Questioning Election Integrity Doesn’t Equal ‘Election Denial’

If Americans have questions and concerns about how our elections are administered and how ballots are tabulated, does that make them “election deniers,” conspiracy theorists, threats to democracy?

The Wall Street Journal seems to think so. In a long news report published over the weekend headlined, “‘It Feels Very Dystopian.’ Republican County Officials Brace for Election Deniers—Again,” the Journal repeatedly characterized those who think the 2020 election was stolen, rigged, or less-than-secure as “election deniers,” and stopped just short of calling them domestic terrorists. 

The piece is framed as a disturbing look at the growing threats facing local election officials from “election deniers” — an asinine epithet — as we approach November 5: “Four years of baseless allegations of election fraud have created an atmosphere of fear and intimidation among election officials from Atlanta to rural Washington state, transforming the way workers in many parts of the country are approaching the most fundamental of civic duties.”

Election officials, workers, and even volunteers have been forced to take extraordinary measures to protect themselves, we’re told. Active shooter drills, barricading exercises, trauma kits, bulletproof glass, and bulletproof vests have all become commonplace in election offices across the country. Scary stuff.

And it’s all Trump’s fault, apparently. After a series of legal challenges to the 2020 results  were dismissed, Trump “has continued to assert the election was rigged,” the article reads, eliding the important difference between stealing and rigging an election.

The former would mean falsely cast or illegally changed ballots, which is difficult to prove took place on a scale large enough to change the outcome of the election, while latter would mean the sort of things that really did happen in 2020: last-minute changes to how absentee ballots are processed and counted, widespread social media censorship by Big Tech in collusion with corporate media, and the flooding erstwhile nonpartisan local election offices with hundreds of millions in “Zuckbucks” to get out the vote in heavily Democrat areas. And that’s just to name a few of the ways Democrats rigged the last election.

The Journal isn’t interested in any of these things and doesn’t mention them in its report. Instead, it presents all the fears and safety concerns from poll workers and election officials as justified. It also presents threats of violence as representative of Trump voters generally, even though it only mentions three cases where individuals have been prosecuted for making threats against election officials.

The entire frame and premise of the piece is designed to gaslight readers into thinking that election officials nationwide are being hunted by rabid Trump supporters who have been hoodwinked into believing an outlandish conspiracy theory about the 2020 election.

That’s too bad, because there are plenty of election-related stories the Journal could have put its considerable resources into reporting — stories about real problems with the administration of our elections and the people and organizations trying to rig the upcoming presidential election against Trump and Republicans.

Here at The Federalist, we’ve been doing actual reporting on election integrity for the past year, telling stories that outlets like the Journal should be reporting. For example, last week my colleague Matt Kittle broke a story about Democrat Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul’s Department of Justice conducting a raid on the office of conservative Wausau Mayor Doug Diny in connection with Diny’s removal of an unsecured absentee ballot drop box ahead of Wisconsin’s pre-Election Day voting.

The widespread use of absentee ballot drop boxes were a big concern in the last presidential election because they are a fundamentally less secure form of voting. Their widespread adoption in 2020, and the attempt by Democrats to make them a regular feature of our elections, should concern anyone who cares about election integrity.

As Kittle reported last month, Diny removed the absentee ballot box outside city hall because it wasn’t secure. The city clerk disagreed and decided to bring it back without getting approval from the city council, and then reported it to the local Democrat district attorney, who opened an investigation into Diny. This local story matters because Wisconsin is a key swing state, where the margin of victory for either candidate will likely be extremely close. Unsecured ballot drop boxes are exactly the kind of thing you don’t want to have in a state like Wisconsin.  

Yet they were everywhere in 2020. Of the state’s 72 counties, 66 had absentee ballot drop boxes. Prior to that election, such boxes had been rare in Wisconsin, as they had been in most states. Back in July, the Wisconsin Supreme Court in a 4-3 ruling reversed a 2022 decision that had declared the widespread use of absentee ballot drop boxes illegal under state law. Local communities, the Court said, could decide for themselves whether or not to use drop boxes and where to place them. The vast majority of counties, it turns out, are opting out of their use, as ballot drop boxes are widely seen as unsecure. 

And now, the state’s attorney general is conducting lawfare against a conservative mayor for trying to ensure there are no unsecured drop boxes in his community ahead of the election. 

There are tons of stories like this playing out across the country right now that paint a very different picture of the election, not one of rabid election deniers threatening local officials, but of Democrat attorneys general, donors, and activists trying to rig the election in their favor in a thousand different ways. But corporate media have been noticeably uninterested in these stories, preferring instead to advance a false narrative, as the Journal did, about election officials as beleaguered heroes enduring threats from Trump-worshipping conspiracy theorists and putting their physical safety on the line for the sake of our democracy.

The reality is of course much less sensational than all that, but quite a bit more dangerous for our democracy. The 2020 election exposed serious flaws in how elections are administered in this country, and pretending that anyone who asks questions or doubts the integrity of our elections is an “election denier” — or worse, a domestic terrorist — is itself one of the tactics Democrats used to rig the 2020 election.

The truth is, every American should want our elections to be above-board, transparent, and honest. We shouldn’t have any unsecured drop boxes anywhere. We shouldn’t have mass mailing of absentee ballots or allow for widespread ballot-harvesting, as was done in 2020 (and is happening again this time in some areas). We should be able to get election results on Election Day, like we used to in this country and like every other developed country in the world does. Demonizing those who point out the problems with our post-Covid election administration won’t restore public confidence in our elections.

The only thing that will do that is to have clean, fair, secure elections again. 

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.