Opinion | A weird story out of Colorado shows the dangers U.S. democracy faces - The Washington Post

The 2020 presidential race stress-tested the nation’s democracy, and it held. But what about the next time? Given the persistence and proliferation of the “big lie” that President Biden won the 2020 election through fraud — and the alarming number of Republican office seekers running on the conspiracy theories being flogged by former president Donald Trump — the country’s institutions may be weaker in coming election cycles, even as the pressure mounts on GOP officials involved in counting or certifying votes to find “fraud.”

A bizarre drama unfolding on the western edge of Colorado illustrates the danger. Election machine passwords from Mesa County, Colo., mysteriously appeared earlier this month on a right-wing conspiracy website. Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold (D) accused Tina M. Peters (R), Mesa County’s elected clerk and recorder, of abetting this security breach — ironically, in an apparent attempt to find evidence of election malfeasance. Ms. Griswold alleged that Ms. Peters smuggled an unauthorized man into a sensitive election software update session, where the passwords were apparently recorded, and she told her staff to switch off security cameras trained on the voting machines. Ms. Griswold added Monday that Ms. Peters, the unauthorized man and one other person also accessed a secure area in the dead of night, making copies of an election computer hard drive.

Ms. Peters’s office did not return a request for comment, but the county clerk’s presence at the election conspiracy-fest that MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell held in South Dakota last week does not help her credibility. There she accused Ms. Griswold of attempting to “control the way you vote” and implied that the secretary of state and the election machine maker Dominion Voting Systems conducted unspecified wrongdoing in a “raid” of the clerk’s office. Ms. Griswold counters that investigators from her own office were “accompanied at all times by officials from Mesa County” as they inspected the county’s equipment, which the secretary of state has decertified for future use. Along with the secretary of state’s office, the Mesa County district attorney and the FBI are also probing the matter.

This weird episode appears to pose no ongoing threat to voting security in Mesa County. But it suggests the lengths to which those devoted to the Trumpist lie will go — and the sabotage they could do if they are in positions of responsibility. Across the country, conspiracist candidates are running for election administration jobs, from secretary of state on down. Many Republican gubernatorial and state legislative candidates have also embraced the effort to undermine the credibility of the country’s democratic system by falsely claiming the 2020 presidential contest was rigged. Meanwhile, election workers simply doing their jobs are regularly facing threats to their safety, forcing them to wonder whether an unglamorous administrative job is worth the risk.

Even amid the tribalism of today’s politics, there are still tribunes of hope and sanity. Matt Crane, the Republican head of the Colorado County Clerks Association, condemned the Mesa breach. “There is nothing heroic or honorable about what happened in Mesa County,” he said. “As election officials, we have to be the grownups in the room.” U.S. democracy will no doubt depend once again on public-spirited officials such as Mr. Crane doing their duty against the unrelenting pressure of Mr. Trump and his acolytes.

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August 21, 2021 at 07:00PM
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Opinion | A weird story out of Colorado shows the dangers U.S. democracy faces - The Washington Post
"Opinion" - Google News
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