The New Voter Vibe
With January 6th back in the headlines, hundreds of GenZ groups, nonprofits and "get out the vote" campaigns are collaborating to protect voter rights
A new field of citizen “democracy defenders” is stirring up a new bipartisan movement to defeat election deniers and restore support for democracy.
NEW YORK—Tim Walz has had a vibe shift. So has Kamala Harris. Donald Trump is undergoing one, himself—as is JD Vance, due to his penchant for provocation.
And now, citizenship is getting one, too—a vibe shift that makes it not just cool again to participate in our democracy, but critical—to make sure the November 5th election is not another “too close to call” contest, but that every vote is counted fairly and every voice is heard this election year without disruption by those who still believe (or want others to believe) the false claim that President Joe Biden “stole” the 2020 election.
Fears of disruption in this year’s vote counts are real. The pro-Trump election denier movement is escalating its push to challenge the rights of large numbers of pro-Harris voters to vote this year. Across the eight U.S. swing states in which this year’s race for the White House will be decided, hundreds of new organizations have been scrambling in recent months to prevent another election denial crisis and any new efforts by Donald Trump or any future candidates to challenge the will of the voters.
Fear Factor
A new report by the non-partisan Center for Media and Democracy, a watchdog group focusing on special interests distorting U.S. democracy, says that “election denialism and their voter fraud lies have infiltrated and taken over the Republican apparatus in each of these critical states.” CMD Executive Director Arn Pearson says there are more than 100 election deniers now sitting on election boards in U.S. swing states—plus 50 running for Congress and 81 who are leaders of local Republican organizations. All deniers, CMD says, potentially can influence the way votes are counted and certified. “The potential for creating chaos if the votes are close is enormous,” Pearson says.
In the recent Vance-Walz vice presidential debate, Vance’s refusal to say whether he believes the 2020 election was stolen has only elevated concerns that election deniers could disrupt this year’s vote count, especially in the swing states, where vote margins are expected to be razor-thin. “Being extra vigilant that all votes are counted fairly is one thing, but continuing to spread lies about the outcome of the last election to encourage a drive to challenge some voters unfairly is quite another,” says Ashley Quarcoo, executive director for the two-year-old, non-partisan Election Trust Initiative.
Quarcoo and leaders of other new voter rights groups say that “getting onto the vibe wagon” is needed, to help make more people aware of how important it is to vote this election. “It’s time to focus on signing up more people to vote but also is about fighting a flood of voter suppression efforts by some pro-Trump supporters and those who still believe he won the 2020 election,” says Quarcoo. “We’ve got to be ready for challenges now and in the future, and we don’t see ourselves as fully ready yet.”
The 'Vibe Wagon’
Last month, the Broadway cast of Hamilton recorded new lyrics for a song they called The Election of 2024—which, like the play itself, emphasizes why democracy is important and that every vote counts. Made in partnership with two leading voter rights nonprofits, WhenWeAllVote.org and VoteRiders.org, the song urges the 41 million GenZers now eligible to vote to do so— many for the first time. To the tune of Here Comes the General, actor Jean-Marc Delacruz shouts: “I am not throwing away my vote, folks.”
According to Pew Research, most Americans still feel it’s very important to vote “to be a good citizen and member of society—a fundamental act in a representative democracy”—but most also believe a good citizen “should be willing to take to the streets when significant issues are at stake.”
Not all of the new citizenship groups are working to increase voter registration. Others are helping election officials replace outdated election system technology, to increase security; fund the hiring of more poll workers and professionalize and improve the efficiency of the individual voting systems set up by individual states.
Still other groups are focusing on pumping up legal efforts to monitor the country’s election systems to enable increased accountability.
Bipartisan Efforts
Advocates for ensuring free and fair elections this year include some legal scholars with conservative credentials, including the prominent conservative scholar and former federal judge Michael Luttig and GOP political attorney Benjamin Ginsberg, who recently joined the voter rights movement and are co-leading some of its efforts. [Luttig recently endorsed Kamala Harris for president, saying Trump “sought to overturn an American election which he had lost fair and square, and as a result, vast numbers of Americans today no longer believe in the elections in the United States of America.”]
The SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University and the R Street Institute also are working across party lines to bring together conservative leaders and election administrators across the country to work with voter rights groups and concerned citizens to find common ground. “We need spaces like this for folks on the right to test these issues out and also to have candid conversations with other conservatives,” says Scott Warren, founder of Generation Citizen, a new civics education organization.
Before and after the November 5th election, new citizenship group organizers and legal scholars say they will be especially monitoring the extent of election denier activity in eight key swing states—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Their focus is mostly on the following:
Mass purges. Georgia has seen, by far, the most mass challenges to voter registrations by election denial groups attempting to purge voter rolls in support of Donald Trump’s reelection bid. Using new apps and online tools, volunteers for the election denial group, True the Vote, have been filing hundreds of thousands of challenges to voter registrations nationally. Last month, True the Vote rolled out a new app called VoteAlert, designed for 2020 election deniers to share conspiracy theories and to coordinate their efforts for 2024 to “catch election cheaters.” Wired magazine, in a recent investigation, said True the Vote, in 2022, claimed to have evidence showing “so-called ballot mules” were being used to stuff drop boxes to sway the 2020 election in Joe Biden’s favor but later admitted in court they had no such evidence. True the Vote is again supporting Donald Trump in this year’s election.
Obscure legal theories. Some election deniers are using obscure legal theories to persuade state and local officials in key swing states to challenge voters who don’t agree with them. “Election deniers, the people who still believe Joe Biden stole the presidency from Donald Trump in the last election, are trying to challenge more and more legitimate voter registrations,” says Michael Waldman, the president of the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan law and policy institute in Washington. “We want voter rolls to be up to date. Everyone does. But election deniers are now engaging in new software and AI-assisted purges of certain groups of voters regardless of their registration status,” Waldman adds. “Unbridled, these are new forms of voter suppression.”
Donald Trump’s statements on election results. Trump has said, publicly, on three separate occasions during the past two months, that the only way he could lose the November election is if voter fraud is committed by his opponents. Such statements have been conjuring up new fears among many election officials that Trump is planting new seeds across his MAGA network “to reprise post-election day protests that would again challenge the outcome of a free and fair election,” the Brennan Center’s Waldman says.
Lofty Ideals?
Can this new “voter vibe” movement to increase voter registration, blunt efforts at voter suppression and increase election security make a difference this fall?
The Brennan Center’s Waldman is hopeful. But he says he thinks the election denial movement won’t go away any time soon.
Meagan Wolfe, an election administrator in Wisconsin, says that over the last four years, she has seen “an alarming change in the way some Americans now perceive the voting process.”
“ … No matter how many facts we present or how transparent we are about our work,” Wolfe says, “there is still misinformation that persists” about the fairness of the system and the legitimacy of President Biden’s defeat of Trump in 2020. To be most effective in battling attacks on poll workers by election deniers, she says, “is not asking someone to take someone else’s word for what’s going on, but to actually invite them to go see it for themselves.”
Stay tuned.
NOTE: This story was updated for a final time on October 6th to include new information on bipartisan efforts to preserve voter rights.
Once again, a very timely article with information that is relevant to all who are voting, or to those who question it. Thanks!