Inside the Effort to Protect the Election — One State at a Time
Art Reyes III had been delivering the closing remarks at a virtual election watch party on November 3, 2020, when he learned that busloads of Republicans had pulled up to a Detroit convention center to demand election workers stop counting ballots. Reyes, the founder of grassroots group We the People Michigan, had known this was coming: Far-right activists in the state had been recruiting since June for “Operation Guard The Vote,” a project to dispatch election observers to “vulnerable areas” to stop the “radical left” as they “try to cheat in November,” a video touting the effort baselessly claimed. “We heard that dog whistle very loudly,” Reyes, a Flint native, recalls. “As we saw [former President Donald] Trump’s language become more intense, we knew we needed to organize a robust response.”
That “robust response” unfolded with a few taps of Reyes’ cellphone. For months, he and a network of allies had been preparing “action councils,” community leaders poised to mobilize in the event of an attempt to subvert democratic processes. That night, the metro Detroit groups sprung into action. It took less than an hour for 150 pro-democracy activists to descend upon the convention hall, countering chants of “stop the count!” by encouraging the tabulation to continue. Many of those same activists flooded the Wayne County canvassing board two weeks later to ensure Republican board members certified the count, despite Trump’s pressure to not. They showed up again the week after that, this time at a virtual meeting of the state legislature, to deliver hours of testimony of what they’d seen in Detroit as they pressured Michigan lawmakers to certify the results.
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“It was a really important victory, but we didn’t know what we know now — that this would be a battle in perpetuity,” Reyes tells me.
Trump isn’t on the ballot this cycle, but threats to election integrity are as abundant as ever. Candidates up and down the ballot have refused to say whether they’ll accept the will of the voters — “We’ve gone from Trump to ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,’” as one source involved in election defense planning describes it. Election conspiracists, meanwhile, have been recruiting like-minded vigilantes to work as poll workers or to stand guard at ballot drop-off sites. In 2020, pro-democracy forces pushed back against an election-denying president with a national strategy focused, very much so, stopping Trump’s steal. But the pervasive nature of threats facing this midterm election has put renewed pressure on the states, especially those where election conspiracists have inserted themselves in every phase of the democratic process. So local activists are building an entire defense infrastructure, state-by-state, to combat these threats, with the support of national groups that helped ensure a fair and free election in 2020.
In states that have been host to election conspiracies, that means having pro-democracy defenders prepared for mass action. Pennsylvania Stand Up, a sibling organization of Reyes’ We The People Michigan, has a network of thousands at the ready to “make sure greedy ass people in power aren’t trying to undermine democracy,” says executive director Carrie Santoro. Building upon its 2020 efforts, the group is prepared to activate its chapters across 12 counties for rapid response in the aftermath of the election — to show up at board of election offices and public meetings, particularly in counties where officials have already floated not certifying the results. Arizona Wins, a political coalition of progressive grassroots groups and labor unions, launched a new committee this year that’s “preparing for anything that could happen” in a post-election scenario, says executive director Montserrat Arredondo. That includes dispatching volunteers to county recorder offices to protect ballot counters, or to election denier protests “to counter that energy,” she says.
“In 2020, we were there to ensure folks could vote, but then we saw people trying to break into county recorders’ offices, accusing people of fraud, calling the election rigged,” Arredondo recalls. “We weren’t as ready for that post-election time last cycle, so we’ve been gearing up for it.”
There’s also an element of staying attuned to emerging election threats. In Michigan, Reyes and his allies have reactivated the action councils, but have shifted their focus to “monitoring where we see people who are anti-democratic forces,” Reyes says. That means keeping tabs on, for example, Macomb County, where the county clerk put a January 6th insurrectionist Genevieve Peters on payroll to recruit and train poll workers. Organizers are also staying vigilant to “constitutional sheriffs,” such as Dar Leaf in Barry County, who attempted to seize a voting machine as part of his conspiracy-driven investigation into Trump’s claims of fraud. “It’s really important that we’re clear eyes about the role they’re playing,” Reyes says. Local leaders have prepared by making demands on local officials ahead of elections — such as asking for Peters to be fired — and educating communities on where potential threats may emerge.
Some national organizations are offering a layer of coordination and support. Election Defenders, founded by a coalition of progressive and racial justice groups in 2020, is leading efforts in eight key states to train, resource, and station volunteers to allow voters to safely cast ballots. “We’ve been training people to be actively engaged at polling locations, be prepared for high-stakes, high-intensity situations,” says Peoples, the executive director. The group is also helping local partners “ in states where there will be attempts to slow or stop counting” to make plans to protect election outcomes all the way through vote certification. In Pennsylvania, for example, Election Defenders has been briefing volunteers on where to anticipate vote count challenges and be ready to show up.
Last cycle, Peoples served as the director of the Democracy Defense Coalition, a first-of-its-kind effort for pro-democracy groups — often left-leaning, though not uniformly — to try to counter Trump’s election denier narrative with democracy fortifications. The groups involved made plans from early voting all the way through certification — from recruiting poll workers and neutral election observers, pushing get-out-the-vote efforts, filing countersuits against frivolous GOP lawsuits, and planning for potential post-election crises. “We were facing a threat we had not seen before, so we needed to be in formation in a way we had not been before,” Peoples says. In the end, she gives the most credit to organizers like Reyes, who held back subversion attempts in the states. “People couldn’t enact their plots to steal the election because grassroots folks were there to hold them accountable.”
The Democracy Defense Coalition formally disbanded after 2020. National groups and individuals that had been involved with it, however, continue to be in contact with one another this cycle, sharing information about anti-democratic threats with an ever-widening array of state and local groups invested in developing their own strategies. Many involved in these preparation efforts, which spans bipartisan and nonpartisan actors, are generally reluctant to discuss it. High-profile election defense has become a talking point for the far right, which lambasted their democracy fortification efforts as proof of a grand left-wing conspiracy to steal the election from Trump. (“Guilty of a conspiracy to commit democracy,” scoffs one national organizer involved in conversations. “That’s not symmetrical with Steve Bannon recruiting poll workers to undermine an election result.”)
There’s also a fear among some activists that speaking so openly about the threats to democracy in the critical weeks leading up to an election could be its own form of voter suppression. But living through 2020 has primed voters to expect spurious claims from the GOP. A survey of likely voters conducted by one researcher examining attitudes toward the midterm election process found that 64 percent of respondents believe Republicans are going to claim election fraud — and 59 percent of them said those claims would not be believable. “Is that enough? Absolutely not,” the researcher says. “But it does mean people are already primed to expect it and treat it with a helpful measure of, ‘This is BS.’”
Back in Michigan, Reyes doesn’t give that too much thought. “The pathway out of these very scary moments when we see democracy under threat — that’s not won by a communications strategy or pretending challenges aren’t there,” Reyes says. “We gotta do something about this together.”
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