With the 2024 national elections now less than six months away, election officials and security experts are working tirelessly to ensure that these elections will be safe, fair, and accurate — free from misinformation and disinformation both foreign and domestic. They clearly have their jobs cut out for them. Officials are attending conferences designed to help them run their elections smoothly while protecting themselves and their staffs from harassment and danger. It is no easy job. These pillars of democracy often work with shoestring budgets and inadequate staff. And now they are facing increased interference from groups organized to agitate and usurp their time such as with frivolous FOIA (freedom of information acts) requests that take time away from necessary tasks and often lead to false claims about procedures, systems, and voter rolls themselves.
One such group is United Sovereign Americans (USA). In an article from Democracy Docket posted May 28, 2024, staff writer Matt Cohen explains in depth the purpose and tactics of this group. It was co-founded by Marly Hornik and Harry Haury and is defined in the article as “a nascent far-right legal group that’s organizing to disrupt the 2024 election with a series of lawsuits aimed at upending the voting process in a handful of states”. The group is raising alarm about non-citizen voting which is already illegal and according to election experts does not occur. In Maryland, the group filed a lawsuit alleging that the voter rolls and procedures were outdated and inaccurate. While they lost this case, they are now appealing the decision and have plans to do the same in Pennsylvania and other states hoping to get a hearing before the Supreme Court in order to sew chaos in the upcoming election. They are recruiting members to knock on the doors of neighbors to find unregistered people who are voting. (In New York, an earlier group of Hornik was ordered to cease its work in 2022 because members were harassing innocent people without any facts behind them). Hornik moved to other states founding, with Harry Haury (an individual pushing unsubstantiated claims of election fraud in 2020), a new group, USA. While it is far from the only group trying to disrupt the 2024 election — other groups such as the Public Interest Legal Foundation, the Arizona Free Enterprise Club and the Republican National Committee are also trying to limit the number of voters — they are also recruiting members to their cause radicalizing them to believe there is mass fraud in our elections. Their three tiered approach seeks to use the courts to invalidate election procedures in several states, train members to harass election officials before, during, and after the upcoming elections, and push government and election officials in districts to sign a resolution supporting their cause. (So far none seem to have signed on.) Their election vigilantes will only add to the danger of violence around November 5. Members in more than twenty states have already filed FOIAs to gain access to voter rolls, claiming that millions of illegal ballots were cast in the 2022 election. Election expert, Leah Tulin, a senior counsel in the Brennan Center for Justice’s Democracy Program, argues, “The danger of making these kinds of unsupported allegations is that it does feed misinformation and disinformation, which threatens our public confidence in elections. It threatens election officials, because it heightens the risk of political violence, and it diverts their resources from administering elections to dealing with false allegations about the election system.” Election officials need the support of informed citizens to argue against these groups intent on feeding mis and disinformation in order to sow distrust of the most sacred pillar of democracy, free and fair elections.