How a Pro-Trump Army Built a Movement to Reject Elections

When Clara Andriola took her seat at the Washoe County, Nev., commission meeting room on July 9, she looked out at a sea of angry faces. The commission is Washoe’s main legislative body, and Andriola, a longtime local business executive, was appointed to fill a vacancy on the five-person board last year. She had just won a Republican primary that would almost certainly allow her to keep that seat in the November general election. The commission was required by law to certify elections at every level, from local primary to presidential election. What came next should have been a simple administrative procedure.

But the restless crowd had other ideas. For three hours, they told stories of a primary gone wrong. Some raised concerns about small bureaucratic errors, like improperly addressed ballots. Others shared more exotic allegations, including an unsubstantiated rumor circulating on X about a Serbian scheme to manipulate voting machines. The stories did not add up to any clear theory about what happened or why, but the community had come to believe that democracy was threatened and that there was only one way to save it: They wanted Andriola to vote with her two Republican colleagues to deny her own victory.

Andriola took her legal duty to certify elections seriously, and the stakes of her decision reached far beyond Nevada. Like thousands of administrators around the country, Washoe County commissioners are charged with certifying elections not just at the commission level but also as the first step in the process of formalizing the presidential results nationally. And Washoe wasn’t just any county. It was a swing district in a swing state.

For that reason, Andriola’s hyperlocal primary had taken on national importance. Washoe County’s longest-serving commissioner, Jeanne Herman, was one of the first and only local commission members in the country to vote against certifying Biden’s win in 2020, “because the election was improper,’’ she told me. She was outvoted at the time by the four other commissioners. But in 2022, a local cryptocurrency multimillionaire named Robert Beadles and a growing movement of election denialists helped elect a second commissioner who expressed doubt about the 2020 results, Mike Clark. With one more like-minded Republican commissioner, the doubters would have a three-vote majority.

Andriola had touted her support of Donald Trump in her campaign ads, but she also said that elections “should not be a partisan issue.” She won the primary by a comfortable margin against several election-denying challengers, and her victory was affirmed even after Beadles financed a recount. (Technically the July 9 meeting was for a second certification, of the recount.)

But now, at the hearing, Beadles himself presented an analysis of the ballot data that described the election outcome as a “13.4 sigma” event — so unlikely as to be virtually impossible without some kind of interference. The analysis came from a Long Island math enthusiast named Edward Solomon, who made a similar — and widely debunked — argument in 2020 to support claims that Biden stole the race. But to Beadles, it merited careful consideration. “I’ve given you guys enough evidence right there that you guys should hit pause,” Beadles said. “Do your duty.”

The commissioners’ duty to certify, though, was entirely “ministerial” — the certification was not an endorsement of the process or the outcome, merely another step in passing the results up through the system. They were legally obligated to certify even if they did see problems. They could note clerical errors — the rules vary from state to state — but once they noted them, they still had to pass the results up the line. This was just the basic administrative work of running a democracy.

The job of explaining these duties to the board fell to Nathan Edwards, a lawyer from the Washoe district attorney’s office. “You are canvassing the vote today,” he began, using the formal term for reviewing the election process. But then he began to interpret the statutory language in a way that surprised Andriola. “There’s been a lot of talk about whether this is ‘ministerial’ or ‘not ministerial,’” he said. But the state law contained elements of both: The board had a duty to review the information, but its members also had a duty to decide what the true results of the election were. He underlined this interpretation emphatically. “You don’t have to vote yes on that, you don’t have to vote no,” he said. “You vote your conscience.”

Now Andriola was uncertain. This didn’t seem right. Was Edwards saying that she did have an obligation to consider the evidence before her? Maybe this was different because it was a recount? She had questions. What would happen next if the motion didn’t carry?

Edwards gave a wry laugh. He had done some asking around, he said, but “it’s a little bit of uncharted water.” Probably the matter would end up in front of the secretary of state or a judge.

“I don’t have time to figure out if this is right or this is wrong,” Andriola remembers thinking at the time. Maybe it was best to “let it go to people who have the authority, jurisdiction and time to do it right.”

And so she voted no. As far as anyone could determine, it was the first time since Nevada became a state in 1864 that a county there had refused to certify an election.

The Washoe County case, with an official voting essentially to block her own election, is the most vivid example of an effort that has been unfolding across the country in the years since the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Now, as voters and campaign professionals prepare for what promises to be a hard-fought election match, a smaller group of lawyers and longtime MAGA supporters is preparing the ground for an even harder-fought post-election rematch. And as they did in 2020, they are preparing to battle on the grounds of certification.

To better understand what this could mean for the country and for democracy in the months to come, I traveled to four battleground states and interviewed dozens of election officials, activists, lawyers and ordinary citizens, read through hundreds of pages of court transcripts and sat in on many hours of local meetings like the one in Washoe. What I found was that although the Stop the Steal movement of 2020 has evolved into the considerably more sophisticated “election integrity” movement of 2024, its success is still premised on persuading election administrators of two things that are not true: that widespread election fraud is a real and present threat to democracy and that they have not only the authority but also the legal duty to do something about it — that they must “do their duty” and deny certification.

I also found a growing number of election officials who seemed willing to do exactly that. For them, going so far as to block certification wasn’t a partisan gambit; it was a patriotic duty. Though it might technically be illegal, it obeyed a higher law. Over months of reporting, this is what I heard again and again. For all the cynicism involved in the effort to overturn Trump’s 2020 loss, and the groundwork being laid to challenge a possible defeat this year, many officials I spoke to were clearly motivated by a deeply held belief that a grand conspiracy was underway. In the face of that, how could they agree to certify?

For the better part of two centuries, American lawmakers and judges have said that they must, and for good reason: Giving administrators the power to deny certification would mean giving them the power to deny the franchise. One New York judge identified the mechanism in 1843. “It requires no great forecast,” he said, to see that if they have such authority, “the success of a candidate will not depend so much upon the number of votes received, as upon the ingenuity and skill” of the administrators.

Trump’s 2020 subversion bid put that ingenuity to the test. When two Republicans on the four-person election board in Wayne County, Mich., refused to certify the results, an uproar ensued, and they reversed course. Trump called them, urging them to fight on, and they tried to rescind their votes, but there was no legal basis for such a maneuver. Trump and his allies then tried to persuade Republican legislators in key swing states that they had the power to override certified results and send a slate of “alternative delegates” who would vote for Trump instead of Biden to the Electoral College. When that failed, they moved on to the congressional certification ceremony that was the target of the Jan. 6 attack.

Afterward, as the House impeached Trump and the major social media platforms shut down accounts that spread the stolen-election narrative (including Trump’s), it seemed as if the denialist movement would wither and die. Instead — fed by a stream of false content on “anti-censorship” platforms like Gab, Parler and Rumble as well as on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast — it not only survived but thrived. Tens of millions of dollars flooded into “election integrity” groups, and a new strategy came into view: Purge the party of those Republicans who resisted Trump’s 2020 scheme, find true believers who would do what needed to be done and put them in control of the administrative machinery well in advance of the next election.

Much of that work would be done by Cleta Mitchell, a Republican lawyer who assisted Trump’s efforts in Georgia after the 2020 election and was on the phone call on Jan. 2, 2021, in which Trump fruitlessly asked Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to “find 11,780 votes.” Later that same year, Mitchell started a new group called the Election Integrity Network that encouraged like-minded “citizen patriots” to infiltrate local elections offices. A how-to guide suggested appearing at their regular board meetings, filing records requests to learn internal processes, running for positions or appointments. On her “Who’s Counting?” podcast, she said, “We are going to retake our election system one county at a time all over America.”

Efforts like Mitchell’s were pursued in the name of making elections run more smoothly and accurately, to, as the Election Integrity Network handbook has it, “restore trust.” But inevitably the initiatives they pushed threatened to have the opposite effect. For instance, since 2020, an expanding constellation of election-integrity groups has requested that ballots be hand counted. This is well known by elections experts to be a less reliable system than machine counting, but it inevitably comes up with results that are slightly different from the machine count, which seems to justify the distrust that led to the hand count. The endless stream of information requests and voter challenges takes up valuable staff time, creating bottlenecks and greater distrust.

All of this fed into a barrage of increasingly complex conspiracy theories, and so the movement grew. Before 2020, there had only ever been a handful of instances in which election commissioners declined to certify an election; in the years since, board or commission members have voted against certifying results in at least 20 counties across eight states. As Election Day approaches, it is clear that there will be more to come. “They’ve been working hard over the past four years to tee up this strategy,” says Jessica Marsden, a lawyer with Protect Democracy, a group that monitors threats against fair elections. “It seems almost certain that they would try it.”

The legal system does not make it easy to nullify the popular will, and in 2022 Congress passed a bill — the Electoral Count Reform Act — that would make it even harder, in part by setting an unambiguous deadline for states to submit their final certified results: this year, Dec. 11.

But there is a path. The bill did not state the consequences for missing the certification deadline. A determined administrator could try to in effect run out the clock, creating a chain reaction of legal maneuvers that would culminate in the election’s being decided by simple majorities of the House and the Senate — each of which could by Jan. 6 be controlled by Republicans. The odds are small, but any administrator willing to face the consequences has a shot at overturning the election. “The whole system is dependent upon, one, everyone doing what they’re supposed to do, and two, doing what a judge has told them they have to do,” Bradley Schrager, a Democratic election lawyer in Nevada, told me. “After that, we’re into something else.”

For election officials around the country, the challenge presented by the new election-integrity movement could be daunting. Conspiracy theories were often difficult to debunk, and efforts to put baseless concerns to rest often led to more questions. In few places was this more true than Maricopa County in Arizona. When Stephen Richer, a Republican, ran in 2020 to become the county recorder, he offered a twist on Trump’s slogan: “Make the Maricopa recorder’s office boring again.” Like others in his party who knew and accepted that Biden won the presidential election, he was confident that the anger would subside after Jan. 6. As soon as he took office, he realized he was wrong.

Maricopa had been a spawning ground for election denialism. On election night of 2020, some Trump voters became convinced that an effort by Maricopa election workers to have them fill their ballots with Sharpie pens was a conspiracy to invalidate their votes. Sharpie pens were previously a problem, because they bled through the ballots, making a mark on both sides. But for the 2020 election, Maricopa had redesigned the ballots so the bleed through didn’t matter, which is why election workers were instructed to tell voters to use Sharpie pens. The rumor that the Sharpies were part of an anti-Trump ploy took flight on Facebook and Twitter nonetheless, sending a mob of angry protesters to the main Maricopa vote-count center, some with military gear and long guns.

Sharpiegate, as it became known, melded into other conspiracy theories about Dominion voting machines and corrupt election workers. Some adherents of these theories made up a sizable bloc of the Arizona Legislature, and in his second week on the job — a week after the Jan. 6 riot — Richer found himself answering a subpoena to provide them with all information about the county’s Dominion machines and ballot records. By the end of the month, Arizona State Senate Republicans were moving to conduct their own “forensic audit.”

Even if Richer thought the Senate audit was excessive — judges and two county-run reviews had determined that there was no evidence of wrongdoing in 2020 — he was ready to go along with it, he told me. Maybe, he thought, it would answer some of the deniers’ questions and cool things down.

But then he found out who would be running the audit. It wasn’t going to be KPMG or Deloitte or some other established public accounting firm — it was going to be Cyber Ninjas, a tiny shop from Sarasota, Fla. Richer still remembers being shocked at the choice.

Cyber Ninjas, run by a software analyst named Doug Logan, had no experience with elections or auditing. In the fall of 2020, Logan worked up theories about Dominion voting machines with Trump-world figures like the Overstock founder Patrick Byrne and retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who, that December, suggested that Trump seize voting machines and use “military capabilities” to rerun the election in swing states. “They just don’t intend to do this seriously,” Richer says he realized.

Then there was the money. The Arizona Senate leadership had budgeted $150,000 for the audit. But more than $7 million flooded in from outside donors. The progressive investigative group Documented reported that Trump’s Save America PAC had kicked in $1 million, by way of an escrow account created by Cleta Mitchell. And open-records lawsuits by The Arizona Republic and the nonprofit investigative group American Oversight found other donors, including Byrne’s America Project; Flynn’s group, America’s Future; and a group called Voices and Votes. It was co-founded by a host on the One America News Network, Christina Bobb, who was indicted this year on conspiracy and forgery charges related to the attempt to subvert Biden’s win in Arizona. (Bobb, who pleaded not guilty, is now working as the head of the Republican National Committee’s election-monitoring effort.)

Even with the funding rolling in, the audit did not go smoothly. Workers broke protocols for handling ballots as they scanned them for bamboo fibers that might indicate a Chinese plot and watermarks that, according to a viral QAnon conspiracy theory, Trump left on a collection of fake ballots to help catch election thieves. As deadlines passed and Cyber Ninjas came under increasing scrutiny, it closed out its audit. In its report, released that September, it said there “were no substantial differences between the hand count of the ballots provided and the official election canvass results for Maricopa County.”

But it also went on to raise questions about the legitimacy of thousands of what it called “questionable ballots” — a number that well exceeded Biden’s margin of victory — and urged further investigation. Trump and his allies seized on the auditors’ ambiguous claims. “It is clear in Arizona that they must decertify the election — you heard the numbers — and those responsible for wrongdoing must be held accountable,’’ Trump told a rally crowd in Georgia that same month.

Richer issued his own post-audit report laying out its flaws. “We can’t indulge these lies any longer,’’ he wrote on Twitter the following May. “As a party. As a state. As a country.” His statements drew a stream of death threats and sent Richer in a different direction from his party’s voters. Denialism was the route to their support, which was why, in 2022, state Republicans nominated for governor a woman who was emerging as one of the most vocal denialists in the country, Kari Lake. A former television anchor and first-time candidate, she claimed the Cyber Ninja audit showed Trump won. If she lost, she said, it would only be because her election was stolen, too.

Unfortunately for Richer, widespread problems with Maricopa’s on-site ballot printers and scanners gave Lake something to seize upon when she did lose in 2022. Some of those problems stemmed directly from the county’s attempts to allay doubts whipped up by the audit and conspiracy theories like Sharpiegate. Though bleed through from markers didn’t cause any problems, it tended to alarm voters nonetheless. So for the 2022 elections, the county had switched to a thicker ballot paper stock. But the heavier paper created its own problems: Some ballots now printed too lightly, and that made them harder to scan. The cascade of problems created long lines, and many voters were asked to use drop boxes that would be transported to the main tabulation center for counting on election night.

Though Lake’s lawyers couldn’t produce hard evidence that these issues caused people not to vote, she said that it cost her the election and that Richer did it on purpose. “Tens of thousands of Maricopa County voters were disenfranchised,” she would assert, and that was because election officials had “sabotaged” the election. (Lake declined to contest a 2023 defamation suit by Richer, but the dispute continues over damages.)

Lake had support from Trump, who wrote on Truth Social, the social media platform he started in late 2021, “They are trying to steal the election with bad Machines and DELAY.” On “War Room,” Bannon declared that she was the true winner.

None of this was going to get Lake elected, just as the audit wasn’t going to get Biden’s victory decertified. But all of it, the audit, the real problems in Maricopa and the false portrayal of their effects, was feeding into the running narrative about stolen elections. That narrative had taken hold of people in Arizona’s Cochise County, on the Mexican border, including the two Republicans on the three-member board of supervisors, Peggy Judd and Thomas Crosby.

When it came time to certify the 2022 election, and even though Lake won by 18 percentage points in Cochise, Judd and Crosby voted not to certify. There were serious consequences. Last year, Attorney General Kris Mayes of Arizona, a Democrat, indicted them on charges of “interference with an election officer” and conspiracy.

Despite such potential consequences, local elections-board members sought to delay or outright voted against certification in counties across the country in 2022. In New Mexico, the State Supreme Court ordered the board of commissioners of Otero County to reverse its vote against certifying primary results; one of the no votes came from Couy Griffin, who had been convicted on trespassing charges in the Jan. 6 attack. In North Carolina, the state board of elections removed a Surry County election board member who voted against certifying the 2022 results, along with another member who joined him in signing a letter saying the North Carolina election laws were unconstitutional. Pennsylvania had to delay certification of its primary for three months as three Republican-controlled counties refused to certify full results in a standoff over mail ballots, which ended with a judge’s order. After the general election in Pennsylvania that November, Luzerne County missed the state deadline after deadlocking on certification. The swing voter was a Democrat who changed his mind after pursuing his own inquiry.

The movement was succeeding in persuading administrators around the country that there were serious problems with the election system, but the rules remained an obstacle to denying certification. Now some commissioners asked the next obvious question: Could they change the rules? One of those administrators was Bridget Thorne, a first-time elected official who took her seat on the Fulton County, Ga., board of commissioners in January 2023.

Like a lot of people in the new movement, Thorne’s conversion experience came in 2020. A part-time software designer, she regularly volunteered to help manage elections in her suburban Atlanta voting precinct. But that year, she told me, she was appalled by a woeful lack of security and protocol she found in the downtown Atlanta convention center where she was helping Fulton County test its new Dominion machines ahead of Election Day.

Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a bête noire to the denialist movement for his refusal to lend credence to their claims, agreed that there were some procedural problems, which were readily apparent in various reviews and investigations. But none of those investigations found widespread fraud or anything that would have affected the outcome, which is why Raffensperger declared his confidence that Georgia’s votes were “counted accurately, fairly, reliably.” Thorne wasn’t convinced. She was particularly worried that the dummy ballots used by workers to test tabulation machines might somehow get mixed in with real ballots on Election Day.

Increasingly agitated that she could not get a hearing for her complaints from Fulton County elections officials, she started reaching out to politicians in her area, and within a couple of weeks, she was testifying before a panel of Georgia State Senate Republicans considering Trump’s demand that they overturn their state’s results.

Now Thorne was connected with a lawyer named Robert Cheeley, who had joined Trump’s 2020 election scheme in Georgia, which involved organizing a slate of so-called alternate electors that Trump and his congressional allies could use to make him the winner on Jan. 6 — a plot that would lead to Cheeley’s eventual indictment by District Attorney Fani Willis of Fulton County (he pleaded not guilty in September 2023; some charges were dropped this year). Thorne helped Cheeley prepare a case seeking to inspect 147,000 Fulton ballots for suspected problems. Working with Cheeley on the suit was eye-opening, she said. “I started studying election law that summer at Cheeley’s,” she told me, “and I realized, Wow, Fulton County breaks a lot of laws.’’

Thorne made her complaints public at regular county commission and election board meetings, where she met like-minded citizens who were convinced that something went wrong with the 2020 election, including Janice Johnston, a recently retired OB-GYN, and Julie Adams, a career human resources executive. The three women would move into positions of authority and influence over state and local elections on roughly parallel tracks.

In 2022, Johnston was appointed to a seat on the state board of elections, which helps oversee how counties apply election law. That appointment was made by the state Republican Party, which, at that point, was under the leadership of David Shafer, who would step down the following year as he came under investigation, too, for helping to organize Trump’s “alternate” election slate in 2020. Adams became a regional coordinator for Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network. Thorne, who showed a natural proclivity for politics, won her seat on the Fulton commission on the Republican line, with donations from two family friends who were also prominent donors to Trump — Lisa and Kenny Troutt of Texas. (Kenny Troutt was also an investor in Truth Social.)

Initially, there was only so much Thorne could do as one of two Republicans on the seven-member commission. At commission meetings, she would grill the election supervisor on procedures and budget, which the commission controlled, presenting errors as evidence of vulnerabilities that could wrongfully change election outcomes. “If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail,’’ says Dana Barrett, a Democrat on the commission. “She believes elections are suspect, so anything she sees that looks in any way off to her is proof that elections are suspect.”

Things would start changing fast in 2024. At the turn of the year, a new lieutenant governor, Burt Jones, who had personally sought to persuade Vice President Mike Pence to throw out the 2020 results, exercised his appointment power to remove a moderate Republican on the state board, Matt Mashburn, who helped block Johnston when she sought to investigate Raffensperger. In Mashburn’s place would be a former state senator, Rick Jeffares, who promoted false claims about “dead voters” ’ casting ballots in 2020. Now Johnston had an ally on the board. A few weeks later, in February, Thorne gained an ally, too, when the Fulton County Republican Party appointed Julie Adams to the Fulton election board, which the commission oversees.

In March, when it came time to certify the results of the Georgia Republican and Democratic primaries, Adams was ready. She asked the county election office for reams of data — a list of qualified voters, voter check-in lists and a record of all ballots cast. When the office responded that it could not fulfill the entire request ahead of the certification deadline, Adams said she wouldn’t be able to support certification and voted no.

In April, Thorne submitted a new rule to the state board. This one would require all Georgia elections certifiers to conduct more extensive investigations before certifying and require elections supervisors to provide board members with all records related to the election upon request. She developed the rule, she said, in consultation with Johnston and Adams, as well as a prominent conservative “election integrity” investigator from Pennsylvania who was also close to Cleta Mitchell, Heather Honey.

The sole Democrat on the state board, Sarah Tindall Ghazal, was aghast at the proposal. Thorne told me later that her main goal was to make board members more confident in the results they were certifying. But the rule would require administrators to skip certifying the results in any individual precincts that they determined to have discrepancies until completing investigations — which meant certifying only some results. Ghazal didn’t believe that was legal. “The risk is using pretextual reasons to fail to certify when folks are not pleased with the results,’’ Ghazal told Thorne at a hearing for the rule. Thorne shot back, “So you’re saying we’re dishonest by requiring this.” A moderate Republican on the board, Ed Lindsey, moved to table the rule, suggesting that Thorne rework it so it definitely comported with Georgia law.

Days later, Adams, on the Fulton election board, sued for the right to conduct her own audit, with full access to local voter data, before certifying elections. She was represented by the America First Policy Institute, founded by four former Trump-administration officials. Her lawyer on the suit, Alex Kaufman, had assisted in Trump’s 2020 Georgia election-subversion bid and sat in along with Mitchell on Trump’s call asking Raffensperger to find him votes that didn’t exist.

Soon after Adams filed her suit, state Republicans made another change on the state board, replacing Ed Lindsey, the moderate who tabled Thorne’s proposal, with a conservative talk-show host, Janelle King, who immediately made it clear that she intended to find out whether “something happened” in Georgia’s 2020 election — and that she would vote in tandem with Jeffares and Johnston. Johnston had control of the board.

In August, Thorne brought her rule back before the newly composed panel. This time, she had supportive testimony from Hans von Spakovsky, a towering figure in the election-integrity movement. Von Spakovsky was among the first in the modern era to raise the specter of voter fraud to push restrictive election rules, starting in the 1990s. When board members do not have “full confidence” that elections are “error free,” he told the board, “they should not certify.” Thorne’s rule passed easily, along with a related provision requiring board members to conduct “reasonable inquiries” ahead of certification.

On Oct. 1, a state judge, Robert C.I. McBurney, heard a challenge to those rules and also the merits of Adams’s lawsuit. Thorne, Adams and Johnston were all in attendance as he pressed the lawyers representing the state board to agree that certification was mandatory and had to happen by the state deadline, Nov. 12, ahead of the federal deadline, Dec. 11. They did. But later in the hearing, Adams’s lawyers agreed that board members had to certify results by the state-mandated deadline but argued it wasn’t clear that they had to certify all results from all precincts. They could reject those they determined to be problematic. In Georgia, certification was beginning to look discretionary.

As the movement to challenge the certification system has gained momentum over the past four years, elected officials and outside groups have also worked to cool the temperature, especially in districts where disinformation is doing the most damage. The approaches have been varied. North Carolina simply removed the recalcitrant board members in Surry County. In Pennsylvania, officials from the office of the secretary of state, Al Schmidt, have been holding informational sessions with judges throughout the state. The goal is to make sure they understand the legal requirements of the Electoral Count Reform Act and the importance of the state’s meeting the Dec. 11 deadline this year. In Arizona, the guidance was more forceful. Thomas Crosby, the Arizona Republican, is still facing charges in connection to his refusal to certify the results of the 2022 midterms in Cochise County. He has pleaded not guilty. But in late October, Peggy Judd, his colleague on the board of supervisors, pleaded guilty to the crime of “failure or refusal to perform duty by an election officer.” She was sentenced to 90 days of unsupervised probation and fined $500. “I will certify,” she says now, though she still has qualms. “I have to.”

One of the outside groups working to cool things down, called Pillars of the Community, was founded by two veteran partisan election lawyers, Bob Bauer, an outside lawyer for Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign, and Ben Ginsberg, the lead counsel for Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign and George W. Bush’s 2004 and 2000 campaigns. They make a striking pair: In 2000, they were on opposite sides of the recount battle in Florida, which in its final phase before the Supreme Court became a fight over what Florida was going to submit as its certified result and whether it would do so on time. Ginsberg moved away from his party in 2020, after 18 Republican attorneys general asked the Supreme Court to throw out swing-state vote results over flimsy fraud allegations. “That was the case that epitomized to me the complete abandonment of principle for the ends of political power,’’ he says.

For the past few months, they have been traveling through major swing states convening discussions between election administrators and the “pillars” — Bauer and Ginsberg’s word for carefully recruited community members across the political spectrum. The idea was that if they could show those with concerns about the election system how it really worked, and let them hear from administrators about their own challenges and how they did their jobs, the pillars would vouch for the administrators if and when things went awry. In October, they invited me to observe a Zoom session with election administrators from Georgia and several of their community pillars.

At the start of the meeting, the election administrators aired deep concern over a late procedural change handed down by Georgia’s state election board, requiring live hand-count reviews of machine counts. There was consensus that if the rule survived a court challenge, it would strain budgets — “a lot of unplanned pay,’’ as one administrator put it — while adding more stressful work to overburdened staffs, for a process that was redundant; various checks were built into the system already. Raffensperger and Gov. Brian Kemp, both Republicans, had repeatedly said the state’s elections were secure. In the name of efficiency, the state board was actually working to make the local election offices less efficient.

It was certification, though, that was now the main concern for clerks in the Zoom meeting. They feared that Thorne’s certification rules and Julie Adams’s lawsuit could make it easier to cast that vote. Raffensperger’s chief operating officer, Gabriel Sterling, said his office had plans in place should that occur — in particular, they would quickly seek a writ of mandamus, a judicial order that would compel board members to certify by a certain date or face contempt-of-court charges. The threat of prosecution could be a powerful deterrent.

But another pillar on the call, Scot Turner, a former Republican state legislator, was far less certain. “I wish I shared your optimism, Gabe,’’ he said. Turner ran a group called Eternal Vigilance Action that was bringing its own suit against the state board for a number of its recent moves, including Thorne’s rule and the one requiring the Election Day hand audits, arguing that the board was overstepping its legal authority. No matter what the courts decided, he said, the state board had now created “the illusion of discretion’’ that angry citizens will expect them to exercise should Trump claim fraud caused him to lose. “You will have locals under extraordinary pressure, peer pressure, from people that they live near telling them, ‘How could you possibly certify this election?’”

Ginsberg was most worried about a scenario like one he shared with the writers of “Succession,’’ for which he served as a script consultant. It envisioned an arson attack on a ballot-counting center on election night, leaving the county in question unable to certify complete results. What then? Bauer noted another eventuality: Administrators could try to drag things out with prolonged court fights, pushing the certification process past the Dec. 11 Electoral College deadline, but he thought it was unlikely. In his view, even if it took court intervention, the deadlines would be met, and all states would ultimately have their certifications done in time for the Electoral College vote on Dec. 17.

Georgia’s administrators began to get clarity in mid-October, when Judge McBurney, who was considering Adams’s suit and the new board rules around certification, ruled that board members did have to certify on time, the entire result, and that voting no was not an option. A day later, the judge in the Eternal Vigilance Action lawsuit ruled that the board had indeed overstepped its authority in approving Thorne’s rule on certification and hand-count reviews. The Republican National Committee appealed, but the state’s Supreme Court denied it on Oct. 22.

Yet the Republicans weren’t done trying. After the McBurney ruling, Kaufman contacted Raffensperger’s office with an odd request, according to communications I obtained through an open-records request: Would the state change the official certification form? Two people with knowledge of the request said Kaufman was seeking the addition of a space where individual commissioners could register doubts about the accuracy of the results they had just certified. The request was denied, but it was a clear attempt to inject doubt into official certification, for purposes that hadn’t yet been articulated.

“Chaos is the strategy,’’ says Joanna Lydgate, the former chief deputy attorney general of Massachusetts who founded States United Democracy Center, a watchdog organization that works with state officials in both parties. “The strategy is ultimately about eroding public trust, priming the electorate for an attempted subversion of the election.”

On the day she voted no, Clara Andriola stayed at her office in Washoe County until 11 p.m., researching. She learned that her certification was absolutely mandatory, in all cases. She also learned that failure to certify could result in Class E felony charges and real jail time. She submitted a request for a reconsideration the following day, but the soonest the committee could meet was a week later, so Washoe would miss the state deadline. Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar — a Democrat who had quietly helped raise money for Andriola’s campaign — concluded that he had no choice but to bring a lawsuit compelling the board to act. “When that D.A. said what he said in a meeting,” Aguilar told me, “he put Clara in a very, very, very bad spot.”

Aguilar hoped to get a clear court determination for November and beyond. The certification finally went through on a 4-1 vote on July 16. One of the Republican commissioners, Mike Clark, said he was voting yes, but “under extreme duress.” Jeanne Herman, who voted against Trump’s loss in 2020, held out yet again. “There are hills to climb on and there’s hills to die on,’’ she said, “and this might be one of those.”

The Nevada authorities had in fact thus far declined to file any criminal charges. And weeks later, the Nevada Supreme Court declared the civil matter now moot, because certification had taken place, and declined to rule. “This is not moot,’’ Andriola told me in September. “Election workers are having to deal with this question every single day now, and it makes their job even harder.”

Indeed, many of the state’s election clerks — the people whose work the board was refusing to certify — were quitting. Washoe was on its third registrar in two years, Cari-Ann Burgess, and she was feeling the pressure. “I was holding the door for somebody, for a lady, and as she walked out the door she said, ‘You should be ashamed of yourself, you’re a disgrace, and you should just die,’’’ Burgess told me at her office in September. “I just have to detach myself from it, otherwise it’s going to eat at me.” (A few days later, the county announced that Burgess had experienced medical issues due to stress and was taking an indefinite leave of absence. In late October, Burgess told The Associated Press that she had in fact been pressured to go on leave after a dispute with the county manager’s office and was considering legal options.)

Just down the hall from Burgess’ office was the Washoe County commission’s meeting space. When I walked in a few minutes after the public session started on Sept. 17, the room was already in chaos. A man was standing at the lectern in a camo hat that read, “Jesus Is My Savior, Trump Is My President.’’ He was using a projector to present a mathematical analysis that claimed to prove that voting machines switched votes to steal the 2020 election for the Democratic chair of the commission, Alexis Hill. “Guys, this is what election fraud looks like,’’ said the man, Nicholas St Jon.

Hill was facing a rematch in the upcoming general election from a Republican named Marsha Berkbigler. Hill had taken Berkbigler’s seat in 2020 without election denial being an issue; Berkbigler herself dutifully certified her own defeat. But now, she said at a forum with Hill, she wasn’t so sure that she would have certified elections that had taken place since. If Berkbigler regains her seat in November, it will give the board a three-member majority of people who have openly expressed doubts about certification. Aguilar told me he considered Hill’s race to now be “the most important in the state.” It wasn’t about 2024; it was about what could happen in the years after.

As St Jon continued to make his case against Hill at the commission’s public meeting, he became agitated when Hill turned down his request to make his presentation more visible for the meeting’s livestream. (There was no way to do so, she later explained.) When his three minutes of allotted speaking time were over, he walked up to a small barrier dividing the public seating area from the dais, leaned his arms across it and looked directly at Hill. “You don’t get to try to intimidate this board,” Hill told him. “Please sit down.”

When he refused, the meeting came to a halt as both sides called the sheriff’s office — St Jon to demand a “citizen’s arrest” of Hill for denying his First Amendment rights; Hill to have St Jon removed. For nearly an hour, St Jon and officers from the sheriff’s office went back and forth over his First Amendment rights and the board’s right to eject him. St Jon left after being warned it was that or arrest. After he left, complaints about elections continued, as other attendees presented the board with a resolution they wanted the board to sign agreeing to extra ballot security and other measures. They said they were affiliated with a national group, United Sovereign Americans, which was promoting similar resolutions around the country. One of the organization’s lawyers, Bruce Castor, a former Pennsylvania solicitor general, defended Trump during his second impeachment, after Jan. 6.

Later, Herman told me she didn’t always agree with St Jon’s approach, but she understood his frustration. “It’s building,’’ she said. “People are aggravated, and they want to get some results and clean up something before the election because we’ve already proven we can’t have decent, fair, earnest, transparent elections under any circumstances.”

Herman told me that she was certain Trump won in 2020 in Washoe and that outside forces, not the voters, were controlling local elections. “I mean, if I sat there and just certified everything, I’d be lying to myself and to the rest of the world, right?” she said. “I wouldn’t be representing the people.” If it was between what county lawyers told her and what she saw as her oath, her oath would win out.

A couple of days after St Jon’s standoff with the sheriffs, I had coffee with him at a cafe in Reno. He said that it was clear to him that there were real problems. As far as he was concerned, he had the math, in the 2020 analysis he tried to present at the meeting. It tracked 2020 vote-count patterns, he said, and found that they could only have been set by algorithms, a sure sign of manipulation. Aguilar’s office reviewed it, he said, and after nine or 10 months he received an email. They told him he had not provided significant enough information for them to conclude anything. St Jon was matter of fact. “At what point does something become significant, right?” To him, it was just more evidence of a rigged system. They were saying, “‘You will never reach significance because we’re the ones who define what significant is.’”

I asked him about the election. What would he do if the courts forced the board to certify a result he didn’t trust? He would try to maintain the peace, he said, but it wouldn’t be easy. A lot of people “are going: You know what, we own guns for a reason, and it’s not because we want to go hunting. It’s because there’s a tyrannical government, and we’re done, we’re done.”

Things could get much worse after the election. “Is it Revolutionary War 2.0? I would not be surprised.”