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    Swing state voters process Trump win with hope and fear: ‘This is a powder keg moment’

    “I am still processing my feelings, but what I do know is that my country keeps finding ways to break my heart,” said Adrienne Pickett, a 42-year-old single mother of two who lives in suburban Detroit.The Kamala Harris voter lives in one of seven states that helped decide the US presidential election on Tuesday. All appear to have voted in Trump’s favor by small but significant margins .Like many Democrats in these states, Pickett is coming to terms with a victory by Donald Trump and a new political reality for America. Republicans in these states are also looking ahead – some with excitement, but not all. We spoke with voters for both parties to hear their reactions.These are Pickett’s worries for the future: “We can expect exactly what Trump promised: mass deportations, pardoning criminals who destroyed the capitol and injured and killed police officers on January 6th, vendettas carried out against his perceived enemies, and maybe most frightening of all, a Project 2025 house of horrors brought to life.”In North Carolina, meanwhile, Jess St Louis, 34, a trans woman in Greensboro who canvassed during the election with the progressive group Carolina Federation, said she was nervous and scared about the future under a second Trump presidency. But she also drew comfort from the defeat on Tuesday night of the Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson who has been embroiled in a scandal over his alleged racist and sexist comments on a chat board, which he has denied.“It’s a mixed bag,” St Louis said. “I am scared, but I’m also proud about the governor’s race and about breaking the Republican supermajority in the North Carolina House. I can feel a rising tide of folks in North Carolina actually pushing back against hatred and extremism.”There had been fears that the devastation wrought by Hurricane Helene would suppress turnout, in the western part of North Carolina, where 23 of the 25 stricken counties were won by Trump in 2020. But record-breaking early voting and the creation of makeshift polling stations in areas devastated by floods and landslides appeared to have mitigated the problem.While Trump grew his base in North Carolina’s large rural areas, Harris failed to build on Joe Biden’s showing in 2020 in the big cities, despite significant investment in ad spending and field operations.View image in fullscreenWinning should have felt better, thought Jen Dopke, 51, a retail worker from north-east Wisconsin, as the results came in on Tuesday night. Counting still continues Thursday, but Trump has a lead of about 1% – 30,000 votes out of 3.4m cast. Dopke hopes Trump will usher in an improved economy and end American involvement in foreign wars. But she isn’t celebrating yet.“I don’t feel like this was a big win, because we’re not all on the same page,” Dopke said. She watched nervously as people in her life blocked each other on social media the day after Trump secured a second term in office. Dopke supported Trump, but her friends who voted for Harris don’t know that, and she’s wary about them finding out — worried her support for the former president could jeopardize a friendship.“I [hear] what they’re saying, and I think, ‘I just totally don’t believe the same thing, and I don’t think you’re ever going to be able to hear where I’m coming from,’” said Dopke. “It’s terrifying to me. I don’t know what we’re going to do to come together.”Georgia proved a political comeuppance for Trump on Tuesday after his razor-thin loss by 11,799 votes in 2020. This year he was winning by well over 100,000 votes at press time.Alejandro Lopez, a military veteran and social services advocate from Stone Mountain, Georgia, said he was “pissed off at the Republican party for not holding up the rule of law against one of their own,” he said.“To have seen all these members of congress in support of a felon just made me sick to my stomach. The laws created by the US congress now seem to apply to the people and not the legislators themselves.”View image in fullscreenLopez, who has been a close observer of Georgia politics for years, was also with Democrats – in Georgia the Trump campaign pitted Latino citizens against the undocumented with a deftness that went unrecognized by the Harris campaign. Nationally, too, there was a collapse in Democratic turnout and a realignment of Latino voters from a Democratic bloc to a near 50-50 split, which provided the margin of Trump’s victory in swing states even as other demographic groups largely held steady.“I just did not see the Democrats engaging the Latino community as much,” Lopez said.He fears being targeted for his sexual orientation, ethnicity and politics.… “I will keep my nose down so not to create any attention to myself.”The Associated Press has yet to project a winner in Nevada, as the state continues to tally mail-in ballots in its most populous counties. But early results suggest it may be poised to select a Republican for president for the first time since George W Bush in 2004.James, 23, who had cast a vote for Kamala Harris – unbeknownst to his family and coworkers, who are die-hard Trump supporters – said he yearned for a time when he and his loved ones could have civilized conversations about politics.“I would love to say I think things will calm down after this,” said James, who didn’t want to provide his last name so he could avoid further conflict over politics. “But I my heart I know it won’t.”“This is a powder keg moment,” he added.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn Pennsylvania, Rick Carrick, a 69-year-old retiree, was walking his dog Elvis outside the Lackwanna county courthouse in downtown Scranton as he processed the election results on Wednesday. He said he was ready to move out of the country.“I just told my daughter, I said guarantee first thing he does when he’s sworn in is he gives everybody from January 6 a full pardon,” said Carrick.Lackawanna county, home to Scranton, was one of several key areas in Pennsylvania where Donald Trump improved his performance compared with 2020. Joe Biden carried the county by eight points in 2020, Kamala Harris carried it by about three points this year. The county was once a Democratic stronghold – Barack Obama won it by nearly 28 points in 2012.Carrick said he had no idea why Trump had been able to do so well in the county.“I’m just looking at the big picture. OK, maybe Trump is better on the economy, and to be honest with you, the first time he ran I liked a lot of his ideas, like we can’t be the bank for the entire world,” he said. “But then other things that he does, it’s like he wants to be king.”Debbie Patel, a retired attorney and progressive activist from the Milwaukee area, said she sees a “dark road ahead” – “for Americans generally”.“The first targets will be the ones he’s been vocal about, and then, because he lacks the capacity to empathize with others. it’s anybody’s guess who he will go after next.”Still, Patel is hopeful about the possibility of establishing common ground among “all people”. She cited efforts by groups like Braver Angels, a nonprofit that seeks to depolarize US politics through facilitated conversations between Democratic and Republican Party voters, as exemplary models for seeking common ground.Ali Asfari, 33, lives in Dearborn, Michigan, which has a large Arab American population. The Biden-Harris administration’s response to Israel’s war on Gaza influenced his decision to vote for Trump, but that wasn’t the only issue.“When he [Trump] was in office there were no wars, and inflation nowadays is bad because of the Joe Biden administration. But hopefully now, with the promises that Donald Trump has given us, it’s going to be better,” Asfari said.“We’re going to have a better economy. We’re going to have better family values, in schools, especially. And we’re going to make this country great again. We’re going to have the entire planet to respect this country again as usual. Because with the Biden administration, nobody had respect for us.”Asfari , who voted for Biden in 2020, added:“She did a terrible job, her and Joe. Look at the wars around the world. Look at the economy over here, with inflation. You know, we middle classes, we go for groceries, everything is double the price. The jobs, we barely find jobs, they’re barely hiring and everything is expensive. Family values went down, down, down, especially in schools. You know, they want to join the boys and girls in one bathroom. They’re doing terrible stuff. So that’s why we have to end all this kind of things and go back to Republicans.”Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

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    Post-election in Saginaw, Michigan, the swing county in the swing state that swung right

    Saginaw county’s Democrats were sure that the lessons had been learned and that this time it would be different.The Kamala Harris campaign flooded this bellwether county in the crucial battleground state of Michigan with canvassers and advertising, a reaction to Hillary Clinton’s complacent and, as it turned out, misguided belief that she had the area sewn up in 2016.The vice-president and Tim Walz campaigned in Saginaw. Leftist hero Bernie Sanders rallied the local university’s students. Door-knockers and phone bankers urged people to the polls in the hope and expectation of at least eking out the narrow win Joe Biden enjoyed in Saginaw county four years ago.But through it all, there were warnings from those closest to key groups of Saginaw’s voters – union organisers, Black community leaders, social workers for lower-income families, Latino activists – that denouncing Republican demagogue Donald Trump and making vague promises from Harris of a better future were not enough.They cautioned that Harris was not getting through to large numbers of those who struggled the most in a county marked by large economic disparities because she was failing to directly address their concerns, not least inflation and the cost of living.Others said that Harris looked too much like one of the machine politicians so many voters have come to despise, particularly as she avoided taking a stand on key issues or bent to the prevailing political wind.All of them warned that it could cost her the election in Saginaw county, and beyond.And so it proved.Trump won Saginaw county decisively. The vice-president lost by three times as many votes as Clinton in 2016 and did even worse when compared with Biden four years later.Trump beat Harris by more than 3,400 votes on about the same turnout as 2020. In that election, the then president lost to Biden by 303 votes.This year, Trump won an outright majority in Saginaw county with nearly 51% of the vote, more than 1% up on his 2020 tally.On election night, the leader of the county Democrats, Aileen Pettinger, a retired firefighter, bounced into a watch party at a local union hall confident that female voters angry about the US supreme court ruling on abortion and the broader assault on women’s rights had won it for Harris.Local Democrats worked hard to try to bring female Republican voters on board over access to abortion, even leaving Post-it notes in women’s bathrooms reminding them that no one would know if they secretly voted for Harris.But as the results trickled in, the party began to feel like a wake. People drifted away. Whoever was in charge of the music stopped playing Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now. A silence fell as hope bled away.Across town at the Republican watch party, Trump supporters burst into a rendition of the Christian hymn How Great Thou Art after the former and future president gave his victory speech.The initial election results for Saginaw appear to show that Harris lost Biden voters to Trump in some of the poorer areas of the county, including minority neighbourhoods, as well as mostly white suburbs. Harris also failed to mobilise the large numbers of people who usually do not vote in Saginaw. The turnout in the main city was only about 50%.A month ago, Jeff Bulls, president of the Community Alliance for the People in Saginaw, told the Guardian that many voters in lower-income parts of Saginaw were disenchanted with the political process because they did not see that it improved their lives.Bulls warned that Harris’s failure to address issues such as inflation and the cost of housing in a way that would make a difference to those struggling to get by was undermining her campaign. After Harris’s defeat, Bulls said “it’s not unexpected for me”.“She wasn’t really speaking to real people’s issues. You have a lot of poverty here in this county, whether it’s in the city of Saginaw or whether it’s rural people out there. And if you don’t speak to that, you’re not going to inspire people to vote for you, and I felt like her campaign was mostly about just blaming Trump or saying he’s racist. She wasn’t really inspiring people with her own policies, with her own vision, and I think that cost her,” he said.Similar warnings came from union organisers who saw members going with Trump, even though Biden kept telling them how good the economy was, because rising inflation had hit them hard. As loyal Democrats, some couched their warnings carefully in public, not wanting to give ammunition to the Trump campaign.Others were more forthright, including Carly Hammond, a Saginaw organiser for the US’s largest union confederation, the AFL-CIO. She told the Guardian a month ago that the Harris campaign was failing to address the deep distrust of politicians in general, and the Democratic party in particular, among many working people.“It’s the Donald Trump voters in unions that I see. I think most of them are still in the same place,” she said in October.“The trend that I see with labour people who are Trump supporters is a tendency to be very upset with the status quo, which everyone should be. People are going to stick with Trump until they see and they feel like things are getting better for them.”Hammond, whose grandfather worked at one of the many car factories that were once dotted around Saginaw but have since closed, said the Democratic campaign was the biggest election mobilisation she had seen but that Harris lacked “concrete plans” to motivate voters.After the result, Hammond issued a statement saying she was “angry that neither presidential candidate had real acknowledgement of, or plans to address, the real suffering and struggle so many Americans are going through”.Black and Latino community leader organised get-out-the-vote campaigns in the last days before the election as they warned of disenchantment and lack of enthusiasm for Harris.Dan Soza, whose father was the first Latino elected to the Saginaw city council, is a child welfare officer who is deeply alarmed by Trump’s threat of mass deportations. He said that Harris failed to connect with large numbers of Latino voters in the city on what they cared about most: the economy.“There was never any really specific plans. OK, the $25,000 for new home buyers was specific, but where was the specific plan for inflation? Not that the other side added any better answers, but they just never really came out with any concrete plans on what they were going to do,” he said.Soza said that the rise in Latino men voting for Trump in other parts of the country was replicated in Saginaw. He said a lot of that had to do with “fear of a female leader, machismo”.But he said the Democrats also made a mistake in thinking that opposition to Trump’s stance on immigration would play well with Latino voters in places such as Saginaw, where there is a long established Latino community, mostly of Mexican origin, when many of those crossing the border are from Central and South America.“Immigration isn’t as important to them as we think. They took to heart issues like the economy,” he said.The scale of Harris’s loss was emphasised by the success of other Democrats in Saginaw.Kristen McDonald Rivet decisively beat a Republican former prosecutor, Paul Junge, for the open seat in the US House of Representatives covering Saginaw and neighbouring counties. McDonald Rivet took about 51% of the vote, meaning that some people split their vote to support her and Trump.But Bulls is not alone in thinking that the Democratic party needs a wholesale rethink of what it stands for if it is to win back voters in Saginaw.“The Democratic party has to have a come-to-Jesus moment and really revisit who they represent because they’re not speaking to kitchen-table issues. There’s a lot of rhetoric around the middle class. We largely don’t have a middle class, especially in the Black community. We have working class. We have people that are in poverty, and they’re not speaking to them and their struggle, to real issues that poor people are really, really dealing with,” he said.“I would hope that there’s a reckoning and that they revisit who they actually represent, because right now it’s not us.”Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

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    Arab American Voters in Dearborn, Michigan, Heard Trump’s Case 

    After supporting Joe Biden in 2020, the majority-Arab American city outside Detroit delivered an unlikely win for Donald Trump, who promised to bring peace to the Middle East.Ameen Almudhari was one of thousands of people in the majority-Arab community of Dearborn, Mich., who helped Joe Biden win the city and defeat Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election.Four years later, Mr. Almudhari had had enough.This week, he joined thousands of other Dearborn residents in voting for Mr. Trump, helping him score a stunning win in a place that seemed an unlikely source of support in the former president’s bid to return to the White House.Standing next to his 10-year-old son outside an elementary school on the north side of Dearborn on Tuesday evening, Mr. Almudhari, 33, explained his change of heart, part of a remarkable turnabout in Dearborn, which is just outside Detroit.He was, he said, fed up with Mr. Biden’s support of Israel and Ukraine and said the death and destruction being underwritten by the United States drove his decision to back Mr. Trump.“The first time we vote for Joe Biden, but what we see right now, he didn’t stop the genocide in Gaza,” said Mr. Almudhari, a Yemeni American, who faulted the president for spending American money to support the wars in Gaza and Ukraine. His son, Khaled, interrupted him with a smiling comment: “Trump will end the war!”Indeed, Mr. Trump has said as much, and the promise was among a host of reasons cited by voters in Dearborn for the wave of support from Arab and Muslim Americans for Mr. Trump.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Musk-linked Pac accused of targeting Jewish and Arab Americans in swing states

    A political action committee (Pac) linked to Elon Musk is accused of targeting Jewish and Arab American voters in swing states with dramatically different messages about Kamala Harris’s position on Gaza, a strategy by Trump allies aimed at peeling off Democratic support for the vice-president.Texts, mailers, social media ads and billboards targeting heavily Arab American areas in metro Detroit paint Harris as a staunch ally of Israel who will continue supplying arms to the country. Meanwhile, residents in metro Detroit or areas of Pennsylvania with higher Jewish populations have been receiving messaging that underscores her alleged support for the Palestinian cause.Those aimed at Arab American populations claim Harris will “ALWAYS stand with Israel” and “stand up against Hamas and radical terrorists in Gaza”. Another notes that she has a Jewish husband, and describes the pair as “America’s pro-Israel power couple”.

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    Meanwhile, texts and mailers sent to heavily Jewish areas claim “two faced Kamala stands with Palestine”, picturing her in front of a Palestinian flag. A Pennsylvania ad asked: “Why did Kamala Harris support denying Israel the weapons needed to defeat the Hamas terrorists who massacred thousands? And why did Harris show sympathy for college protesters who are rabidly antisemitic?”The different ads, produced by the Future Coalition Pac, can be viewed in Google’s ad transparency center.“They are stirring up and trying to create trouble,” Mark Brewer, a Michigan elections attorney and former head of the state’s Democratic party, told the Guardian. Messages depicting Harris as pro-Israel or having a Jewish husband in Michigan “are not designed to help her – they’re designed to hurt her”.Metro Detroit has the largest Arab American population in the US per capita, until this election a solidly Democratic voting bloc that helped boost the party in the divided swing state. But the Trump campaign has made inroads with the groups as frustration mounts over the Biden administration’s support for Israel in its bombardments of Gaza and Lebanon.Another Musk Pac is separately facing legal action and backlash for mistreating canvassers, including failing to pay them.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMany mailers and billboards are from Future Coalition, which was established in July. In its Federal Election Commission (FEC) paperwork, the Pac claims its ads are in support of Harris, despite the fact that those in Michigan clearly aim to sabotage her. The only funding it recorded was a $3m contribution from the Musk-funded Building America’s Future non-profit.One billboard from the group in a heavily Arab American Michigan area is more open about its aims: it states that the Democratic US Senate candidate Elissa Slotkin, who is Jewish and in a tight race with her GOP counterpart, is “more focused on arming Israel than helping your family”.But some people in Arab American areas around Detroit report receiving up to five text messages a day from unidentified senders touting Harris’s alleged support for Israel. The FEC does not require organizations sending political texts to identify themselves, Brewer said, which he called “a real problem and a big loophole”. The FEC in 2002 ruled that identification in text messages was not required in part because the messages of character limits on the messages.The same Pac is producing purportedly pro-Harris ads targeting Pennsylvania on issues unrelated to Gaza, one of which reads: “Imagine a world where the American Dream has no borders,” and features a photo of migrants at the US border. More

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    Five US election officials on what they’re expecting: ‘There’s a conspiracy theory for everything’

    In Fulton county, Georgia, they’re on guard for efforts to undermine democracy from Republican members of the state elections board. In Luzerne county, Pennsylvania, they’re defending themselves as conspiracy theories swirl. And in Cochise county, Arizona, they’re preparing to certify the results shortly after one of their colleagues pleaded guilty to refusing to do so in the last election.Election officials are the first line of defense for democracy this election – and their job is anything but easy.For years, they have worked in relative obscurity as they administered the vote in a non-partisan way. But Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election unleashed a wave of harassment and pressure on these officials never seen before. Many have chosen to leave the profession, and those that have stuck around find themselves in a job that looks dramatically different from the low-profile one they once held.The Guardian has been following five election offices across the country for the last year, examining how staff turnover, election denialism and misinformation have affected their work, mental health and physical safety.On the eve of election day, we checked in with the officials, many in swing states, who will be working around the clock to ensure that all votes are counted.Fulton county, GeorgiaSheri Allen and Julie Adams rhetorically circled each other at the election board meeting like boxers in a ring.Allen, chairperson of the Fulton county board of registration and elections, and Adams, one of two recalcitrant Republican members of the board, were negotiating terms for which election documents Adams could inspect over the next week or two.But really, they were probing each other for an angle – some hidden danger or exposed weakness or intent behind their words.“I can see where this conversation is going,” Adams said at the board meeting last Wednesday, “but I want to renew the request that I have made, and I would like to see the reports from poll watchers, poll workers and voters that have had issues, complaints or comments, and how we react.”Allen is a personal injury attorney and approached Adams’s inquiries like a lawyer might. The two sparred over how to define a problem that should rise to the board’s notice, about whether Adams could have an electronic copy of the list of voters who had cast ballots in Fulton county – in order of their vote, by precinct – and whether she could be physically present as election workers popped the seals on the boxes of early vote ballots on election day.Under other conditions, Adams’s request to get reports in real time about problems at polling locations, or a list of voters who had cast a ballot, would raise no alarms.In Fulton county, the alarms never stop.After the 2020 election in Georgia, Trump and others issued florid and extravagant lies about Fulton county and the conduct of its poll workers. Though recounts showed that the election was fair and accurate, every error made by the county has been amplified by conservative partisans.County elections officials have been in a state of hyper-vigilance ever since, wondering which mistake might draw the heavens down upon them, or from which rock the next fountain of misinformation will spring.“With all that is on the line for this election, why would we keep throwing in additional new ways of doing things?” asked board vice-chairperson Aaron Johnson. “I’m on the record today; this is going to cause chaos. I don’t know that it’s intentional.”Adams, who works for a Trump-aligned group, sued the county earlier this year seeking a ruling to establish that she and other elections board members in Georgia had the legal right to refuse to certify an election if they think it didn’t meet their standards. A judge rejected that position, ruling instead that certification is a ministerial act mandated by the Georgia constitution.But Judge Robert McBurney also ruled that Adams has a right to review documents in advance of the certification vote, though a second judge in a separate case ruled that counties are not obligated to provide volumes of poll data and administrative paperwork to elections superintendents.At the board meeting on Wednesday, Adams’s request to have an electronic copy of the voter list was denied in a 3-2 vote. Allen cited security considerations. Instead, the county will make a hard paper copy available for her review, no phone recording allowed. If the elections director has to send a report to the secretary of state’s office about a polling problem, the board will get a note too. And Adams will be able to watch the first ballots come out of the box for counting at 2pm sharp on election day.Cochise county, ArizonaIn rural Cochise county, Arizona, a Republican haven along the US-Mexico border, there are Democratic candidates running for the three open county supervisor seats and a recorder position – something that hasn’t happened in recent memory.The Democratic activation came after several years of rampant election denialism culminated in criminal charges against two supervisors who initially refused to certify the county’s election results in 2022. Those charges followed attempts to hand-count ballots and after an experienced elections director quit over a hostile work environment. The county is on its fifth elections director since 2022.“I think it speaks volumes to the frustration that people have with their local government,” said Elisabeth Tyndall, the chair of the local Democratic party, that “people were willing to step up and run for those seats, even in light of all of the chaos”.One of the supervisors, Peggy Judd, recently agreed to a plea deal, accepting a misdemeanor charge that brings probation and a fine. The other supervisor, Tom Crosby, hasn’t done the same – and he refused to vote to certify the 2022 results even after a court required the county to do so.

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    Tyndall said, despite the upheaval, she trusts the elections department to carry out a successful election. About 100 ballots in one precinct were missing a supervisor’s race, an error that the county rectified by sending corrected ballots to those affected and having some on hand on election day at the polls. It was a “fixable mistake” that Tyndall said the county remedied fairly.Still, the specter of refusing to certify looms over the 2024 results – as jurisdictions around the country toy with the idea of whether they have to sign off on election results, a non-discretionary task. Judd’s probation lasts through the certification, and prosecutors said that timing was intentional to ideally prevent a repeat of 2022. Crosby, who has been the more vocal elections critic, hasn’t indicated his plans.“Honestly, it will be very difficult for them to not certify,” Tyndall said.Hillsdale county, MichiganAbe Dane is hoping for the best but preparing for the worst.Dane, who administers elections in Hillsdale county, Michigan, has spent the last four years challenging the election-related disinformation and conspiracy theories that have taken hold in his conservative community all while getting ready to run his first presidential election.“We’re not a heavily staffed office, and most of our staff are dealing with everything outside of elections,” said Dane. “So it’s a lot, but I have a wonderful group of township and city clerks that I’m very close with.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreenThis year, Dane has full confidence in the local election officials running the show in the small towns and cities that make up Hillsdale county. That wasn’t always the case.In 2020, the clerk in Adams Township was drawn into Trump’s efforts to overturn the presidential election. Scott didn’t only accept Trump’s claims of a stolen election. She believed Michigan’s presidential election had been corrupted by nefarious forces in favor of Joe Biden, who many in Hillsdale county could not believe won the 2020 election. Egging her on was Stefanie Lambert, a Michigan lawyer who in the wake of the 2020 election took on numerous cases challenging the results.After the election, the state of Michigan alleges Scott and Lambert illegally turned over private voter data to an outside group in their search for fraud – for which they currently face multiple felony charges. When Scott refused to turn over voting equipment for mandatory maintenance, the state stripped her of her authority to administer elections in 2021. Two years later, voters ousted her in a recall election that was widely viewed as a test of the power of election denialism in the deep-red community.Scott, who challenged Dane in the Republican primary for the position overseeing elections in Hillsdale county, enjoys the support of a small but vocal coterie of activists who maintain their belief that the 2020 election was stolen. After Scott and a slate of so-called America First candidates lost their primary elections in August, Dane says the group has quieted down. But that hasn’t stopped the flow of conspiracy theories, which he says “disseminate from the top down”.“I still have people that I know, love and respect in my circles that believe some of the stuff, and I have to continually try and either bite my tongue, or if the opportunity presents itself, try and educate them on what the facts are,” said Dane.Dane has been preparing security measures for months in advance of the election, coordinating with local law enforcement officials to continually monitor polling places on election day. But he says he is more concerned about the bread-and-butter of election administration – processing early and absentee ballots, helping poll workers adapt to new processes and technology, and preparing for inevitable human errors.Luzerne county, PennsylvaniaLuzerne county, an industrial battleground in north-eastern Pennsylvania, is facing a wave of conspiracy theories on the eve of the election.In late October, the county was doing some routine shredding of documents. When someone spotted the truck for the shredding company in front of the county’s office building, which also houses its election offices, it set off conspiracy theories. Romilda Crocamo, the county manager, quickly started hearing online that the county was shredding ballots, which of course wasn’t true.“There’s a conspiracy theory for everything,” she said. “There is nothing that we can say or do that will convince the people who believe in conspiracies to change their minds. I feel badly for those people. I don’t know how you live that way.”Crocamo is also worried about violence. During the early voting period, she had to call a sheriff to the elections office because two people were fighting. Someone called a bureau employee a racial slur. Another person spit on an employee.She said the county was adding barriers to control traffic into the office. Government employees will be required to go through a metal detector on election day.Scott Pressler, a conservative activist who has been registering voters in the state, suggested there was voter registration fraud in the county. As officials in another county investigate possible fraudulent registrations, Pressler suggested that there could be something amiss about voter registrations that were dropped off at the registration deadline by Beth Gilbert McBride, a voting rights organizer. McBride served as head of the Luzerne county election office in 2022 when it ran out of paper on election day.The claim was amplified by the Gateway Pundit, the influential far-right website that has become a powerful vector of election misinformation. Days later, the Luzerne county district attorney said that between 20 and 30 forms had been dropped off at the deadline, and none of them were fraudulent.Shasta county, CaliforniaVoting in Shasta county, a conservative stronghold in far northern California, will largely proceed as normal.That’s disappointing to the small but vocal group of residents who hoped to see radical changes in the community of 180,000 people that has attracted national attention for its far-right politics and embrace of election denialism.A band of local activists convinced of widespread voter fraud and stolen elections have been relentless in their efforts to uncover evidence of tampering. The group successfully lobbied officials, some of whom have also spread election misinformation, to throw out the county’s voting machines and institute a hand-count system. When the head of the elections office retired, the county replaced her with someone who had no experience and who election skeptics thought would be sympathetic.They believed they would be able to remake the voting system, but their efforts ultimately proved unsuccessful. State lawmakers thwarted plans for a hand-count system with a bill preventing counties from using manual tallies in most elections. The new elections clerk has pushed back against proposals that would violate election law and said he won’t make any major changes to county election processes.At a tense and widely attended meeting of the county’s governing body last week, several expressed disappointment in the registrar of voters.“You cannot certify the election next Tuesday, no matter what happens because of what’s happening in that office,” one man said, asking officials to “put pressure on” the registrar.There’s discontent among that group, said Jeff Gorder, a retired county public defender, but after years of upheaval and violent rhetoric in the area things feel surprisingly calm: “It seems to be a milder environment right now.”Some elected officials have continued to sow doubt, though. Patrick Jones, a county official who was recently voted out of office, suggested to journalists that if Trump does not win it would be due to cheating.“It’s pretty obvious to most of us that he should easily win this and if they cheat him out of it again I think the response from the public is going to be very different unfortunately,” he said. “They can certainly cheat but there’ll be a price for that.”Still, Nathan Blaze, a local activist and chef, said he expects election day will proceed without issue. He plans to act as an observer at the elections office to ensure that workers there, who have faced increased harassment in recent years, can do their jobs without interference. More