Newsletter: Focusing on Election Denial in 2024

American Oversight is tracking the election denial movement’s impacts on the 2024 primary landscape, from election administration issues to voter distrust.

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As the 2024 primaries begin, we’re monitoring the election denial movement’s impact — not just on voters’ trust in our democracy, but also on decisions about the administration of elections, from the push to abandon a nonpartisan voter-roll system to misinformation about voting machines.

Missouri Auditor Scott Fitzpatrick this week accused Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft — who is currently running for governor — of violating state law by refusing to release cybersecurity reports of local election authorities.

Fitzpatrick’s allegations were delivered Monday in an audit report of Ashcroft’s office that was highly critical of the secretary of state’s March 2023 decision to withdraw Missouri from the nonpartisan Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) without having an alternative plan to track voter information in place.
American Oversight has been investigating how the election denial movement targeted ERIC in its continued effort to undermine U.S. democracy. Last month, we released a report, “The Campaign to Dismantle ERIC,” detailing how many of the same people who tried to overturn the 2020 election worked behind the scenes to push Republican-led states to abandon ERIC, and how that exodus threatens the 2024 election.
The report drew upon thousands of pages of records and details how states privately acknowledged ERIC’s importance but withdrew anyway, and have been scrambling to find viable alternatives.
Among the records mentioned in the report are emails showing that guidance about the state’s plans for post-ERIC voter list maintenance wasn’t provided to local election authorities until months after the state withdrew.

In Cochise County, Ariz., which has become a hotbed for election denialism in recent years, some county officials are attempting to educate residents on how elections are administered, hoping to increase faith in the democratic process, Votebeat’s Jen Fifield reported this week.

Officials have held demonstrations of how voting machines work and answered the public’s questions in efforts to rebuild trust after the 2022 midterm elections, during which Cochise County supervisors tried to illegally hand-count ballots and refused to certify election results.
Last year, two of the county’s supervisors were indicted by a state grand jury and charged with conspiring to delay the counting of the 2022 votes and interfering with the Arizona secretary of state’s ability to complete the statewide totaling of votes.
Earlier this month, we sued Cochise County for records regarding the county’s recent election administration decisions, including officials’ refusal to meet Arizona’s certification deadline and other significant changes. With the 2024 election looming, the public, especially Cochise County residents, should know how officials aligned with the election denial movement have used their authority to make significant changes to election administration and to undermine our democratic processes.

Wisconsin Impeachment Panel Records Update
On Thursday, the Dane County Circuit Court in Wisconsin held a status conference in American Oversight’s lawsuit against the once-secret panel of former state Supreme Court justices that Assembly Speaker Robin Vos convened last year for advice on the potential impeachment of a newly elected justice.

The panel members’ names were previously revealed through American Oversight’s lawsuit and public reporting.
During a hearing last month, Judge Frank Remington ruled the former justices who made up the panel had released all public records related to their work to American Oversight. He affirmed that ruling Thursday.
“Now that our requests for records held by the panel members are resolved, we will work to ensure that all of the records held by Speaker Vos are provided to the public as required by Wisconsin law,” American Oversight’s Executive Director Heather Sawyer said in a statement last month.
The court scheduled an additional status conference for March 5 to discuss Vos’ compliance with the public records portion of our lawsuit.

On the Records

Georgia’s ‘Unborn Child Tax Exemption’ Guidance
In July 2022, as abortion-rights opponents sought to capitalize on the previous month’s Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, officials in Georgia’s Department of Revenue (DOR) were grappling with how to issue guidance on another provision in HB 481, the state’s recent six-week abortion-ban law: an “unborn child” tax exemption.

The records we obtained show DOR officials discussing the need for HB 481 guidance in May 2022, following the leak of the Supreme Court’s draft Dobbs opinion, and later fielding questions from tax professionals once the guidance had been issued.
On May 4, DOR’s assistant deputy commissioner for tax operations emailed the deputy state revenue commissioner and several other department officials and noted that they would “[p]robably need to chat about HB 481 over the next month.”
Even after DOR issued guidance on Aug. 1, 2022, significant questions remained. An executive from the Georgia Society of CPAs told a DOR official that he was “getting all kinds of questions on this as you can imagine, and I know y’all are getting the same.”
We obtained these records as part of our investigation into efforts to restrict abortion rights. Learn more about our ongoing investigation here.

Newsletter: Focusing on Election Denial in 2024

On the Records

Other Stories We’re Following

Election Denial and Threats to Democracy

Voting Rights

In the States

LGBTQ Rights

Abortion and Reproductive Rights

Threats to Education

Government Transparency and Public Records Law

Immigration

Trump Accountability

Jan. 6 Investigations