Video: Agnes Vann and Gilles Clarenne. Photo: Fred Brown
For 20 years, her neighbors have trusted Cindy Elgin to vote in their small corner of Nevada. Now those same neighbors believe she is part of a conspiracy to take the presidency from Donald Trump.
Never mind that Republicans won 82 percent of the votes cast in Esmeralda County in 2020, and the county’s population of about 700 makes it one of the least populated counties in the United States. There is.
“I don’t trust the results of the 2020 election,” said Mary Jane Zakas, a former teacher who supports the effort to remove Elgin as county clerk.
The problem is using voting machines instead of paper ballots, Zakas said, echoing a theory often repeated among conservatives.
“As Mike Lindell pointed out, there are many ways to cheat,” she said of the man whose rants about election integrity often appear alongside ads for the pillows he sells. .
“There are formulas that could change the vote. There are things that could flip it,” Zakas said.
Mr. Elgin knows by sight nearly all of the 600 registered voters in Esmeralda, a desert region where gold miners, including author Mark Twain, once sought wealth.
Retired school teacher Mary Jane Zakas is part of the effort to bring back Cindy Elgin, who plays Esmeralda County Clerk Frederick J. Brown.
In the past, she said, the community always seemed satisfied with the way elections were run.
But things worsened in 2020 when President Trump refused to accept his loss to Joe Biden.
“Some people are very passionate about this. You can’t blame them for being passionate about their country,” she told AFP from her Goldfields office.
“I may not agree with some of the things they do, say or don’t say, but I understand.”
Polls show that more than one-third of Americans doubt the integrity of our electoral system.
Claire Woodall, from the Issue One Institute, said the current of mistrust has been around for a long time.
However, the situation turned sour in 2020 when President Trump refused to concede.
Frederick J. Brown verifying voter signatures at the Washoe County Courthouse in Reno, Nevada
“Questions really started to emerge, especially around election administration,” she said.
Aside from the noise generated on a national level, the developments in small communities like Goldfield can be insidious, with threats, harassment, and attacks forcing many election officials out of their jobs. she said.
According to a report in Issue, in states where presidential elections are usually close, such as Arizona, which Biden won by a 0.3 percentage point margin in 2020, and Nevada, where he won by a 2.4 percentage point margin, changes in local election officials are particularly common. It’s serious. One.
Amy Bergans, an elections official in Douglas County, a county of 50,000 people in western Nevada, gave one example.
“I have only been in this position for four years, but I am one of the most senior clerks in the state,” she said.
Bergans, a Republican, is frustrated that most of the misinformation about election integrity comes from her own party.
She said lies and conspiracies are driving out honest officials.
“We are losing the institutional knowledge of clerks who have been doing this work for years.
“It does nothing to make elections more secure. It has a negative impact on elections.”
AFP contacted several former Nevada election officials, but they declined to discuss the records.
“I don’t want to expose my family again,” one of them said.
A quarter of election officials reported experiencing abuse or intimidation between 2020 and 2022, according to a survey by the nonpartisan Election and Voting Information Center.
Esmeralda County Courthouse in Goldfield, Nevada where voting and vote counting takes place Frederick J. Brown
Bergans was one of them. She received death threats in 2022.
Tammy Patrick of the National Association of Election Officials said heightened tensions led to the adoption of once-unheard-of security measures, including bulletproof vests, surveillance cameras and even snipers atop buildings near polling places. It is said that it became like this.
In Los Angeles, elections offices are partnering with law enforcement to use sniffer dogs to inspect ballots that arrive in the mail.
“In different parts of the country…we received mail that contained various substances, some of which were fentanyl…one of which was methamphetamine,” Patrick said.
Ballot storage at the Washoe County Administration Facility in Reno, Nevada Frederick J. Brown
Bergans said she and her team are now carrying Narcan, the antidote for opioid poisoning, in case they receive a contaminated ballot.
A large part of her professional life is now spent explaining the voting process to the public and reassuring them that it is safe.
“I think for the most part people are willing to talk,” she says.
However, there are some people who simply cannot accept it.
“No matter how much I try to give them the facts, they still want to believe the false information that is being given to them,” Bergans said.
