A group of Republicans has come together to defend the voting process and the people who run it in the US.
On Election Day last November, one of Georgia’s top election officials saw that online news stories about a problem with voting machines in an eastern Pennsylvania county were getting more attention.
So Gabriel Sterling, a Republican who had stood up for the 2020 election in Georgia despite being threatened, sent a message on the social network X to his almost 71,000 followers explaining what had happened and promising that all votes would be counted properly.
One commenter asked him right away why he was commenting on an election in a different state, and other replies repeated false claims that there would be widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
Sterling told a group the next day, “It’s still the right thing to do,” emphasizing how important it was for Republican leaders to speak out to protect elections. “We need to be ready to say over and over that other states are not cheating even though they do things differently than us.”
Sterling is the chief operating officer for the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office. He is part of a group that was formed after the 2016 election to bring together Republican officials who are ready to protect the country’s voting systems and the people who run them. They want officials to stress again that polls are safe and fair. This is something they believe is especially important as the country prepares for another contentious presidential election.
The group has met in several states and plans to meet again before the election on November 5.
There are six months to go until the expected rematch between former Republican President Donald Trump and current Democratic President Joe Biden. Election officials are very worried that people still don’t trust voting and counting ballots, especially Republicans. Trump, the likely Republican winner, keeps casting doubt on the results of the last election and telling his supporters that Democrats will try to cheat in the next one, but he doesn’t give any proof.
Last week, at a campaign event in Michigan, Trump said again that Democrats stole the 2020 election, which is not true. He said, “But we’re not going to let them rig the presidential election.”
A study from last year by the Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that only 22% of Republicans were very confident that the votes would be counted correctly in November.
The SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University and the center-right think tank R Street Institute are in charge of the project, which has been going on for about 18 months. The goal has been to get conservative leaders talking about trust in elections and come up with a set of principles to help them do that.
The group’s main rule is that Republican leaders should “publicly affirm the security and integrity of elections across the U.S. and avoid actively fueling doubt about elections in other jurisdictions.”
Trump Compares Biden Administration to Gestapo at Private Donor Event
A recent poll by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s Law School found that this kind of abuse had happened to almost 40% of local election workers. A lot of people have quit their jobs because of it. According to Henderson, 20 of Utah’s 29 clerks are new since 2020, and nine have never been in charge of an election.
