Pillars in The New York Times
The New York Times Magazine‘s Jim Rutenberg published a piece, “The Army of Election Officials Ready to Reject the Vote.” In it he profiles Pillars’ efforts to bolster community support and trust in elections and the officials responsible for counting votes:
One of the outside groups working to cool things down, called Pillars of the Community, was founded by two veteran partisan election lawyers, Bob Bauer, an outside lawyer for Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign, and Ben Ginsberg, the lead counsel for Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign and George W. Bush’s 2004 and 2000 campaigns. They make a striking pair: In 2000, they were on opposite sides of the recount battle in Florida, which in its final phase before the Supreme Court became a fight over what Florida was going to submit as its certified result and whether it would do so on time. Ginsberg moved away from his party in 2020, after 18 Republican attorneys general asked the Supreme Court to throw out swing-state vote results over flimsy fraud allegations. “That was the case that epitomized to me the complete abandonment of principle for the ends of political power,’’ he says.
For the past few months, they have been traveling through major swing states convening discussions between election administrators and the “pillars” — Bauer and Ginsberg’s word for carefully recruited community members across the political spectrum. The idea was that if they could show those with concerns about the election system how it really worked, and let them hear from administrators about their own challenges and how they did their jobs, the pillars would vouch for the administrators if and when things went awry. In October, they invited me to observe a Zoom session with election administrators from Georgia and several of their community pillars.
At the start of the meeting, the election administrators aired deep concern over a late procedural change handed down by Georgia’s state election board, requiring live hand-count reviews of machine counts. There was consensus that if the rule survived a court challenge, it would strain budgets — “a lot of unplanned pay,’’ as one administrator put it — while adding more stressful work to overburdened staffs, for a process that was redundant; various checks were built into the system already. Raffensperger and Gov. Brian Kemp, both Republicans, had repeatedly said the state’s elections were secure. In the name of efficiency, the state board was actually working to make the local election offices less efficient.
It was certification, though, that was now the main concern for clerks in the Zoom meeting. They feared that Thorne’s certification rules and Julie Adams’s lawsuit could make it easier to cast that vote. Raffensperger’s chief operating officer, Gabriel Sterling, said his office had plans in place should that occur — in particular, they would quickly seek a writ of mandamus, a judicial order that would compel board members to certify by a certain date or face contempt-of-court charges. The threat of prosecution could be a powerful deterrent.
But another pillar on the call, Scot Turner, a former Republican state legislator, was far less certain. “I wish I shared your optimism, Gabe,’’ he said. Turner ran a group called Eternal Vigilance Action that was bringing its own suit against the state board for a number of its recent moves, including Thorne’s rule and the one requiring the Election Day hand audits, arguing that the board was overstepping its legal authority. No matter what the courts decided, he said, the state board had now created “the illusion of discretion’’ that angry citizens will expect them to exercise should Trump claim fraud caused him to lose. “You will have locals under extraordinary pressure, peer pressure, from people that they live near telling them, ‘How could you possibly certify this election?’”
Ginsberg was most worried about a scenario like one he shared with the writers of “Succession,’’ for which he served as a script consultant. It envisioned an arson attack on a ballot-counting center on election night, leaving the county in question unable to certify complete results. What then? Bauer noted another eventuality: Administrators could try to drag things out with prolonged court fights, pushing the certification process past the Dec. 11 Electoral College deadline, but he thought it was unlikely. In his view, even if it took court intervention, the deadlines would be met, and all states would ultimately have their certifications done in time for the Electoral College vote on Dec. 17.
Georgia’s administrators began to get clarity in mid-October, when Judge McBurney, who was considering Adams’s suit and the new board rules around certification, ruled that board members did have to certify on time, the entire result, and that voting no was not an option. A day later, the judge in the Eternal Vigilance Action lawsuit ruled that the board had indeed overstepped its authority in approving Thorne’s rule on certification and hand-count reviews. The Republican National Committee appealed, but the state’s Supreme Court denied it on Oct. 22.