State elections officials said preparations for the 2024 presidential elections are being stalled by continuing attempts to challenge the 2020 vote based on unfounded fraud claims.
Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe and Gabriel Sterling, a top election official in Georgia, told the National Press Foundation’s Statehouse Reporting fellows in Madison, Wisconsin, that that baseless claims and “malicious” information requests have swamped their offices with a new presidential election looming next year.
Wolfe addressed the group just days after Wisconsin Republican lawmakers voted to oust the non-partisan official who has rejected their baseless allegations of misconduct. The administrator remains in office while Attorney General Josh Kaul presses a legal challenge to block the action.
What they said:
On disinformation:
“We have to deal with the lies constantly. … [Disinformation] gets recycled. It is whack-a-mole with the same crap. I mean, I remember I did a press conference the day before the runoff election in January where I was literally debunking the same things that had been said for the previous two months. Guess what? It’s 2023,” said Gabriel Sterling, the Georgia Secretary of State’s chief operating officer. “The incentives to lie, the incentives to be as obnoxious as you can are way up here and the downsides of lying are way down here. [Georgia Rep.] Marjorie Taylor Greene raises more money than the Speaker of the House. Does that make any sense in a regular operating world? No. It doesn’t, but we live in this environment that’s going to stay this way because the reward’s on all sides of that.”
On ‘villainizing’ nonpartisan officials:
“If you would’ve told me before 2020 that ERIC [Electronic Registration Information Center] was going to be the target of conspiracy theories, I would’ve said, ‘You’re out of your mind. This is the most boring, mundane thing you can imagine.’ … Prior to 2020, we were getting sued from the left saying that ERIC could lead to us removing too many people from the voter list. And then after 2020, all of a sudden there were all these theories that ERIC just simply was something that it is not,” Wolfe said. “Is this foreshadowing for other things? Absolutely. There has been a concerted effort to dis-attach election officials from our network, be it people we rely on for technical expertise, be it the federal government, Homeland Security … on any given day you can see these partners getting pulled into these conspiratorial narratives and these efforts to really villainize us working with anyone and trying to isolate us so that we’re not able to utilize that expertise from even our other election officials.”
Why it matters.
“I’ve been in elections administration for 12 years and this is the first time before a general election or a presidential election where I felt like we have not had the time we needed to make the preparations that we need to make … be that training of our election officials, be that fortifying the cybersecurity of our systems, we just haven’t had those same opportunities because every day we walk into a new challenge that still relates to the 2020 election.”—Meagan Wolfe, Wisconsin Elections Commission administrator
Access the full transcript here.
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