If Georgia’s elections are more secure than ever, why do so many voters distrust the system? • Georgia recorder

Gabriel Sterling, chief operating officer of Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office, said that in today’s partisan society there is a certain level of skepticism about the election results.

“We can have very transparent elections, we can get quick results, we can have well-functioning systems; One thing we can’t control up here is who wins and who loses,” he said. “And the problem is that for a large portion of Americans, all that matters is who wins and who loses.” And if my husband lost or my wife lost, there must be a bag of crap in here somewhere. That’s what they believe, and there’s nothing we can do about it. As transparent as we are, there will be people who make these claims because the incentives in many of our systems are currently backwards. It’s unfortunate. And partisanship has become very difficult.”

Sterling said Raffensperger’s office is facing criticism from both sides. Those on the left claimed that officials were removing voters from voter rolls to suppress the vote, and those on the right said they were intentionally leaving dead and deceased voters on the lists so they could cast fraudulent votes to steal elections.

Jennifer McCoy, a political science professor at Georgia State University, said several factors have caused voter confidence to decline in recent decades.

“This is not new. “This was nothing new with Donald Trump, as some people think,” she said. “It has grown. And it has grown for several reasons. The first, I would say, is the really big changes that we’ve seen in this country in our values ​​and in the rights of different groups of people who haven’t had those rights in the past.”

McCoy cited the civil rights movement and the struggles for women’s and LGBTQ rights.

“Such new rights actually frightened some others because they feared that if some people who had previously been more subordinate came forward and were given more equal rights, it might take away the rights that the other groups, the more dominant groups, were entitled to . had.”

Adrienne Jones, a political science professor at Morehouse College, said some on the right have cynically deployed arguments used by people in these movements.

“One way to do that is to undermine elections by tapping into the complaints of people of color that they didn’t have equal access or that voting systems didn’t treat them fairly in states like Georgia.” Then you go along with it “The issue is being addressed as if it were directed against a Trump presidency, a potential Trump presidency,” she said.

“So we raise the specter of voter fraud, which we know is not factual, and yet we see in the media so much support and belief in these ideas that the election will not be fair,” she added. “And that’s really important, coupled with creating these racial tensions that I think in the United States inherently and instinctively creates disagreement between people and makes it harder for them to see how much there is in common.” average American have.”

Political divisions often trigger threats to real campaign workers and volunteers, said Akyn Beck, Floyd County elections director.

“It’s ridiculous that I do my silly little job in my silly little county and get bullied for it, and what I’ve experienced in my position is nothing compared to some other counties.”

Beck said she receives about 50 angry emails a day and she’s not the only one who feels threatened.

“I think it’s more than likely that we’re going to lose a lot of good colleagues and a lot of good poll workers just because, frankly, none of us make enough to do this,” she said. “We have Narcan in our office, I know many counties do because people have been sending fentanyl to election offices. Every single one of our districts must have an officer there. We have to do specialized training on Stop the Bleed and CPR because you just never know.”

Jones said partisan news sources, divisive rhetoric from politicians, close elections and the U.S. winner-take-all electoral system also contribute to division, and the country could break away from the books of other democracies by adopting proportional representation , in which districts receive multiple representatives based on the breakdown of votes, or ranked-choice voting, in which voters assign a ranking to candidates and results are determined after multiple rounds and eliminations.

“After this election, I hope that we get an even bigger movement for electoral reform in this country and move away from our winner-takes-all system where we only elect one person per district, which is half the vote.” “The people in this district who may have voted for someone else may feel like they have no voice at all, no representative,” she said.

Sterling said he is confident that the free market of ideas will eventually produce good leaders.

“I think over time voters will ultimately reward people who are responsible actors who defend the institutions and keep this 200-plus-year-old democracy, democratic republic, going,” he said.