IT’S NOW AT LAST the homestretch for the two presidential contenders. For news organizations, too, it’s a time to get all their operations fully fine-tuned to meet whatever events might develop as the finishing line gets ever closer — and beyond it too.  

While the media make their final preparations, the electoral process’s turbulence of 2020 and thereafter will need to be kept firmly embedded in mind. Not least the actual purpose behind it. The January Sixth riot in 2021 was of course an illegal attempt to prevent the joint Houses of Congress from completing their formal count of the presidential electoral votes. Are we fully ready for any such repeat of efforts to subvert the nation’s vote, be they violent … or just cunningly organizational?

Journalism’s response to such a threat, or in fact anticipation of it, has been to create a subspecialty. To the fore in adopting this tactic is NPR, the network we used to call National Public Radio until it opted for purely an acronym as its title.

The subspecialty that NPR is developing is that of election integrity and security, and its specialist correspondent is Miles Parks. On his X profile (formerly Twitter) Parks announces himself as @nprpolitics voting guy. Parks began reporting on the nitty-gritty of election machinery and processes, back in 2016. His work then was cited with some commendation by the Senate Intelligence Committee in its report on Russian interference in American elections. The territory has only become more greatly in need of repeated investigation ever since.

Parks came very close to winning a Peabody Award – was a finalist in 2023 for a lengthy and dogged piece of digging he conducted into newly-formed conservative organizations who have worked, in a coordinated campaign, to get individual states, eight of them in total, to pull out of what was then virtually the only multi-state system for ensuring election security. It bears the named ERIC, the Electronic Registration Information Center – never until these days a matter of much popular interest.

But ERIC had become a kind of bogeyman for the hundreds of so-called “election integrity” groups that sprang up across the country, prompted by Donald Trump‘s lies about the 2020 vote being stolen. Parks charted these groups in their progress from Louisiana to Ohio taking in other states too. His report skillfully uncovered the conservative movement’s plan to sabotage the system, and contrasted it with the Republican Party’s claims to be dedicated to catching and rooting out voting improprieties. You might think the two-facedness is a bit like urging fire-safety precautions upon everyone, while at the same time turning off the sprinklers

And much more recently, late last month, Parks was alerting us to disturbing new moves in Georgia, the very state where Trump made his (possibly?) most blatant attempt at election interference. Do you remember, of course you do, his infamous and numerically-specific phone-call with the state’s top election official, wanting to change the already-certified result? “All I want to do is this,” you’ll recall him saying: “I just want to find 11,780 votes.”

In Georgia now, a new law’s been passed that seems to suggest that the state’s boards who perform certification (a process that’s traditionally been, here and elsewhere, a simple formality) will now have some new discretion to refuse to certify voting results – on not very clear or specified grounds. They could be acting almost as if they were investigative bodies, which constitutionally they are not. You might also remember that Trump tried (in another recorded phone-call) to get some certifiers in Michigan not to certify results there, but his ploy failed.

Georgia’s new rules are naturally enough being challenged in court, mainly by Democrats, but also by others concerned about the voting system’s general health  – and our doughty Miles Parks at NPR says  “there is a general confidence in the elections community that courts will be an effective backstop against this type of interference.” He means of course in Georgia and the other states where similar moves are afoot. We can only hope that he is right.

SOME PEOPLE ARE MUCH LESS OPTIMISTIC – for instance the very official who had to bear the brunt of Trump’s pressure in that overbearing phone call, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. He has criticized the making up of new rules so close to the upcoming election. “The Georgia state election board is a mess,” he told reporters.

And deep in the messy undergrowth, some distinctly underhand methods are being employed. Election officials all across Georgia have received thickly-stuffed manila envelopes sent anonymously, and threatening “treason” (yes, treason) and insisting that the 2024 election “cannot be certified” on the grounds that local officials are not in compliance with election laws.

At the very least, all of this intimidatory stuff is – as are many other murky tactics throughout the country – turning the job of being an election official, at almost any level, high or low, into an unpleasant, quite likely a positively dangerous job.

And almost needless to say, all this agitation takes place despite the overall well-established truth that’s hard to dismiss, unless you’re Trump or an acolyte – the truth that the so-called “Great Steal” is a complete mirage. That, over time, close on a hundred judges, including ones appointed by Trump, have rejected the cases brought before them alleging voter fraud in 2020. I’ll quote one of them, a federal appeals court judge Stephanos Bibas (one of Trump’s own nominees). He said

“Calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here.”

But the Trumpists’ poking at our voting system’s credibility carries on regardless, for all-too-obvious reasons. And it calls for dedicated, confidently probing journalism to test it and, as is so often necessary, to debunk it. Thank heavens, Miles Parks is far from being alone in navigating the difficult and often complex pathways of all the sabotage efforts. That stalwart of political coverage, for instance, The Hill (below right) is doing a very good job of such navigation.

And there’s much for them to report on.– At the overt and respectably legal level, there are cases like the federal lawsuit brought in Michigan by the Republican National Committee … and the Michigan Republican Party … and the Trump Campaign, which alleges Governor Gretchen Whitmer expanded voter registration locations, thus allegedly benefiting the Democratic Party. It can be argued about in court.

From that formal, official, level we can swoop down to those undergrowth depths that I mentioned earlier.  For instance, there are the everyday election workers of Surry County in North Carolina — all women by the way (representative of the 80% of election workers countrywide who are female). They are being targeted by ugly disinformation and threats from Trump supporters – including male heavies who confronted the county election-board’s chief when she was out shopping, pressing and hustling her. She told Scripps News Service that she was alarmed; as a local public servant she “didn’t expect to have to think about the safety of myself, my staff, my family.”

And a Scripps News survey discovered that across the US as a whole, nearly 40% of election officials (and again most of them women) have reported experiencing threats, harassment or abuse. 7 in 10 say those threats started coming in the wake of Trump’s voter-fraud agitation.

IT MAY NOT HELP MUCH with physical intimidation, but in the Rocky Mountain state of Colorado there’s a new training initiative for election workers, on how to spot and to counter electoral disinformation, including “deep fakes” and other kinds of misleading uses of AI.

We owe this news to the Durango Herald newspaper (below left) serving the onetime Colorado railhead of Durango City. It quotes the county clerk for Kit Carson County, Susan Corliss (who’s a Republican) saying about the new training session: “we have our security plans, but this opened up my eyes further, that we need to have more coverage, on what could be happening on Social Media through AI.”

Colorado state is even considering a kind of reverse 911 call system, whereby it would send out robocalls to members of the public, to counter any egregious campaign of damaging disinformation.

The Herald, rather smartly, drew attention to a strong irony. While all this determined training was going on, in a courtroom just blocks away, the trial was being held of a former election official – the now ex-County Clerk of Mesa County, Tina Peters, on charges of assisting in a security breach of her election equipment – an action, her charge-sheet says, that was inspired by unsupported Trumpian claims of election fraud.

I can report this week, perhaps encouragingly, on a nationwide news institution stepping up to encourage and assist efforts at monitoring and exposing electoral-system interference. The Knight Election Hub is now in place — a new creation of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation (the Brothers Knight, as we can call them, newspaper-publishing brothers who originated in Ohio). The Hub involves a fresh investment from them of $6.9 million to bolster election coverage, primarily in swing states for understandable reasons. It comes along with a new concerted collaboration with The Associated Press, dedicated  to supporting smallnews organizations.

The political campaigns are both hoping their leaders will be at the top of their game (especially when they meet one-on-one in just five days’ time for the supposed “Great Debate.” And meanwhile, we news-consumers will have to hope that our journalists – especially given the amount of disinformation they have to counter – are at the top of their game.