Francis Wilkinson: Can faith in elections be restored? It's worth trying

Former Representative Liz Cheney campaigned with Vice President Kamala Harris this week as Harris seeks to win non-MAGA Republican votes in battleground states. Cheney has put herself on the line for democracy perhaps more than any Republican in America. But she’s not alone.

Days before the 2020 election, longtime Republican election lawyer Benjamin Ginsberg took to the Washington Post to blast his party’s presidential nominee for spreading lies about voter fraud and angling to suppress Democratic votes. “Proof of systemic fraud has become the Loch Ness Monster of the Republican Party,” wrote Ginsberg, whose career up to that point had been every bit as partisan as Cheney’s once was. “People have spent a lot of time looking for it, but it doesn’t exist.”

Ginsberg couldn’t have known then that the worst was yet to come. The fallout from Trump’s perfidy, including his attempted overthrow of the constitutional order, continues to rend the nation’s civic, political and moral fabric. While Cheney is out on the hustings, Ginsberg is busy doing his own repair work. He and Democratic election lawyer Robert Bauer, former President Barack Obama’s White House counsel and Ginsberg’s frequent foe, have joined forces to try to bolster faith in elections.

Their group, Pillars of the Community, connects civic leaders with election officials in electoral battlegrounds. “Our goal is to get community leaders from across the political spectrum together with election officials, to give those leaders, who might have questions or be skeptical about the election system, the chance to really kick the tires,” Ginsberg said in a telephone interview. “Faith leaders, veterans, first responders, business leaders, labor leaders are generally the group.”

In September, Pillars of the Community held an “Ask Me Anything” town hall in Arizona where community members could pose questions to Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, a Republican, who has been vilified by Trumpists for having confirmed the integrity of Arizona’s 2020 election.

A similar event in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, earlier this month brought officials including Philadelphia City Commissioner Seth Bluestein, another Republican, to the middle of the state. An October CBS News/YouGov poll found that 47% of Trump voters believe — or at least say they do — that there will be widespread fraud in the 2024 election. According to the poll, the two areas where Republicans most expect fraud are “major cities and urban areas” and “in minority communities” — in other words, places like Philadelphia.

“You know the allegation in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and Georgia is going to be that the big urban jurisdiction is the problem,” Ginsberg said.

Bluestein told me that he spent time in Harrisburg “explaining how the process works so that the people at the event can have confidence that the elections are being run fairly and they have the information they need to communicate that to their constituencies. There were a lot of questions about the ballot-canvassing process, about the security around drop boxes and overall preparation for the election,” Bluestein said. “They definitely asked good questions that I think they legitimately wanted to hear the answers to. Whether their constituencies will accept that or not, I'm not sure.”

The Rev. Bradley Mattson, rector of Hope Episcopal Church in Manheim, Pennsylvania, was an attendee. “These officials, representing both urban centers and central Pennsylvania, devoted hours to answering questions from local community leaders about the safeguards in our election system,” he wrote in a local paper, adding that he is convinced that Pennsylvania elections are fair.

Such drops of truth compete with Trump’s ocean of lies, of course. Trump’s demagogy is backed by an extensive propaganda infrastructure stretching from Fox News, which paid a $787.5 million settlement for spreading lies about Dominion Voting Systems and the 2020 election, to right-wing podcasts and Russian disinformation. Yet failing to confront the lies amounts to democratic surrender.

Ginsberg hasn’t given up on his co-partisans — not even MAGA. On Jan. 6, he was in a Washington television studio overlooking the city. He could see police reinforcements headed to the US Capitol. “During that whole period, there was a constant flow of MAGA red-bedecked people not going into the Capitol but walking away from it,” Ginsberg recalled. “It’s those people who we hope will listen to what we're saying and what our pillars are saying. That’s the target audience on the right.”

_____

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Francis Wilkinson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering US politics and policy. Previously, he was executive editor for the Week and a writer for Rolling Stone.

_____