THE ELECTION DENIERS ARE NOW INSIDE THE SYSTEM
The people who tried to discredit American elections are increasingly gaining power over how those elections are administered.
By Dr. John Petrone
The most dangerous attack on an election may not begin with armed men storming a government building.
It may begin quietly, months earlier, in a county office.
It may begin when someone who has spent years spreading false claims about stolen elections is appointed to an election board.
It may begin when an official who once demanded that legitimate results be rejected gains access to voter-registration records.
It may begin when a political activist who does not believe in the integrity of American elections is placed in charge of administering one.
That is the disturbing reality revealed by a major New York Times investigation into the growing number of election deniers now serving in local offices responsible for overseeing voting, maintaining voter rolls, establishing polling locations, canvassing ballots, and certifying election results.
These are not merely people expressing skepticism from the sidelines.
They are increasingly sitting behind the desks.
They are holding the keys.
They are gaining authority over the very system they have spent years attempting to discredit.
And they are doing so as the United States approaches midterm elections that will determine control of Congress.
The Infiltration of Election Administration
According to the Times investigation, at least 25 county-level officials who have aligned themselves through words or actions with the election-denial movement have taken office since the 2024 election.
They join scores of other election-skeptical officials who were already serving in state and local positions.
Some oversee county election departments.
Some sit on boards responsible for certifying results.
Some possess authority over polling locations, early-voting schedules, voter-registration records, ballot procedures, and the final canvassing of votes.
Many embraced claims that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election despite the absence of evidence sufficient to overturn the result in any state.
Others have supported organizations dedicated to searching for supposed widespread fraud that repeated investigations, recounts, audits, court proceedings, and Republican and Democratic election officials failed to substantiate.
Still others have attempted to delay certification, challenge eligible voters, promote discredited voting-machine theories, or transform routine election administration into a partisan battleground.
The Times identified officials in states including Virginia, Michigan, Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina, and Ohio—several of which contain competitive congressional or statewide races.
That distinction matters.
Control of Congress could be decided by a relatively small number of closely contested districts. A disruption in even one strategically important county could delay results, generate litigation, feed conspiracy theories, and create the appearance of chaos where none previously existed.
The objective would not necessarily have to be successfully overturning an election.
Sometimes merely destroying public confidence is enough.
From the Fringe to the County Office
The election-denial movement did not disappear after January 6, 2021.
It evolved.
Its central claims repeatedly failed in court. Its promised bombshells repeatedly collapsed under scrutiny. Its supposed proof of widespread fraud repeatedly dissolved when subjected to evidence, procedure, and law.
But instead of abandoning the falsehood, the movement redirected its energy toward the machinery of future elections.
Activists began attending county meetings.
They pressured election workers.
They demanded access to voting machines.
They challenged voter registrations.
They sought seats on canvassing boards.
They ran for county clerk.
They pursued appointments to election commissions.
They learned that seizing control of the entire national election system was unnecessary. America’s decentralized structure offered thousands of smaller points of entry.
The Times investigation describes Heidi Stirrup, a former Trump White House liaison who reportedly pressured Justice Department employees for sensitive information that could support unsupported election-fraud allegations after the 2020 election.
She was later appointed to an electoral board in Prince William County, Virginia, and eventually became its chair.
In Nevada, Jim Hindle, who was charged in connection with the state’s 2020 false-elector effort, has served as the clerk of Storey County. The criminal case remains pending, and an indictment is not a conviction.
In Arizona, Kathleen Gomez took office in Cochise County after saying that she would not have certified the 2024 election.
These are not isolated internet commentators.
They are officials operating inside institutions whose credibility depends upon impartiality, lawful procedure, and public trust.
North Carolina’s Wholesale Transfer of Power
Few states demonstrate the structural stakes more clearly than North Carolina.
Following a change enacted by the Republican-controlled legislature, authority over the state election board shifted away from the incoming Democratic governor and toward the Republican-controlled auditor’s office.
The change reportedly resulted in Republican control of the chairmanship of all 100 county election boards.
That transfer was followed by attempts to reconsider early-voting locations, including sites serving college students, and proposals to reduce Sunday voting.
Supporters describe such changes as administrative decisions or election-integrity measures.
Critics see something much more calculated: the use of election administration to make voting less convenient for constituencies that may favor the opposing party.
Sunday voting has particular importance in some Black communities because of “Souls to the Polls” programs organized through churches. College polling locations can similarly determine whether students with limited transportation can realistically participate.
A polling site is never merely a dot on a map.
Its location can decide who must travel farther, who must wait longer, who can vote between work shifts, and who eventually gives up.
Election interference does not always require altering a ballot.
Sometimes it means making the ballot harder to reach.
The Anatomy of a Manufactured Crisis
The experience of Antrim County, Michigan, illustrates how a correctable administrative mistake can be weaponized into a national conspiracy theory.
On election night in 2020, incorrect unofficial results were initially published because of human error. The mistake was identified, explained, and corrected.
But the correction did not end the story.
Trump-aligned lawyers and activists descended on the county and used the error to promote broader allegations about voting machines. Those claims were debunked, but the conspiracy escaped the county and entered the national bloodstream.
The false narrative was repeated in political speeches, social-media posts, and legal challenges.
Years later, its influence remains embedded in local politics.
Victoria Bishop, who campaigned amid claims involving allegedly ineligible or deceased voters, defeated the former county clerk and assumed office. State officials later accused her of exceeding her authority in efforts involving voter-registration records and ordered compliance training while temporarily restricting her access.
The lesson is chilling.
A falsehood does not need to survive factual scrutiny to achieve political success.
It only needs to survive long enough to place its believers in power.
What Other Investigations Have Found
The Times investigation does not stand alone.
Voting Rights Lab warned months earlier that state and county election boards were becoming a central battleground for partisan interference. The organization identified a trend in which activists who embraced election-denial narratives sought authority within the institutions responsible for administering elections.
The Brennan Center has documented repeated attempts since 2020 by local officials to delay or refuse certification. Courts and state officials ultimately compelled certification in those cases, but not before public resources were consumed, deadlines were threatened, and misinformation was amplified.
Protect Democracy has similarly warned that certification—historically understood as a mandatory administrative duty—has increasingly been treated by some officials as an opportunity to relitigate political grievances or contest outcomes they dislike.
Reuters has reported on a parallel effort at the federal level, including attempts by Trump-aligned agencies and officials to obtain voter information, examine election equipment, investigate long-discredited allegations, and increase federal involvement in a system traditionally administered by states and local governments.
Taken together, the reports reveal something larger than a collection of eccentric local officials.
They reveal a coordinated political environment in which distrust is manufactured at the national level, promoted through partisan media, organized through activist networks, and institutionalized through local appointments and elections.
The movement spreads the claim that the system cannot be trusted.
Then its adherents demand control of the system.
The Constitutional Stakes
The Constitution gives states primary responsibility for administering congressional elections, subject to congressional authority to regulate the process.
That decentralized structure has long been one of the American election system’s greatest defenses.
There is no single national official who can flip a switch and rewrite the outcome of a federal election.
Votes are cast and counted across thousands of jurisdictions under different state laws, with overlapping layers of officials, observers, courts, canvassing boards, and procedural safeguards.
That decentralization makes a nationwide conspiracy extraordinarily difficult.
But it also creates vulnerabilities.
A national election can be protected as a whole while still being disrupted in carefully selected places.
A county board could delay certification.
A clerk could improperly challenge voter registrations.
An election commission could reduce polling locations.
An official could misuse access to confidential records.
A partisan majority could manufacture controversy around routine discrepancies.
A local delay could then become the raw material for a national disinformation campaign.
The goal might not be to change the count directly.
It might be to produce enough confusion that millions of Americans no longer know what to believe.
Once citizens are convinced that every unfavorable outcome is fraudulent, elections cease to function as a peaceful method of resolving political disagreement.
They become merely another battlefield.
Certification Is Not a Political Veto
One of the most persistent misconceptions promoted by election deniers is that local certifying officials possess broad discretion to reject election results whenever they claim to have concerns.
They generally do not.
Certification is typically a mandatory administrative responsibility. Officials review the vote totals produced through legally prescribed procedures and formally confirm that the canvass has been completed.
They are not miniature courts.
They do not possess unlimited authority to investigate every internet allegation.
They cannot lawfully refuse to certify merely because they dislike the outcome, distrust voting machines, or believe a candidate’s unsupported accusations.
Disputes involving fraud, eligibility, recounts, or election contests belong within processes established by state law.
When certification officials attempt to transform a ministerial duty into a partisan veto, courts have repeatedly intervened.
Those interventions are important safeguards.
But relying upon emergency litigation after every election is not a sustainable method of democratic governance.
A system in which officials follow the law only after a judge orders them to do so is a system already under extraordinary strain.
The Myth of Harmless Election Skepticism
There is nothing wrong with demanding secure elections.
There is nothing wrong with audits, recounts, transparent procedures, bipartisan observation, accurate voter lists, functioning equipment, or vigorous enforcement of election law.
Those protections strengthen democracy.
Election denial is something different.
It begins with a predetermined conclusion and searches backward for allegations that might support it.
It dismisses audits that do not produce the desired result.
It attacks Republican officials who confirm Democratic victories.
It attacks Democratic officials who confirm Republican victories.
It treats the absence of evidence not as evidence of absence, but as proof that the imagined conspiracy is even larger.
It demands endless investigations while refusing to accept their conclusions.
This is not healthy skepticism.
It is an ideology of permanent delegitimization.
Under that ideology, only one outcome can ever be legitimate: victory by the preferred candidate.
That is not democracy.
That is authoritarian logic wearing an “election integrity” badge.
Why This Matters Now
The 2026 midterms will determine control of the House and Senate.
Competitive races may be decided by narrow margins.
Close elections are not evidence of fraud. They are a predictable feature of a politically divided nation.
But narrow margins create opportunities for bad-faith actors.
A small discrepancy can be exaggerated.
A routine delay can be portrayed as suspicious.
A corrected clerical error can be transformed into a national scandal.
A lawful batch of absentee ballots can be depicted as mysterious.
A certification meeting can become political theater.
The false narrative can then spread faster than election officials can correct it.
By the time accurate information reaches the public, millions of people may already believe the election was stolen.
This is how democratic legitimacy is poisoned—not necessarily through one dramatic act, but through a thousand repeated insinuations.
The Institutional Guardrails Remain
The danger is real, but the outcome is not predetermined.
America still has powerful safeguards.
Election administration remains distributed among thousands of state and local jurisdictions.
Professional election workers continue to carry out their responsibilities, often under intense political pressure.
State officials can intervene when county officials exceed their authority.
Courts can compel certification.
Observers, journalists, civic organizations, and attorneys can expose misconduct.
Paper ballots, audits, recount procedures, bipartisan canvassing, and public reporting provide additional protections.
Every election result was ultimately certified in both 2020 and 2024 despite attempts to interfere with or delay the process.
That fact should provide reassurance—but not complacency.
Guardrails work only when people defend them.
Laws work only when officials enforce them.
Institutions work only when individuals inside them remain loyal to the Constitution rather than to a political leader.
How We Protect the Electoral Process
Citizens must begin paying attention to the local offices that administer elections.
County clerks, election-board members, canvassing officials, and county commissioners rarely receive the public scrutiny directed toward presidential candidates or members of Congress.
Yet their decisions can directly affect whether voting is accessible, ballots are properly processed, and lawful results are certified on time.
Communities should demand transparency in appointments.
Journalists should investigate the public statements and organizational ties of prospective election officials.
State governments should clearly define certification duties and establish rapid remedies when officials refuse to perform them.
Election workers must receive adequate security, training, legal support, and funding.
Voters should attend county meetings, monitor proposed changes to polling locations, and challenge efforts that make lawful participation unnecessarily difficult.
Most importantly, the public must reject the dangerous idea that election administration should be controlled by whoever is most willing to declare the system corrupt.
A person who refuses to accept verified election results should not be rewarded with authority over the next election.
The Bottom Line
The greatest threat to American elections may no longer be standing outside the courthouse waving a conspiracy-theory sign.
The threat may be sitting inside the courthouse preparing to certify the vote.
It may be updating the voter rolls.
It may be deciding where polling sites will be placed.
It may be determining how long those sites remain open.
It may be waiting for a close result—and an opportunity to create chaos.
The election-denial movement learned an important lesson after 2020.
It could not consistently persuade courts to discard lawful votes.
It could not produce evidence demonstrating the massive fraud it alleged.
It could not overturn the certified result.
So it changed strategies.
It began seeking control over the people, procedures, and institutions that will administer the next election.
That is not proof that American democracy will fail.
It is a warning that democracy requires protection long before Election Day.
The people entrusted with counting our votes must believe that lawful votes deserve to be counted.
The people responsible for certifying elections must accept that certification is a duty, not a partisan weapon.
And the people of the United States must understand that election denial does not become legitimate simply because an election denier receives an official title.
A lie does not become truth when it enters government.
It becomes more dangerous.
Defend democracy. Protect the vote. Demand accountability. Never stop fighting back.
P.S. Democracy does not usually disappear in a single dramatic moment. It is dismantled piece by piece—one office, one rule, one polling location, and one refusal to accept the will of the people at a time.
P.S.S. Release all of the Epstein files now!