Pillars in Bloomberg Opinion

Bloomberg Opinion columnist Francis Wilkinson covered Pillars’ efforts to bolster confidence in elections:

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 Bob Bauer, former President Barack Obama’s White House counsel and Ginsberg’s frequent foe over their long careers, 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 is 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.

Read the piece here (paywalled).