In Pennsylvania, the Big Lie Is Spreading Its Roots

In Pennsylvania, the Big Lie Is Spreading Its Roots

As election-deniers become more involved in local politics, they are bringing with them the propaganda and conspiracies of national politics. 

By Francis Wilkinson

30 October 2022 at 7:00 pm GMT+9

As the elderly woman hesitated at the top of the auditorium steps, a college student in a blue suit and pink tie materialized, lending his arm and guiding her to a seat. The woman’s slightly less hobbled friend beamed at the display of youthful gallantry. It was not the only Norman Rockwell moment I observed at a debate earlier this month in Gettysburg, Pa., that great rampart of American republicanism.

Three candidates for the Pennsylvania House of Representatives — an incumbent Republican, a Democratic challenger and a libertarian outsider — responded to questions posed by a local worthy. The politicians were mostly polite. The crowd of about 200, largely older and overwhelmingly White, was mostly respectful. The evening seemed to provide a respite from the tortured politics of 2022.

Until the poison was released. About midway through the hourlong debate, after local taxes and infrastructure and education received their two cents, the moderator posed the question that doubles as an open wound: “Do you think the 2020 election was free and fair?”

Representative Dan Moul, who has been in office since 2007, gave an answer perfectly designed to undermine democratic faith. “Who’s ever going to know?” he replied.

Describing former President Donald Trump’s crowd of 30,000 at a 2020 rally in nearby Lancaster, Moul said it seemed improbable that such a popular figure could have lost the election. (Almost 7 million votes were cast in Pennsylvania in 2020; Joe Biden received about 80,000 more than Trump.)

U.S. President Donald Trump's rally in Pennsylvania

A Trump campaign rally at Lancaster Airport

Photographer: Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Moul also reported having seen “government footage from cameras mounted on government buildings with people walking up to drop boxes at 3, 4 o’clock in the morning with handfuls of ballots and shoving them in.”

After the debate, I asked Moul where I could obtain the government footage he had described. He said he didn’t have access to it. He directed me instead to watch a thoroughly debunked conspiracy movie produced by a professional propagandist.

Trump-inspired election denial is, of course, part of the national landscape. Moul’s claims echo not only Trump but the commonwealth’s top Republican leaders, including gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano, a White Christian nationalist who was at the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Former President Trump Holds Rally In Support Of 'Pennsylvania Trump Ticket'

Doug Mastriano, Republican gubernatorial candidate for Pennsylvania

Photographer: Bloomberg

Like the contours of the Gettysburg debate, with its customary format and folkways, the shape of local politics in 2022 is eminently familiar: Meetings are convened. Petitions are presented. Campaigns are waged. Votes are taken. It might be easy to convince yourself that nothing has gone awry.

But the content of local government has grown ugly and dangerous. In small towns and counties across Pennsylvania, the pernicious shockwaves of 2020 are not a distant phenomenon. Local officials, many of them Republicans trying to do an honest job, are increasingly squeezed between the lies of Republican elites and relentless attacks from local activists who treat the lies as to-do lists.

The resulting pressure, directed at local targets with no easy means of escape, is immense. “These people just contrived one thing after another,” Gary Eichelberger, a Republican commissioner in Cumberland County, told me when I first spoke to him not long after the Jan. 6 attack.

Cumberland is in the south-central part of the state’s geographic “T” (basically all the area outside metro Philadelphia and Pittsburgh). Pennsylvania Republicans have dominated the T for generations. It has proved to be fertile ground for conspiracy theorists. “They started rumors that there were bags of ballots coming in, phony ballots that were coming in, and they had people observing our building and circling our building,” Eichelberger said. “They were chasing our mailman.”

“They started rumors that there were bags of ballots coming in… They were chasing our mailman.”

The delusions proved too profitable to abandon. “They’re just going to keep coming back and coming back,” Eichelberger told me last month. “At least for the ringleaders, it does not appear that they’re really seeking facts and answers. They’re trying to keep this ball rolling.”

MAGA activists, spurred by a state group called Audit the Vote PA — whose “audit” is riddled with errors, according to one investigative report — are “pressure-testing these folks to see how far they can push them,” said Kyle Miller of Protect Democracy, a nonprofit group founded after the 2016 election.

Former President Trump Holds Campaign Rally In Pennsylvania To Support Local Candidates

At a Trump rally in Wilkes-Barre, Sept 3. 

Photographer: Spencer Platt/Getty Images North America

Elected officials who prove uncooperative face accusations of corruption and the prospect of MAGA challenges for local offices, with control of local election infrastructure included in the spoils. In the meantime, MAGA activists spread rumors and demand actions to confirm voter fraud that no credible investigators can detect. They overwhelm local governments with information requests about suspicious ballots, phantom voters and compromised election machinery.

Forrest Lehman, election director of Lycoming County, said he has spent hundreds of hours responding to conspiracy-fueled demands for information. By his calculation, Pennsylvania has lost some 600 years of collective election administration experience in the past couple years, with election directors or deputy directors resigning in more than half of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties.

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In Luzerne County, where Trump beat Joe Biden 57% to 42% in 2020, the county election director left in August. He had lasted eight months in the job, which is two months longer than his predecessor made it.

Threats of violence are common. “I’ve become more of a recluse,” Melanie Ostrander, the election director of Washington County, south of Pittsburgh, told me. “You kind of worry when you go out.”

Small-town government is under siege. And until elections produce the kind of results that MAGA activists approve of, it will likely remain so. Audit the Vote PA is training poll watchers to supervise Pennsylvania election sites. Mastriano has proposed requiring every Pennsylvania voter to re-register, a move that would make it easier to exclude those inclined to vote incorrectly. If elected governor, he has promised to appoint a secretary of state who will manage elections from a reliably MAGA perspective. Republicans in the Pennsylvania General Assembly are ginning up a constitutional amendment to tighten restrictions on voting.

Of course, if Mastriano or Trump-endorsed Senate candidate Mehmet Oz lose their elections in November — Mastriano has trailed consistently in polls while Oz appears to be in a tight race — the result will be further proof that the system is corrupt and needs to be overthrown. Rolling Stone reports that “Trump and other Republicans are already preparing to wage a legal and activist crusade against the ‘election integrity’ of Democratic strongholds,” including Philadelphia. Public officials who refuse to join the MAGA chorus will be subject to renewed attacks.

Former President Trump Holds Rally In Support Of 'Pennsylvania Trump Ticket'

Trump and Oz at a rally.

Photographer: Bloomberg

In testimony last year before the US Senate, former Philadelphia City Commissioner Al Schmidt, a Republican, described the symbiosis between elites and activists as a “vicious cycle” in which elected officials lie to their constituents and the deceived constituents then demand action “to fix something that never happened to begin with. Then elected officials use those demands as an excuse to do something.”

Pennsylvania was once a bastion of Republican moderates such as governors Dick Thornburgh and Tom Ridge. But the party belongs to the likes of Trump and Mastriano now. The consequences of that transformation threaten to warp the party, the commonwealth and the nation for years to come.

***

The agenda for the Oct. 20 county commissioners’ meeting in Washington County was neither surprising nor contentious. Prayer, pledge of allegiance, approval of meeting minutes. There were commendations for a couple of sheriff deputies (punctuated by jokes about a remarkably unruly law-enforcement canine in attendance). Then followed a series of rapid-fire unanimous votes by the two Republicans and one Democrat approving contracts for software upgrades, real-estate appraisals, disability insurance and the like. The commission, led by Republican Diana Irey Vaughan, moved efficiently.

As at every meeting, time was set aside for public comments. The citizens who rose to speak, however, were markedly less interested in county affairs. One way or another, public comments were all variations on the theme of Donald Trump, who won 61% of the vote in Washington County in 2020.

A woman “respectfully” requested that the commissioners instruct the elections director to “segregate any undated mail ballots” for next month’s election. (The validity of undated ballots is a source of bubbling conflict in the state; the county had already decided to segregate those ballots from others, pending clearer legal guidance.) That was as close to a local issue as the public comments produced.

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A man rose to criticize false claims of election fraud, then segued into a tally of close Trump associates who have been convicted of crimes. A woman delivered an impressively learned sermon on the nature and history of fascism. Another woman, articulate and forceful, lambasted the commissioners for failing to open up voting machines to public inspection, and for generally destroying the sanctity of the vote in Washington County.

“So do something! Count something by hand!” she urged them. “You can’t just let this go on like this. I mean, why would we think that the 2022 midterms are going to be any different?”

It was actually a slow day at the commission, comment-wise. Since the 2020 election, local citizens have been showing up at meetings, every other week, to demand that their local government refashion itself to serve the lies and confirm the conspiracy theories that animate them. Their frustration is palpable. So are their threats.

“Election integrity is the No. 1 issue, but as it stands right now, every one of you has to go,” one activist told the commissioners at their meeting on Dec. 16, 2021. “The people are fed up and they’re not taking this. I’m just trying to give you advice because we’re not going to go anywhere — and there’s a lot of us. Most can’t come because of work, but don’t underestimate the support of this. That is my friendly advice.”

Before he turned from the microphone, he offered a final comment: “Merry Christmas.”

“Why would we think that the 2022 midterms are going to be any different?”

Bracken Burns was a Democratic commissioner in the county until 2012. He presided at meetings “literally every other week for 16 years,” he said. Few people bothered to attend, and those who did were generally looking for help with a specific local problem.

After November 2020, the character of the meetings changed. “I’ve been to a couple of them,” Burns said, “and they just make me physically ill.”

Attacks on county government, which serves more than 200,000 residents, are also coming from inside the house. Brenda Davis, the clerk of courts, has waged a persistent war on the commissioners, promoting conspiracy theories and bucking commission directions. Davis, who eventually was held in contempt for refusing to follow a court order, was part of a MAGA wave that swept local elections in 2019. She is also a local promoter of Douglas Frank, an Ohio election conspiracist with whom Washington County commissioners agreed to meet last February.

Frank, whose work has been repeatedly exposed as junk, claimed the county’s election was “hacked” and that county voting machines were subject to “control chips.” The commissioners found him unpersuasive. Their resistance merely provided additional evidence that local government, like state government and federal government, can’t be trusted.

Protestors Active In Philadelphia As Pennsylvania Ballot Count Continues

Outside the Philadelphia Convention Center, Nov. 6, 2020.

Photographer: Chris McGrath/Getty Images North America

Commissioner Diana Irey Vaughan has grown accustomed to functioning in an ever-expanding fog of doubt. Still, she moves quickly and decisively, extending crisp, warm, greetings to the people she encounters walking the halls of government. After 27 years in office, she exudes confidence and competence. A registered Republican since she moved to the area in 1984, she might object to being likened to US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, but Vaughan has a similar woman-in-charge aura. She bluntly labels persistent falsehoods about the election, many of them generated by her own party, as “propaganda.”

Whether creators and consumers of propaganda will join to end Vaughan’s political career is an issue for next year’s elections. “The story next year in Pennsylvania is going to be what happens in local primaries for county commissioner when you have election-denying candidates running,” said Forrest Lehman, the elections director of Lycoming County. “They want to be in charge of the elections.”

Like some local officials elsewhere in the state, Vaughan took the initiative to review allegations of irregularities, spending hours investigating. “I personally looked into over 500 allegations of wrongdoing,” she said. Only two, she said, had any potential merit, and neither indicated systemic fraud. She turned her findings over to the district attorney.

“My own party slammed down on my desk a list of individuals who they claimed were deceased but had voted,” Vaughan told me. “We found every one of those individuals very much alive.”

Vaughan’s detective work produced only scorn from people who want their fantasies confirmed. For many of her constituents, the knot of lies and resentments, which they press and knead like worry beads, is too tight for even the most dedicated public official to unravel.

“My own party slammed down on my desk a list of individuals who they claimed were deceased but had voted.

We found every one of those individuals very much alive.”​​​

At the county commission meeting I attended, after the local woman had implored the commissioners to just “do something,” I followed her to the exit and asked if she would speak to me. She asked who I was writing for. After rolling her eyes at my answer, she said I wouldn’t dare go “against the narrative” of the powerful mainstream media.

I asked her if there was something larger than an election that she feared had been stolen from her. (There is ample research that lost social status, and fear of further losses, is a driver of MAGA political reaction.) She accused me — perhaps justly this time — of seeking to impose a narrative on her.

Then she made an offer: If I would first agree to watch a film about voting machines, she would agree to speak to me.

We eyed each other for a while in silence. Her preferred conspiracy film was different from the more popular one I had been encouraged to watch earlier in the week in Gettysburg. I hadn’t heard of it. I envisioned the tedium of sitting through more polarizing nonsense. And I imagined the Berlin Wall of mental checkpoints that would meet any question that I posed to her.

I told her that I wouldn’t watch a conspiracy movie as a precondition to conversation, no doubt confirming her suspicions about the system. We did not speak again.

***

Donald Trump Trailer in PA

Along I-76 in western Pennsylvania.

Photographer: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc.

 

Democracy promotion used to be a project of US institutions engaged in foreign nations. Democracy groups are now working in Pennsylvania and other states as well. I spoke with half a dozen leaders in the movement over the past month. Each was working on safeguarding the 2022 election in Pennsylvania. The high stakes and heavy workload had not induced despair. But confidence was not overflowing.

“Normally, truth is the answer to lies,” said Al Schmidt, the former Republican commissioner in Philadelphia who now runs the Committee of Seventy, a good-government organization founded in Philadelphia more than a century ago. “But we’ve only seen that to be of limited success. It’s a lot easier to fool someone than to convince someone that they’ve been fooled. And we’ve had about a third of Americans who have been fooled for a very long time.”

Conservative activists have been producing bogus allegations of voter fraud for decades. There is a well-traveled claim, for example, that a state election in Missouri in 2010 was decided by “50 votes cast illegally by citizens of Somalia.” A Missouri court found in 2010 that “credible evidence proves that there was no voter misconduct and there was no voter fraud with regard to this election.”

Yet the lie about dark-skinned foreigners casting illegal votes still motors around the propaganda track. You can read it, right now, on the website of the Heritage Foundation, where a Supreme Court justice spoke just last week. The false claim about Somalis appears under the byline of Hans von Spakovsky, a Heritage senior legal fellow who testified under oath in 2018 that he doesn’t know of a single US election decided by noncitizen votes.

Trump may be a singular liar, but he has had many allies in his campaign to discredit democracy. His own attorney general, William Barr, was lauded for contradicting Trump’s claims of widespread fraud in December 2020. But Barr had previously spread scurrilous claims about mail ballots and fraud, actively sowing doubt about the 2020 election before votes were cast. He then permitted Trump’s lies to fester for weeks after the election before finally stating that the election was legitimate.

Former Attorney General Barr Speaks At The Federalist Society

Former US Attorney General William Barr.

Photographer: Win McNamee/Getty Images North America

Fighting falsehoods has grown more difficult as the media has fractured and right-wing infotainment has become a closed loop. Most democracy organizations are focused elsewhere — on blunting the most egregious, public symptoms of anti-democratic fervor, such as intimidation efforts or laws and administrative actions designed to restrict voting. Addressing root causes of American conservative disaffection is largely beyond their capacity.

The job of democracy activists, nearly all of whom work for nonpartisan organizations, is further complicated by the reality that American democracy is increasingly a partisan commitment. “We are a nonpartisan organization,” said Al Schmidt, “and I’m very sensitive to perceptions that we would be considered anything other than nonpartisan. That’s a challenge when so much of the propaganda seeking to undermine confidence in elections is coming from my party, the Republican Party.”

Many groups, including Common Cause and the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, participate in an Election Protection Coalition, which is modeled on efforts that began during the 2020 election, when it became increasingly apparent that Trump did not intend to relinquish power voluntarily. The various groups have divisions of labor — communications, courts, voter registration and the like.

“So much of the propaganda seeking to undermine confidence in elections is coming from my party, the Republican Party.”

Kadida Kenner is chief executive officer of the New Pennsylvania Project, a voting-rights organization that primarily does voter registration. Democracy, she said, remains too “abstract” to mobilize many of the people her group seeks to engage. “We can’t get to the nitty-gritty of civic education if we can’t get past the first few obstacles, which are the pocketbook issues,” she told me.

Democracy needs active institutions to promote its interests and defend it against enemies, foreign and domestic. But the work of repair is going to have to extend beyond institutions, courthouses and big cities. The US Capitol was attacked on Jan. 6, 2021. Local county seats are fending off less violent, but no less insidious, attacks on a regular basis — with far fewer resources to blunt the blows. Conservative counties, where many credible leaders will face MAGA opponents in GOP primaries, are especially worrisome.

Trump Supporters Hold "Stop The Steal" Rally In DC Amid Ratification Of Presidential Election

A scene from Jan. 6.

Photographer: Samuel Corum/Getty Images North America

 

Coaxing tens of millions of Americans back to democratic commitments is a grueling task. I missed a quiet opportunity with the woman I met in Washington County. I don’t mean to suggest that I would have breached her formidable defenses; of the two of us, she was likely the more certain of her beliefs. But the ebb and flow of democracy takes more effort one day than another. The cost of little failures — unrepaired frays, unventured conversations — is higher today than it was 20 years ago, or 40.

By its nature, democratic work falls to ordinary people, town by town, citizen by citizen. A Gettysburg Republican told me that the real conflict in her local party is not over Trump or his lies about voter fraud. Neither topic, she said, is much discussed. Instead, the division is between those Republicans who look at Democratic neighbors as civic equals and viable friends, and those who consider Democrats an enemy that must be crushed. In Gettysburg, a battle rages. The tide appears to run against the republic. The consequence of failure is a whirlwind.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

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Francis Wilkinson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering U.S. politics and policy. Previously, he was an editor for the Week, a writer for Rolling Stone, a communications consultant and a political media strategist. @fdwilkinson