The most important elections are local

Longtime Trump allies, chief among them Steve Bannon, have spread his Big Lie that voter fraud swung the 2020 election against him, and they are striving to take over these offices. In Pennsylvania, they recruited candidates in 2021 to run for “election judge,” a hyper-local and typically uncontested position, with some success.

Pennsylvania may be one of the country’s core swing states, but chances are you haven’t heard of its “election judges.” Even if you closely follow American politics, you likely do not know how their powers compare to those of the state’s county boards of elections, nor when and how any of those officials are selected. For people who hope to protect the election system from the Big Lie, this labyrinth of relevant offices can be a nightmare to navigate.

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The bulk of election administration in the United States takes place at the local level, across thousands of counties and municipalities, as Trump and Bannon’s forces well know. Sleepy offices like county clerk or county auditor determine much of what goes into running elections—determining the number and location of polling places, appointing precinct officials, designing ballots, scheduling early voting options, and overseeing voter registration.

These local officials can ease access to the ballot, and Houston’s clerk drew widespread attention for such reforms in 2020. But they can also mar the election process via policies that close down polling locations, purge eligible residents from the rolls, or fuel long lines.

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These local administrators also have clout in state or federal policymaking. They are often members of statewide associations that lobby legislatures.

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Every state structures its system differently. Election administration can also vary wildly from county to county within a state. [...] To make matters more confusing, election administration is frequently split between different institutions even within a county. It pulls in officials like sheriffs and tax-assessors, whose formal titles do not reveal their responsibility for running elections.

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Many states provide little if any centralized information about their systems or relevant offices, and it’s even harder to track down when administrators are selected or elected. Even if this was all readily available, the sheer number of election administrators make them a challenge to follow.

This decentralized election administration has a major benefit: It helps prevent any sort of widespread hacking. With so many offices in so many municipalities, it would be functionally impossible to rig a large-scale election. But this dynamic also creates layers of inequity. Depending on where they live, voters within the same state may face different rules.

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A well-financed group’s concerted efforts to win such offices can remain largely under-the-radar, as in Pennsylvania in 2021. Voting rights activists seeking to expand access to the polls may comparatively struggle to organize inside opaque election systems that usually draw little public attention.

Today Bolts is publishing an original database that compiles, state by state, the local institutions that are responsible for administering elections at the county and municipal level.

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And in almost every state, the process of tabulating, canvassing, and officially certifying the votes cast, is conducted in a separate process that may not always involve the same administrators but that has also come under conservative attack. Bolts will dig into these complexities in future work.

  Bolts

Texas has one of the most complex (and controllable by the major party) system, as you might imagine they would.  (Click the graphics for an enlarged view.)

And Pennsylvania's shows how difficult it might be to have a straightforward and honest election in that state.   

Compare those with Missouri's, which surprisingly seems to be fair and unassailable, except in those counties that don't have an election board. And, guess what? That's almost all of them, with the notable exceptions of Jackson (Kansas City) and St. Louis counties. Even the state's capitol county (Cole) has its elections run by the clerk's office.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE: