Election deniers’ doubts about voting made for compelling conspiracy theories, but proved to be a bad get-out-the-vote strategy.
-
Send any friend a story
As a subscriber, you have “>10 gift articles to give each month. Anyone can read what you share.
Give this articleGive this articleGive this article
Election workers processing ballots in Phoenix on Sunday.
PHOENIX — It was early on Election Day when polling places in Maricopa County started experiencing a glitch. Tabulation machines were rejecting thousands of ballots, a result of a printer error, and the confusion was causing lines and frustration at the polls.
There was a simple fix: Voters could place their ballots in a secure box — called Box 3 — kept at every polling station for just such situations. Their votes would be counted later, at the county’s central tabulation center.
But for the state’s most conservative voters, a group primed by two years of former President Donald J. Trump’s stolen-election lies to see conspiracy in every step of the voting process, Box 3 smelled of trouble. Election deniers in the state’s Republican Party soon began warning voters away from the boxes, as suspicions flew across Twitter and right-wing media. “Do not trust them,” Charlie Kirk, the conservative leader, warned his followers.
That message reinforced Republicans’ skepticism about elections, but it didn’t do much to help their candidates win. Later that morning, the Republican candidate for governor, Kari Lake, held a news conference to deliver the opposite message. Box 3 was safe, her campaign lawyer said.
“Vote, vote, vote,’’ Ms. Lake added. “We’ve got to vote today.”
Whether the suspicion and mixed messages around Box 3 made a difference in a race that Ms. Lake lost by a hair to her Democratic opponent, Katie Hobbs, might never be known. (Her campaign maintains the fault lies with the county.)
But the moment crystallized one of the main lessons of the 2022 midterms: Casting doubt on the legitimacy of elections might be an effective tool for galvanizing true believers to participate in a primary — or, at its origins, to storm the U.S. Capitol in order to overturn a losing result. But it can be a lousy strategy when it comes to the paramount mission of any political campaign: to get the most votes.
“If you tell people that voting is hard, or voter fraud is rampant, or elections are rigged, it doesn’t make people more likely to participate,” said David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonpartisan group that works with election officials to bolster trust and efficiency in voting. “Why would you want to play a game you thought was rigged?”
ImageA driver dropping multiple ballots into a ballot drop box outside the Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center in Phoenix.Credit…Patrick T. Fallon/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Post-election data may help show just how much the intense rhetoric about a rigged system affected Republican turnout, which, according to party officials, was relatively robust but did not meet expectations. And elections are ultimately decided by myriad factors.
But there were prima facie examples across the country of where denialism led candidates to eschew tried-and-true methods of modern vote gathering, most likely costing them votes.
Understand the Outcomes of the 2022 Midterm Elections
Card 1 of 7
What we know. It seemed as if the conditions were ripe for a red wave in the 2022 midterms, but in the end Republicans generated no more than a red ripple, leading to an improbable, still-undecided election. Here’s what the results tell us so far:
Biden beat the odds. President Biden had the best midterms of any president in 20 years, avoiding the losses his predecessors endured and maintaining the Democrats’ narrow hold on the Senate, which provides him with a critical guardrail against Republicans should they win the House.
G.O.P. faces a reckoning. A thin Republican majority in the House appears likely, but a poor midterms showing has the party wrestling with what went wrong: Was it bad candidates, bad messaging or the electoral anchor that appeared to be dragging the G.O.P. down, Donald J. Trump?
Trump under fire. Mr. Trump has faced unusual public attacks from within the G.O.P. after a string of losses by his handpicked candidates. There are also signs of an effort to inch the party away from the former president ahead of his expected announcement of a third White House bid.
Abortion mattered. In the first major election since the fall of Roe v. Wade, abortion rights broke through, as Democrats seized on the issue to hold off a red wave. In all five states where abortion-related questions were on the ballot, voters chose to protect access or reject further limits on it.
Voters rejected election deniers. Every 2020 election denier who sought to become the top election official in a critical battleground state lost at the polls this year. Voters roundly rejected extreme partisans who promised to restrict voting and overhaul the electoral process.
Ticket-splitters made a comeback. While ticket-splitting has declined substantially in recent elections, some voters seemed more inclined to support candidates of different parties this year, emphasizing candidate quality over partisan identity.
“They were torquing the entire system in a way that disadvantaged their own candidates,” said Adrian Fontes, a Democrat who handily defeated one of the most strident election deniers in the country, State Representative Mark Finchem, to become Arizona’s next secretary of state.
That was especially true here in Arizona, where Ms. Lake emerged as the breakout figure of her Trump-endorsed class. Fresh out of the anchor’s chair at the local Fox station that had been her perch for more than 20 years, she delivered Mr. Trump’s hollow message about fraud and malfeasance in 2020 with a telegenic polish that her fellow classmates lacked.
“We had a fraudulent election,” Ms. Lake maintained on Fox during her primary campaign. “We have an illegitimate president sitting in the White House.” Endorsing a gamut of disproved and unsubstantiated conspiracies, she questioned the security of voting machines and impugned mail voting, saying, “We want Election Day, not election month.”
Working in tandem with the state Republican Party, her campaign and other Republicans on the ticket prioritized voting in person on Election Day over voting by mail, which they regularly denigrated as fraud-ridden. (It is not.)
That, in effect, meant forgoing the organizational advantages that modern campaigns have developed through a full embrace of mail voting — which campaigns can easily track, allowing them to bank votes before Election Day and then focus their resources on turning out those who have yet to send ballots. Republicans in Arizona have traditionally been quite good at it.
“We would have never, ever thought about telling people to hold onto their ballots,” said Wes Gullett, a Republican strategist who long served as a senior strategist for Senator John McCain of Arizona. (Mr. Gullett’s firm, OH Strategic Communications, worked for Mr. Fontes.) “The only reason to do that is to build this narrative about ‘foul play’ and keep that narrative going, but any time you encourage people not to vote immediately, you lose the opportunity to get that vote in the bank.”
ImageA small crowd outside a ballot-counting site in Maricopa County on Saturday. Some people brandished signs saying “Lake won” and “Arrest the traitors.”Credit…Caitlin O’Hara for The New York Times
Ms. Lake’s campaign was not unique. Many Republicans disparaged mail voting, following the example Mr. Trump set in 2020, when it became clear that Democrats were more likely than Republicans to use the method (though Mr. Trump himself votes by mail).
The risks of the approach became increasingly apparent in the last week of the campaign.
In Nevada, for instance, Adam Laxalt suggested during his Republican primary race for Senate that voting by mail and using drop boxes were “not safe methods.”
But on the Friday before Election Day, when meteorologists predicted a snowstorm that Tuesday in Northern Nevada, home to many Republican voters, he changed his tune: “Weather alert!” Mr. Laxalt wrote on Twitter. “Beat the weather and vote early! Early voting ends TODAY at 8 PM, so you must act now.”
Though full results are not yet available (absentee ballots are accepted until Saturday), it appears that some voters followed Mr. Laxalt’s initial guidance. The share of voters who cast ballots on Election Day in Nevada was 21 percent in 2022 compared with 11 percent in 2020, according to data from the secretary of state’s office.
In Michigan, where Republicans narrowly lost the state’s House of Representatives by roughly 700 votes across a couple of districts, some state legislators laid blame on Kristina Karamo, the Republican candidate for secretary of state, who repeatedly cast skepticism on voting by mail and even sued to block mail ballots from Detroit in the waning weeks of the campaign.
Republicans might have learned lessons from Glenn Youngkin’s successful campaign for governor in Virginia last year. Mr. Youngkin, a conservative running in a lightly blue state, embraced voting by mail and voting early.
His campaign sent canvassers to voters’ doors, asking if they had requested or sent in their mail ballots. He held events at early voting locations, encouraging everyone to cast a ballot early if possible. (It’s a tradition he carried into the governor’s office, and he voted early in November, too.)
“I think when the autopsies are written about 2022, the early vote and the absentee vote are going to be a huge part of it and something that our party really needs to embrace early on,” said Kristin Davison, a political adviser to Mr. Youngkin.
In Arizona, Republicans calculated that a series of Trump-style rallies, and excitement around Ms. Lake among the conservative faithful, would lead to an overwhelming show of force on Election Day that would surpass the Democrats’ mail votes.
Where Ms. Lake was trying to move her voters en masse in one big Election Day push, the campaign of her opponent, Ms. Hobbs, relied heavily on mail voting and was quietly working to send supporters to the polls in a targeted fashion.
“Every few days or so we get the list of voters who turned in their ballot, we can remove them from our universe, so we are only talking to voters who haven’t voted yet,” said Nicole DeMont, Ms. Hobbs’s campaign manager. “If they were telling everybody to vote on Election Day, you’re never shrinking your universe.”
Local Republicans appeared to have second thoughts as the campaign entered its final week, when the chair of the state party, Kelli Ward, a loud proponent of the stolen-election narrative, posted a photo of herself on Twitter placing her ballot in a drop box.
Yet Ms. Lake’s campaign remained vulnerable to the myriad forces that can come to bear on that single day — when a sick child or the weather or the demands of work may keep people from going to polls or, in the event of lines, keep them from staying long enough vote.
ImageBill Gates, chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, speaking during a news conference at the Maricopa election center in Phoenix on Monday.Credit…Rebecca Noble for The New York Times
Last Tuesday, lines became longer when a printer problem produced ballots that were difficult for tabulation scanners to read. The issue affected about 30 percent of the county’s polling places.
Shortly before Ms. Hobbs was named the victor on Monday, Maricopa County’s top election officials — themselves Republicans — accepted responsibility for the printer issues but accused local Republican Party leaders of making matters worse at polling stations, and for their own voters, by spreading suspicion about the voting system.
In some cases, they said, party leaders advised their supporters against using the felt-tipped pens that election officials had provided at ballot stations, leading some voters to use their own ballpoints, which caused trouble for scanners. (Officials said those votes were registered but added to wait times.) Then there were the initial warnings against using Box 3, which, county officials said, also led to longer lines.
“It is clear to me that those lines were longer because members — leaders — in one political party were spreading misinformation,” the chairman of the Maricopa Board of Supervisors, Bill Gates, said on Monday.
As a Hobbs victory was coming into view, though, local Republicans were seizing on the printer problems to argue that their voters — who were always expected to make up a larger share of in-person voters than Democrats — were disenfranchised. Members of both parties said they expected that those complaints could feed lawsuits and boisterous protests like those that took place in 2020 — against a losing result, again, and not a winning one.
Citing no evidence, Ms. Lake, in a tweet, declared the result “BS.”
Charles Homans and Ken Bensinger contributed reporting.
Source: nytimes.com
