Colorado Republicans gathered earlier this month to whittle down the number of candidates they will put before voters in the state’s June primary. The one who attracted the most support from the crowd of GOP activists was Tina Peters, the Mesa County clerk indicted last month on suspicion of smuggling someone who was not an employee of the county into its offices to illicitly copy election machine hard drives. This is the disgraceful election official whom a judge barred from conducting a county election last November, and who might be restricted from overseeing the 2022 midterms. The office for which Ms. Peters got 60 percent of the delegates’ ballots? Secretary of state — Colorado’s chief election official.
Not all Republicans are enemies of democracy. But some are.
Ms. Peters has become a hero among die-hard followers of former president Donald Trump, who insists falsely that election fraud robbed him of reelection in 2020. What led to her indictment was an alleged effort to save data from the 2020 vote before county election machines were updated, so that she or someone else in the right-wing fever swamps might root through it to discover evidence of such fraud.
Images of secret election machine passwords appeared online after her alleged operation. The state had to decertify the county’s election equipment. Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold (D) warned that illicitly copying election software could enable bad actors to find technical vulnerabilities.
The election lies that apparently motivated Ms. Peters have inspired Republican lawmakers in many states to impose new restrictions on voting, making it substantially harder to cast ballots but providing little by way of additional security. One of the nation’s two major political parties seems increasingly committed to undermining the U.S. political system.
Still, some exceptions remain, including Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams. He and Republican state lawmakers cooperated with Democrats in the legislature and Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear (D) to enact a new election law that expands voting access and ballot security. The law, which Mr. Beshear signed on April 6, guarantees voters three days of no-excuse early voting, allows counties to create voting centers where residents from any precinct may cast ballots, maintains an online portal to request absentee ballots, permits voters to fix deficient mail-in ballots, encourages a transition to paper balloting and provides for ballot drop boxes. These are the sort of voter accommodations Republicans elsewhere are rolling back.
Some partisans charge that Kentucky Republicans are comfortable relaxing voting restrictions because encouraging more people to vote poses little danger to them in their deep-red state, unlike Republicans in states where Democrats have better prospects. Yet Republicans in other red states have genuflected to their hard-right base by passing election “integrity” laws simply to show their fealty to Mr. Trump’s mistruths. Mr. Adams and his GOP colleagues in the Kentucky legislature deserve credit for resisting this wave, as does Mr. Beshear for working with them in good faith.
With candidates such as Ms. Peters and other 2020 election deniers on ballots across the country, this year’s voting will determine a lot more than who holds the House or the Senate. It will decide whether people who seek to disrupt the process of orderly, legitimate elections will take control of the machinery of democracy.
Source: WP
