David Graham

A couple of things have happened as a result of that harassment.

We've seen an exodus of experienced election officials, people who simply don't want to have those jobs.

They go and they do something else.

We've seen threats against them.

That means they have to worry more about security and spend less time on the sort of basic administration of elections that they want to do.

We've seen pressure campaigns against these people.

So, you know, on one level, we saw President Trump in 2020 calling for

for example, the Georgia Secretary of State and asking him to find almost 12,000 votes.

But we also had people in Trump's orbit calling local officials and trying to pressure them to change things.

We saw

the kind of public harassment of people like the local officials in Maricopa County.

And that makes it very hard for election officials to do their job.

It detracts from what they're doing.

They're also facing funding cuts, including cuts for security, cybersecurity and physical security from the federal government.

So really, in every way, the work of these election officials has gotten a lot harder.

I think this shows why Republicans either would be reluctant to stand up for Trump or simply might not run for these kinds of offices.

Stephen Rich is an interesting character because he is forthrightly conservative.

His politics are conservative, but he's also somebody who cares a lot about elections and about truth.

And when Trump was claiming that the Maricopa County elections in 2020 were tainted by fraud, he stood up along with several other elected Republicans in the area and said, no, these elections were fair.

And for that, he became a target of extensive harassment, you know, by individuals, by he was attacked in conservative media.