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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. We're in our 10-part series on democracy in peril as an issue in the midterm elections. As many of you know, this is our seventh day out of the 10, and our topic today is terrorist threats to election workers themselves and attempts to physically intimidate people from voting in person or as they drop their ballots in drop boxes or attempts to sabotage the election procedures. We'll also touch again today because it's related on the possibility that election results won't be certified in some places if Democrats win. This is especially salient in some key swing states where Republicans control the legislature.

Our guest today is Washington Post columnist, Dana Milbank, whose latest column focuses on one state in particular as one to watch for the potential of some of these problems. The column is called In Nevada, Election Deniers Prepare to Sabotage the Midterms. He also has a book out now called The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five-Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party. Dana, always good to have you on the show. Welcome back to WNYC.

Dana Milbank: Thanks, Brian. Great to be with you.

Brian Lehrer: Starting right in on the threats to poll workers and other election officials, your column says the election supervisors in 10 of Nevada's 17 counties have already quit, been forced out, or announced departures, and lower-level election workers have quit in the face of consistent abuse. Who's leaving those jobs and why?

Dana Milbank: A lot of people are leaving those jobs as you indicated, and if you look at the state level in Nevada of the 12 state election workers, 8 have departed. It gives you a real sense of what's happening there. A lot of this is because they just don't want the grief anymore. They're getting a lot of abuse from the community. For example, the top election official in Washoe County, which is Reno, Nevada, quit. She was being harassed. She felt her family was in danger, being accused of fraud, being accused of being an addict. The whole campaign was led against her by a wealthy fellow out there in Reno.

We're seeing this happen across the board, and in many cases, the officials are being replaced by election deniers in one county in Nevada. The new top election official actually was one of the fake electors for Donald Trump in 2020. We're seeing them assault the whole system of voting, discrediting machines, saying, "We're going to hand count. We're going to do paper balloting without procedures and methods in place to do this." We're looking at a whole lot of chaos, a whole lot of delay, the potential not to meet the statutory deadlines, which means elections may not get certified, which could throw everything to the courts and the state legislature. We don't know for sure what will happen, but it sure looks like a recipe for a big mess.

Brian Lehrer: Let me follow up on that Reno case you just cited. You wrote in your article it's an antisemitic conspiracy theorist, and you just said that led a harassment campaign against the registrar of voters accusing her of treason among other things and she quit for her family's safety. Do you know if that election registrar was Jewish? Was that part of it?

Dana Milbank: No. I think the antisemitic piece was just a part of the guy's overall shtick, but no. Maybe there's plenty of hatred directed behind what he has done, but it was a more general election denial thing. Brian, this has real consequences. Now, what's happened in Washoe County since then, they lost their top election official, they have lost other officials. The county sends out a sample ballot. It has four separate errors on it. It has a contest in there that's not supposed to be in there. Somebody's name is left off. Something is misspelled. This is what happens when you--

It's in this case not deliberate sabotage, but when you've lost the people who are competent at running elections, there's going to be a mess. I didn't hear a lot of people saying they expect that all of this is about inducing fraud in the election. It's about inducing chaos into the election, which will instill doubts in the electorate about the outcome.

Brian Lehrer: To stay on the physical threats to the poll workers, to put that in national context, that Nevada example that you gave, there's been a lot of reporting by now of threats to poll workers in different states. For example, an article on Reuters last October was called Trump-inspired Death Threats Are Terrorizing Election Workers. It starts with this. "Election officials and their families are living with threats of hanging, firing squads, torture, and bomb blasts. Interviews and documents reveal the campaign of fear sparked by Trump's voter fraud falsehoods threatens the US electoral system."

Then it gives the first example in the piece. "Late on the night of April 24th, the wife of Georgia's top election official got a chilling text message. 'You and your family will be killed very slowly.'" My question for you is, do you agree with the premise of that Reuter story that these threats of violence against poll workers threaten not just them but the US electoral system?

Dana Milbank: Yes. That's exactly the point, it's that it drives these people to quit, to want to get out, and you can hardly blame them. Why put yourself through such abuse? You can work in the private sector, take your skills somewhere else, but it leaves the rest of us in a whole mess here because who are they being replaced with? At best, they're being replaced with people who are not as competent, not as experienced at doing this. At worse, they're being replaced by people who are themselves election deniers or interested in discrediting the election.

I went to Nye County, Nevada. The clerk who had been in charge of elections there for more than two decades was also a Republican like the Secretary of State in Nevada, a Republican, stood by the results of the election and was just hounded and hounded and finally said, "I'm out of here," and sure enough replaced by a guy who has denied the results of the 2020 election, has talked about all kinds of conspiracy theories involving George Soros and others and is running this secretive process that he's still putting it together on the fly even though early voting has already begun.

Brian Lehrer: I want to play one minute from the January 6th committee hearings, which I think is a stretch of the hearings that's worth keeping in mind as early voting has already begun in many states. As we approach election day itself, it was the chilling story of two election workers in Georgia, a mother and a daughter, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, who were falsely accused of all kinds of shenanigans and then wound up getting threats themselves. This is a one-minute clip of Shaye Moss with Congressman Adam Schiff.

Shaye Moss: I went to that icon, and it was just a lot of horrible things there.

Adam Schiff: Those horrible things, did they include threats?

Shaye Moss: Yes, a lot of threats, wishing death upon me, telling me that I'll be in jail with my mother, and saying things like, "Be glad it's 2020 and not 1920."

Adam Schiff: Were a lot of these threats and vile comments racist in nature?

Shaye Moss: A lot of them were racist, a lot of them were just hateful. Yes, sir.

Adam Schiff: In one of the videos we just watched, Mr. Giuliani accused you and your mother of passing some sort of USB drive to each other. What was your mom actually handing you on that video?

Shaye Moss: A ginger mint.

Brian Lehrer: Ginger mint. Who can forget that ginger mint moment from the January 6th hearing? It's a chilling example of why a lot of people like the Freeman-Moss family may not volunteer or take paid jobs even to be poll workers this year, right?

Dana Milbank: That's right, and that's what I was finding in Nevada too, that they were having some difficulty getting enough volunteers to do this. We've heard in Michigan there's a concern about rogue poll workers that the people volunteering to do this or perhaps even being hired as staff to do this but who are interested in sabotaging the election. In Nevada, the Republican nominee for Secretary of State who will oversee the election, this guy Jim Marchant, he is part of a group nationally of election deniers trying to gain office. At the county I visited in Nevada, he was offering to bring in people from his group to run the election.

It's like, in place of the ordinary people who would be volunteering or would be hired to run elections, he's willing to bring in people from his group which is devoted to election denial to run the election. You can see the loss of the long-time staff to threats like that that you just played and the potential replacement by people who may not have free and fair elections as their top priority. You can see why that's concerning.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, if you're just joining us, we're talking to Washington Post columnist, Dana Milbank, about physical threats to election workers and threats to the election procedures in this election cycle, which might sow chaos from election day on forward. I see you also went to a place called Pahrump, Nevada, and staked out a county clerk named Mark Kampf, who you describe as an election conspiracy theorist, who is both running for office and administering the election. Tell us about your encounter with Mr. Kampf from Pahrump.

Dana Milbank: [chuckles] There's a lot of wordplay to be heard there, but it's quite a serious matter. This is the one who replaced the county clerk, the election overseer, a Republican who had been there for more than a couple of decades. He was going to run to replace her anyway and then was just appointed by the County Commission. This is what led the clerk to quit in the first place, the County Commission basically agreeing with Jim Marchant, the Secretary of State candidate I mentioned, to say, "Yes, let's get rid of the voting machines. Let's move towards all paper ballots and all hand counting."

It's not illegal for him to be on the ballot in the election that he administers. That is his job. The real question there is how-- When I staked him out because he wasn't willing to return my emails or my calls, he was still just last week making changes to his election procedures, even as early voting began. How can you conduct an election when you're changing the rules on the fly? That's the real concern. It's not so much that he will put his thumb on the scale in some way but that through incompetence or a lack of manpower, they just won't be able to get the counting done in time.

County Commission, therefore, may not be able to certify the vote or will refuse to certify the vote. Under Nevada law, if that sort of thing happens, the courts can't resolve it. It actually goes to the state legislature. They can just decide to throw out the vote and appoint whoever they want to the state assembly or even in the governor's race. Now, hopefully, it won't come to that sort of thing, but when you welcome such chaos into the process, when you're basically making up the rules as you go along, you're certainly asking for trouble.

Brian Lehrer: You report four counties will have paper ballots counted by hand in Nevada. Is that so threatening? Maybe listeners are thinking, "Weren't elections run that way until the fairly modern era of voting machine technology, and wouldn't that be the gold standard voting by paper ballot and counting those ballots by hand?"

Dana Milbank: There's nothing wrong necessarily with paper balloting, they definitely have higher error rates. Of course, before we had electronic voting machines, we had other types of voting machines. As I said, they're in a way taking us back to the 19th century. We definitely know that it would be a lot slower, and we definitely know it's prone to higher error rates, but look, if you had a larger amount of resources being poured into the election, you had a large force of trained volunteers and staff who were going to handle the counting, yes, you could do that. These four counties are doing it to varying degrees.

They're not all going as far as Nye County is going. One of the counties is tiny. They're only going to get a couple of hundred votes, so it's not really that hard to count things by hand there, but if you've got a large county and you don't have procedures and trained staff in place, that's where the chaos comes. It's not inherently from the problem of paper balloting, although that does have some problems. It's doing it without the necessary procedures and training in place so that you actually may not be able to get it done.

Brian Lehrer: To put this back into national context, you quote an official of a voting rights group who sees Nevada as part of a proliferation nationwide of efforts to create chaos in our election system in the service of undermining confidence in the election results. I think that's the real takeaway you're trying to get at in your piece. Really interesting because they claim to be making these revisions in pursuit of trust in elections like with paper ballots, but you're saying the goal is to create chaos, and you even use the word sabotage as the goal in terms of the trust that people have in the election results. Can you talk about that a little bit more?

Dana Milbank: Yes. Even if we don't impute motive and say it's their goal, it's certainly going to be the result of creating chaos. The clerk in Nye County we just talked about, Mark Kampf, he said the whole purpose of switching to paper balloting and hand counting is to introduce transparency into the process. There's no transparency in the process now because the procedures keep getting written and rewritten. He couldn't do a run-through of the voting systems with me because they simply weren't ready to do it. He couldn't even talk to me about it and he said he wants to be transparent.

Maybe he does, but this is about as opaque as you can get. It is this sort of death by a thousand cuts around the country, mass challenges to individual voter registrations. We've particularly seen that in Georgia the potential for people carrying guns to polling places, the use of election police forces like Ron DeSantis has in Florida that intimidate voters. We've already seen a round of arrests just before the primaries, the potential for rogue poll workers, and then all around the country the loss of skilled election workers replaced by people who either don't know what they're doing or do not have free and fair elections at heart.

Brian Lehrer: To bring it full circle, to finish up full circle to where we started on the physical threats to election workers, this comes from NBC News, which reports that threats to election workers are considered such a real possibility in Georgia that they've unveiled a dedicated text message number for election workers to report potential danger. It says the system will allow poll workers to report threats by text message to a five-digit number that will notify law enforcement and county election officials. I hope that's enough to get enough workers to do the job, but it's an example of why there might not be enough poll workers if that's the environment that they have to work in.

Dana Milbank: Yes. When you introduce violence and intimidation into a democratic society that's based on the rule of law, this is the sort of thing that happens. You don't actually need widespread violence to cause dramatic effects and deteriorate our ability to follow the rule of law.

Brian Lehrer: Washington Post columnist, Dana Milbank, his recent book is called The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five-Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party, and his recent column that we've been discussing is called In Nevada, Election Deniers Prepare to Sabotage the Midterms. Dana, thanks always.

Dana Milbank: Thanks very much, Brian.

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