S1: Daniel Schultz, is he a political guy? Like, is he a professor of political science? Is he an interested regular guy with a different job? Like, who is that guy? At least I did back in the late sixties, in seventh grade, in social studies, in civics class, essentially. It’s it’s real simple, and most people learn this. He just kind of plucked it out of obscurity and called up this guy who’s been saying the same thing for more than a decade, and no one ever listened until Bannon gave him the platform. So Bannon didn’t come up with this himself. And you know, sometimes this was as confusing to the county chair as anyone else. We’ve never seen anything like this before. But overwhelmingly, for the most part, the answer was yes. So can we substantiate are there? Is there a sudden surge of people wanting to be precinct chairs? And we focused on those competitive states and electorally significant counties because we couldn’t survey all 3000 counties in the US and not everywhere we checked. You know, much less is interested in being one. And we just asked them, you know, hey, all of a sudden, are you getting a ton of people calling you asking to be precinct chairs? Because like, that’s a little weird, right? You know, the average voter has never heard of a precinct chair. S2: So the way that we reported this was, we called around to the the county party chair in important counties in these competitive states. S1: When did you realize that this sort of conservative media ecosystem was involved? Like, when did you start hearing people say to you like, Oh, well, I heard about this on Bannon’s podcast. And so you could actually see how the Republican line on the chart just shoots up and the Democratic line is flat. There actually was official data for both parties. And like in Maricopa County, Arizona, you know, which is more than half the state’s population. And one of the ways that we tried to check ourselves, you know, is this really a thing was looking at the Democrats as sort of a control group, so we could compare past increases in Republican precinct officers, and we could also see if there’s anything similar going on on the Democratic side. And the out of the 65 counties, forty one of them said they had seen an increase. And we asked them how many new precinct officers or whatever they call it they’ve had since February, which is when Bannon started promoting this and total in aggregate, it was more than 8500. Florida, Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, the states that decide elections. So the ones you’re used to hearing about on election night. S2: So we contacted the local party officials in 65 counties in the most electorally significant states. Can you just lay out the basics of exactly what you found when you called those people? Because it’s dramatic, you found a big increase. S1: I know that ProPublica contacted GOP leaders in 65 key counties. We need to send the county clerk really long lists of really hardcore Republicans so that we can make sure we’ve got people in the precincts running the polls who are looking out for fraud. County chairs are going, Wait a minute, we need to stack. They were like, Well, you know, on Election Day, it’s more important to us to have our volunteers out doing other things. And in the past, this really hasn’t been an issue because the party’s like basically didn’t bother. But the poll workers, who are technically called election inspectors, are nominated by the county party, and the law says that the county clerk has to hire the party’s poll workers if they provide them. And so to give you some specific examples in Wisconsin, the election is run by the county clerk.
And every state’s a little different, but that’s the basic idea.
S2: So overall, the the key thing to understand is that the county party, the local party officials, have direct influence on the election administration through these like formal mechanisms.
0 kommentar(er)
