August 31, 2022 • 32 mins
Election day in Sequim. The Good Governance League wins by a landslide. A new mayor will be installed. However, down south in Shasta, the future is uncertain. We go back to the far-right activists who are trying to install more of their candidates into elected office. Will their takeover be successful? In both Shasta and Sequim, some residents have awakened to the importance of local government. But can that engagement last? And what does it mean for the fraying trust that is essential for democracy?
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome back to the story of Shasta County. Last we
left off, it was about to be election day there,
the June seven primary, which Shasta's far right movement get
more of their candidates in the county government. That was
the question on our minds when my producer Kathleen, and
(00:22):
I drove to Shasta County on election day. We hit
the ground and started talking to voters. I think Shasta
County kind of has gotten extreme, extreme, extreme right. I
think in the past I voted a lot more for change.
I think I'm voting now more for stability. Well, what
(00:42):
they're teaching the kids in schools, I don't agree with that,
to be honest, I'm a little scared of them. Of
the non gun control that's around. I don't I don't
want to get away, you know, do away with anybody's guns,
but I think there should be some kind of control
with all the children getting killed. I don't really get
(01:02):
too much into it. I don't pay too close attention.
It was clear that folks were thinking about a lot
of hot button topics, but not much about Shasta's recent
political turmoil. Well, some people we talked to understood that
local politics had recently shifted hard to the right. A
(01:23):
lot of folks seemed pretty unaware of what was happening
in their own backyard. That's not unusual, but it did
kind of surprise me because of what a huge deal
the recall had been. It had been two years of chaos,
and I wondered how much of an appetite booters had
for more. But what unfolded over the two days we
(01:46):
spent in Shasta took us in a wildly different direction
from what we expected. For one thing, there was so
much mistrust in government, in media, in elections. What I
saw shook me, and I want to tell you all
about it, especially as we head into the US midterms.
(02:11):
This is Bedrock USA, a podcast about political extremism, small
town life, and the fight for democracy. I'm your host,
Laura Bliss. Real quick, let me just remind you of
what was at stake in Shasta's June seven primary. On
(02:34):
the ballot were two openings on the Board of County Supervisors.
There were also several county department leaders up for reelection,
including the sheriff, the school superintendent, and the county clerk.
A slate of candidates backed by many of the same
folks who led the recall was running for all of
(02:56):
these posts. If they won in a clean sweep, far
right candidates would hold nearly all elected positions in Shasta County,
and the existing majority on the Board of Supervisors, which
had already voted to lift the pandemic state of emergency
and to fire the county Health officer, could be deepened.
(03:19):
On the other hand, moderates and incumbents were also running
for the same spots, and if they won, it might
send a message that the far right wasn't as powerful
as it seemed. Kathy Darling Allen was one of those incumbents.
She was the Shasta County Clerk, which meant she oversaw elections.
(03:40):
Kathy was running to be re elected for the fifth
time in eighteen years. A few days before the primary,
I called her up to see how she was doing,
and Kathy was worried, not so much about her opponent
or her chances of winning, but about the election in general.
(04:01):
I UM, I'm worried. I'm worried about our community. I'm
worried about, you know, at the national level, of the
messaging that we see um around the election and what
that means for elections administration going forward. Including the primaries
(04:24):
in the general election that's going to happen later this year.
I have been called a liar a lot in the
last two years, more than the last two years in
my entire life combined. And that's tough, and I'm not
a liar. Kathy had been called a liar because a
lot of people in Shasta didn't trust the work she did.
(04:48):
And it's not just where she lives. Claims of election
fraud have been sweeping the country, amplified by Donald Trump
claims that judges and elections experts have dismissed again and
again as lacking evidence. Yet a majority of Republican voters
(05:09):
still question the election results, and those doubts are affecting
how people view their hometown election workers, people like Kathy
Hi right, just wondering if either right and just sticking
chatting with us about what brought you out. We met
some election doubters outside one polling location fire station. Kathleen
(05:33):
and I talked to a woman named Ronny Lund who
was volunteering as an election observer that day. She was
deeply concerned about election integrity and recommended I watched a
documentary that claimed the election was stolen. Yeah, you need
to watch it because you know they have definitive proof
(05:55):
of ballot box stuffing, and you know, I that's why
I'm observing today is because I feel like we have
an election integrity problem. And I don't care who gets
voted in as long as it was a fair election
and we had election integrity. This documentary she's talking about
(06:16):
it was referenced numerous times in the January six hearings.
It's called two thousand Mules, and it uses cell phone
location data and dropbox surveillance footage to raise doubts about
Trump's election loss. In fact, Trump himself has promoted the film,
but experts who have reviewed the documentary have concluded that
(06:40):
the claims just don't hold up to scrutiny. Ronnie still
had grave misgivings. When I asked her if she'd spotted
any problems in the election she was observing. She pointed
to a few hiccups that she said we're resolved, but
she was still sure that there were deeper problems with
the system. At eight o'clock, polls closed. Jeremy Edwardson, the
(07:06):
producer of Red, White, and Blueprint, the YouTube series that
had followed and promoted the recall campaign had invited us
to an election party for the candidates backed by the
Liberty Committee. That was the pack that had formed to
support the far right contenders. Its website declared, our country
is under assault. It's time to take it back, one state,
(07:29):
county and city at a time. After the break, we
hit the election party and the night takes a turn.
The party was at Country Strong Faitness, a gym owned
by a prominent recall supporter. We went inside to look
(07:50):
for Jeremy. Tons of people had gathered to watch the
results come in. The energy was buzzy, celebratory, and people
were drinking pretty heavily. A giant American flag hung on
the back wall. We didn't see Jeremy, but we did
immediately spot Patrick Jones. He was in the back of
(08:13):
the room, near big screen TV that showed live election coverage,
holding a microphone like he was about to speak. Now
you may remember Patrick. He was one of the most
outspoken county supervisors who had supported the recall. I talked
to him at the political fundraiser we've been to a
few months earlier. He'd cracked a joke about how they
(08:36):
wouldn't execute any journalists there at the time. Patrick told
me how excited he was that the recall had succeeded
and that people in Shasta County were finally taking action
to shake up their government. Patrick was a big supporter
of the Liberty Committee candidates and was confident about their
(08:56):
chances when we last talked, so we approached him to chat,
but he refused, and he immediately told us we had
to leave. We need truth here tonight. You guys aren't
part of it, you never have been. You're irrelevant. Let's go,
Let's go, just to get answered. Let's go. Patrick physically
(09:18):
escorted us to the door. People were staring. It felt
really uncomfortable at deep mistrust of us as journalists. To
be honest, we were relieved we got outside. We were
trying to decide whether or not to leave when Jeremy
spotted us. Jeremy, how's it go? We were in guarded outs.
(09:44):
I just told all of them that you are my guests,
and then I'll keep working on over because that's ridiculous.
He was apologetic and we stayed chatting with him in
the parking lot for a while. He had just wrapped
up the finale with the Red, White, and Blueprint docuseries,
and aired it at a special event in Humboldt County, California,
(10:08):
where another group was trying to grow a similar movement.
I'm glad that people finally care about local politics. That's
why I started this whole thing with Red, White, and
Blueprint documentary. My goal was to wake people up to
the needle they could actually move instead of just focusing
on the presidency. And I've seen that. It's it's really
(10:31):
really encouraging to see people finally care. I'm just excited
that people are standing up and actually caring about local government.
Around this time, I checked my phone to see if
any early returns had started to come in. They had,
and they did not look good for the Liberty Committee candidates.
(10:52):
Most of them were losing substantially outside in the parking lot,
though the mood didn't change, not yet. People still seem
to be in a party spirit. So Kathleen and I
left to go grab some dinner. But that's when we
missed some pivotal action because while we were eating, folks
(11:13):
at Country Strong Fitness evidently saw the results and some
of them decided to leave the party and to head
downtown straight to the county elections office. By now it
was around ten o'clock. The ballots had all been collected
from drop boxes and precincts. Workers were starting to tabulate
(11:33):
the votes and posting results online. Kathy Darling Allen, the
county clerk, was overseeing things like me. Most of the
reporters who had been on the ground all day had
already left. Ballot counting takes a while and would continue
for several more days. That's the norm for these kinds
of elections. But Donnie Chamberlain, the local journalist you've heard
(11:58):
in earlier episodes, still working. She was at the elections
office taking notes for her report. Later she told us
about what happened that night. I was just kind of
still hanging around. I had this feeling like it wasn't
over yet. And Kathy Darlene came out to the lobby
and she said to me, who wants to scoop? And
(12:18):
I said I do. She goes follow me. So we
went through the elections department through the back door into
the alley, which was all dark, and all the precinct
vehicles are lined up, you know, making their drop off
some ballots. And she points to a it's a trail,
it's a game trail. Camera hidden in a tree right
(12:41):
pointing directly at the back door of the elections department,
and um, she said, as far as they knew, it
wasn't there before. You could see freshly cut branches where
they got. You know, they have fixed it and we
still don't know who put it there, But so that
was kind of the first thing. It was kind of bizarre.
A trail camera, the kind that hunters and scientists use
(13:02):
to take animal photos in the wild, was pointing at
the back door of the elections office. That is pretty bizarre.
Clearly someone didn't trust what was happening inside, Donnie said.
Then the crew from the party rolled up. According to Donnie,
he said, they were there to observe the count, but
(13:23):
some of them got confrontational. They're all walking very rapidly
toward the back door, which was open for workers. Kathy
Darling is still standing there because she was talking about
the camera. Normally she wouldn't have been out there in
the alley. I suspect she had other stuff to do.
And this group came up and they started basically verbally
assaulting Kathy Darling Allen, who, of course, as a city
(13:47):
clerk and registrate our voters one of them, Donnie said,
got right in Cathy's face. You know, at one point,
he's standing so close to her that she is saying,
are you going to touch me? I mean, just back up,
are you going to touch me? And he's he was
quite agitated. These election observers eventually moved upstairs to the
(14:09):
area where ballots are being processed, but according to Donnie,
they weren't just observing. They were disrupting the process, challenging
Cathy on the way she was doing her job, and
getting in the way of staff. Later I talked to
Kathy about this night. She said it was all pretty
upsetting and counterproductive to what she was trying to accomplish.
(14:31):
It's bizarre because there are concerns that were not going
to count the ballots, and I don't think they quite
understand that what's happening right now is actually slowing down
with the count. We're not going to count things faster
um with all these distractions, So we will count as
fast as we can count on the world process as
fast as we can process um with their observation, Cathy
(14:55):
stayed at the office until almost three am. By that point,
she said they were still observers on site a few
of them spent the night in folding chairs outside, and
yet throughout the whole ordeal, Kathy said she did her
best to remain calm. It wasn't always easy, but she
(15:16):
tried to answer questions plainly to provide accurate information. She
really wanted to connect. It's almost like, you know, one
vote or one person at a time, we have to
convert and reassure and reassess and talk about their concerns.
You know, this whole process um of people reading bad
(15:41):
and false information online is my my assumption that that's
most of this is coming from about stuff that happened
in other states. And I don't feel like you had
any But those were those conversations successful with any of
the folks you talked to you last night or three individually?
I think so? Um, But honestly, you know, are they
(16:04):
placating me and smiling and smiling nodding? I don't know.
I don't know these people really personally, you know, so
I just have not going to judge whether we've been
effective or not. We'll we'll continue to try. Um and
gendering trustment process is a huge priority for us. And
you know, one of the ways we know being condescending,
(16:29):
being shaming people for having believed things about the election.
Um is not going to help them change their mind. Right. Yet,
the onslaught of doubt and denial was having an impact.
It was demoralizing, Cathy said, and that's a widespread feeling
(16:50):
in her field right now. In one recent national survey,
one in five local election officials said they were likely
to quit. The credibility of elections and the people who
facilitate them are under attack all over the country. More
on that after the break. My name is Matthew Wile,
(17:24):
and I am the executive director of the Democracy Program
at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, d C. I
called up Matthew to hear more about how election in
nihilism and conspiracy theories are affecting the voting process and
democracy overall. In many states and counties, the laws around
(17:44):
the election observation are pretty fuzzy, he said, and people
who don't have all the information about what's going on
can easily misinterpret what they're seeing and that really keeps
them up at night. I think the laws are still
very gray. Um, what is allowable, the capacity, how many
people you can have, and certainly what we learned in
(18:09):
was that observation without any kind of training or context
provided by people who know what they're looking at, leads
to this information. Matthew gave the example of Fulton County, Georgia,
where Trump supporters used video footage of a pair of
election workers, a mother and daughter named Ruby Freeman and
(18:31):
Shay Moss, to spread lies about election fraud. Afterwards, those
women who recently testified in the January six hearings were
targeted and harassed relentlessly. They received death threats, one of
their homes was broken into. This is what Matthew was
worried about now, the thread of distrust if my candidate
(18:56):
loses and so the election officials are barren the brunt
of those threats, and since we've seen a huge amount
of turnover in those local election officials, not only is
their turnover among these officials, but some of the folks
running to take their places are themselves election deniers. Matthew said,
(19:18):
even though the laws and provisions around election integrity have
only gotten stronger, not weaker over the last two decades,
but he doesn't expect the lies and conspiracy theories to
go away anytime soon. If people keep losing the faith
in the system, things could get really ugly, he said.
(19:41):
If people don't have confidence in the basic premise that
the people who are in office are there legitimately, the
laws they passed, the policies they make are kind of
by default and not legitimate either, and that that's a
pretty dangerous spiral. So I do think that we've taken
our elections for granted, you know, for most of our history,
(20:03):
for over to undre years. I think there's been a
surge since you know, Florida two thousand two to focus
a lot more on it, to professionalize the field, and
we've been doing that, but we are under attack again.
And I don't think that anyone will like the results
of a nation that cannot trust their election apparatus, because
(20:23):
it's just going to leads it up, you know, the
kind of death spiral of democracy that we don't we
don't want to enter into. When Kathleen and I woke
up and learned what happened the night before, we jumped
in the car to head back to the Shasta County
Elections office. Soon after we got there, a group of
(20:43):
women showed up to observe the count staff members opened
the doors to the building and gave us all a
visitor badges and we followed the group inside to the
room where the ballots are being sorted. This room, it
was kind of amazing. There were stacks of bins filled
with ballots dropped off the night before. Workers were opening
(21:06):
them up and counting the number of ballots. They were
pulling off the special tabs that covered voters signatures so
they could run them the resorting machine called the Agilus.
This all had to happen before the actual votes were
counted by another machine, but that was in a different
room upstairs, which the election staff lovingly called the bat Cave.
(21:28):
Just taken all the supplies, so all the supplies from
the poll workers that weren't dropped off last night, they
have to organize all those and then they're taking them
upstairs to the warehouse upstairs that holds all the supplies
from the flying places upstairs. That was Anna Rodriguez election
office staffer who explained all of this. She had been
working there nearly fifteen years, and she fielded many questions
(21:52):
from the group of observers. It seemed like people genuinely
wanted to understand the process. One woman asked about the
bins did election workers only break the seals on them
once they're ready to process the ballots inside. They wait
until they in the process. It correct because there's a
control sheet on top of that bin, and so we
just want to make sure it's telling us where those
(22:13):
came from, right, So we don't want to more congloberate everything.
We want to make sure that that bin is processed
and done before we open the next bin. Yes, but
the most part, things were pretty cordial between Anna and
this group of observers. She was patient, matter of fact friendly,
but it was clear that not everyone in the room
(22:33):
really trusted the process. At one point, one observer asked
Anna about a set of bins that she believed was missing.
It turned out everything was where it was supposed to be,
but it was a tense moment. Soon after that, a
familiar face walked in, Richard Galardo, the guy we had
(22:55):
met manning the security booth outside the political fundraiser you
heard in early her episode. He was here to observe
the ballot count, and he'd been here yesterday too. You
were here last night, right all day yesterday. I was
here last night and I watched the drama. Unfortunately, so um,
(23:17):
some people are just very passionate, you know what I mean.
I was very passionate about flex integrity. Richard told us
he had a lot of concerns. He thought it was
a conflict of interest for Kathy Darling Allen to run
for clerk while also overseeing the election. He thought she
should recuse herself. So when I asked Kathy about this later,
(23:41):
she told me this scenario is perfectly legal under state law.
But Richard didn't like that Cathy followed other California election laws,
like providing ballot drop boxes, which he thought increased the
potential for fraud, even though there's no evidence for that.
I'm not saying the fraud he happens under her watch,
(24:01):
but she's aware that the fraud is increased if she
follows all of the laws, even though she has discretion
to not follow something that is a big problem with
Kathie Allen. We said goodbye to Richard to head upstairs
with the rest of the group to another ballot counting room,
and I thought about his fear that fraud could occur
(24:24):
even if it wasn't. I wondered how Anna felt she
fielded all these questions. We rode in the elevator with
her while others took the stairs. It's a tough spot
because you're serving your community and you know, you know
(24:45):
what you know. But it's good. I'm glad folks are
here and they're asking questions. I think it's important we're
doing it for them. Do you feel like their conversations,
this relationship you're golding is helping. I hope. So it's
hard though, because you don't know um their version of
it when they leave. So you hope what you're seeing
(25:07):
is what that's my hope, you know. All right. Up
on the second floor, we stood with the observers for
a while, looking through the plexiglass window into the bat
cave where people's votes actually get counted. Witnessing this all,
it was kind of profound. There was such a ritual
(25:30):
to it, so many specially ordained bins and tables and rooms.
It was like being inside the inner sanctum of democracy.
You couldn't get any closer. And yet, even being that
close to the source of their uncertainty, observers we met
still had doubts. They just couldn't fully trust what they
(25:54):
were seeing, even with their own eyes. In July, the
final results were tallied and the county certified the election
for almost all of the positions Clerk, Superintendent, d A. Sheriff.
The incumbents one with big majorities that met the far
(26:14):
right candidates lost in the end. Maybe a lot of
Shasta County voters were sick of the political drama, or
another explanation, a lot of folks might have just picked
the most familiar names. It's common for voters to favor incumbents,
But folks continued to question those results at county board
(26:36):
meetings and on social media. Some of the same folks
we met inside the elections office and who had been
there the night before expressed they still weren't confident in
the process. And there were also two races that would
go to a runoff in November, and those were the
two seats on the county board. If the Liberty Committee
(26:59):
candidates one either of them, the Board of Supervisors would
retain its far right majority. Clearly, Shasta's wild ride wasn't
over yet. All through this series, we've been asking one
big question, how our extremist ideologies reshaping life in local communities.
(27:22):
I've gotten a lot of answers. I've seen how conspiracy
theories and radical ideologies disrupt the normal functions of local government.
I've seen how threats and intimidation silence neighbors, and I've
seen how confrontations and harassment are pushing elected officials and
(27:43):
civil servants to the break. All throughout, one major theme
has permeated this story, and that is mistrust. Mistrust and
government and media. In science, we've seen how that mistrust
drove large numbers of people to reject pandemic guidelines, to
(28:04):
reject the election results, and to reject mainstream news sources.
And at the local level and the stories you've just heard,
we've also seen how it causes people to reject each other.
So is it possible to rebuild that trust. I don't
(28:25):
know the answer to that question. But when I asked
Cathy about all the scrutiny that she and her staff
are facing right now, she said something interesting. For all
the harm created by the mistrust and doubt, she also
thought there was a tiny silver lining. We need people
(28:46):
to get off the couch and pay attention to what
government's doing at all levels. That's that's that's not a
bad thing. Sometimes I don't think this group understands it.
I'm with them on that I'm a citizen here too.
I'm a taxpayer here, I'm a voter here in this community.
I don't want people doing backroom deals and um being
unethical in power. That's not okay. Maybe that's why I
(29:09):
am so willing to kind of go over and above
and explain and explain and walk around and explain and
talk about you know, I just I really really want
folks to understand how this process works and to know
that they're included. They have to be included. All people,
Cathy said, are part of the process because that's how
(29:30):
democracy works. That's the system she believes in, and we'll
fight for so long as she's county clerk, she said.
On the other hand, just because you can participate in
democracy doesn't give you a free pass to try and
tear it down. When I spoke to her a few
weeks later, Kathy told me that in the next election,
(29:54):
she's going to spend less time giving attention to anyone
who tries to attack her office because she started to
accept that she and her staff can't reach everybody, no
matter how patient and informative they are. She said, she
can't compete with the louder voices, the ones who are
falsely claiming that elections cannot be trusted Right now, those
(30:18):
kinds of claims could be leading the United States to
a scary place. And it's striking how it only takes
a small group to spread ideas like that. Democracy is
surprisingly pliable, isn't it. It's so easily bent and reshaped
by the people with the loudest voices and the deepest pockets.
(30:40):
But it also means that, at least at the local level,
it can be bent back. That concludes this part of
the series. We're going to leave the stories of Squim
and Shasta there for now. We'll be back in the
fall with more episodes of bed Rocky USA, but sadly
I won't be back to host them. I'm going to
(31:02):
do a year long journalism fellowship at m I T.
For the next year, I'll be studying the science of
cities alongside an amazing cohort of fellow reporters. But you'll
be in great hands with our team of Bloomberg journalists
and producers. From the bottom of my heart, thank you
to everyone who has listened and supported the series. You
(31:23):
can find me on Twitter at ms Laura Bliss. This
episode was reported and hosted by me Laura Bliss. Kathleen
Quillian is our senior producer. Samantha Story is our story
editor and executive producer. We had additional editing help from
Nicole Flato, original music and scoring by Zachary Walter, and
(31:46):
audio engineering by Blake Maples. Jennifer Sondag is head of
Bloomberg City Lab. Bed Rock USA is a production of
Bloomberg City Lab and I Heart Radio. For more podcasts
from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome back to the story of Shasta County. Last we
left off, it was about to be election day there,
the June seven primary, which Shasta's far right movement get
more of their candidates in the county government. That was
the question on our minds when my producer Kathleen, and
(00:22):
I drove to Shasta County on election day. We hit
the ground and started talking to voters. I think Shasta
County kind of has gotten extreme, extreme, extreme right. I
think in the past I voted a lot more for change.
I think I'm voting now more for stability. Well, what
(00:42):
they're teaching the kids in schools, I don't agree with that,
to be honest, I'm a little scared of them. Of
the non gun control that's around. I don't I don't
want to get away, you know, do away with anybody's guns,
but I think there should be some kind of control
with all the children getting killed. I don't really get
(01:02):
too much into it. I don't pay too close attention.
It was clear that folks were thinking about a lot
of hot button topics, but not much about Shasta's recent
political turmoil. Well, some people we talked to understood that
local politics had recently shifted hard to the right. A
(01:23):
lot of folks seemed pretty unaware of what was happening
in their own backyard. That's not unusual, but it did
kind of surprise me because of what a huge deal
the recall had been. It had been two years of chaos,
and I wondered how much of an appetite booters had
for more. But what unfolded over the two days we
(01:46):
spent in Shasta took us in a wildly different direction
from what we expected. For one thing, there was so
much mistrust in government, in media, in elections. What I
saw shook me, and I want to tell you all
about it, especially as we head into the US midterms.
(02:11):
This is Bedrock USA, a podcast about political extremism, small
town life, and the fight for democracy. I'm your host,
Laura Bliss. Real quick, let me just remind you of
what was at stake in Shasta's June seven primary. On
(02:34):
the ballot were two openings on the Board of County Supervisors.
There were also several county department leaders up for reelection,
including the sheriff, the school superintendent, and the county clerk.
A slate of candidates backed by many of the same
folks who led the recall was running for all of
(02:56):
these posts. If they won in a clean sweep, far
right candidates would hold nearly all elected positions in Shasta County,
and the existing majority on the Board of Supervisors, which
had already voted to lift the pandemic state of emergency
and to fire the county Health officer, could be deepened.
(03:19):
On the other hand, moderates and incumbents were also running
for the same spots, and if they won, it might
send a message that the far right wasn't as powerful
as it seemed. Kathy Darling Allen was one of those incumbents.
She was the Shasta County Clerk, which meant she oversaw elections.
(03:40):
Kathy was running to be re elected for the fifth
time in eighteen years. A few days before the primary,
I called her up to see how she was doing,
and Kathy was worried, not so much about her opponent
or her chances of winning, but about the election in general.
(04:01):
I UM, I'm worried. I'm worried about our community. I'm
worried about, you know, at the national level, of the
messaging that we see um around the election and what
that means for elections administration going forward. Including the primaries
(04:24):
in the general election that's going to happen later this year.
I have been called a liar a lot in the
last two years, more than the last two years in
my entire life combined. And that's tough, and I'm not
a liar. Kathy had been called a liar because a
lot of people in Shasta didn't trust the work she did.
(04:48):
And it's not just where she lives. Claims of election
fraud have been sweeping the country, amplified by Donald Trump
claims that judges and elections experts have dismissed again and
again as lacking evidence. Yet a majority of Republican voters
(05:09):
still question the election results, and those doubts are affecting
how people view their hometown election workers, people like Kathy
Hi right, just wondering if either right and just sticking
chatting with us about what brought you out. We met
some election doubters outside one polling location fire station. Kathleen
(05:33):
and I talked to a woman named Ronny Lund who
was volunteering as an election observer that day. She was
deeply concerned about election integrity and recommended I watched a
documentary that claimed the election was stolen. Yeah, you need
to watch it because you know they have definitive proof
(05:55):
of ballot box stuffing, and you know, I that's why
I'm observing today is because I feel like we have
an election integrity problem. And I don't care who gets
voted in as long as it was a fair election
and we had election integrity. This documentary she's talking about
(06:16):
it was referenced numerous times in the January six hearings.
It's called two thousand Mules, and it uses cell phone
location data and dropbox surveillance footage to raise doubts about
Trump's election loss. In fact, Trump himself has promoted the film,
but experts who have reviewed the documentary have concluded that
(06:40):
the claims just don't hold up to scrutiny. Ronnie still
had grave misgivings. When I asked her if she'd spotted
any problems in the election she was observing. She pointed
to a few hiccups that she said we're resolved, but
she was still sure that there were deeper problems with
the system. At eight o'clock, polls closed. Jeremy Edwardson, the
(07:06):
producer of Red, White, and Blueprint, the YouTube series that
had followed and promoted the recall campaign had invited us
to an election party for the candidates backed by the
Liberty Committee. That was the pack that had formed to
support the far right contenders. Its website declared, our country
is under assault. It's time to take it back, one state,
(07:29):
county and city at a time. After the break, we
hit the election party and the night takes a turn.
The party was at Country Strong Faitness, a gym owned
by a prominent recall supporter. We went inside to look
(07:50):
for Jeremy. Tons of people had gathered to watch the
results come in. The energy was buzzy, celebratory, and people
were drinking pretty heavily. A giant American flag hung on
the back wall. We didn't see Jeremy, but we did
immediately spot Patrick Jones. He was in the back of
(08:13):
the room, near big screen TV that showed live election coverage,
holding a microphone like he was about to speak. Now
you may remember Patrick. He was one of the most
outspoken county supervisors who had supported the recall. I talked
to him at the political fundraiser we've been to a
few months earlier. He'd cracked a joke about how they
(08:36):
wouldn't execute any journalists there at the time. Patrick told
me how excited he was that the recall had succeeded
and that people in Shasta County were finally taking action
to shake up their government. Patrick was a big supporter
of the Liberty Committee candidates and was confident about their
(08:56):
chances when we last talked, so we approached him to chat,
but he refused, and he immediately told us we had
to leave. We need truth here tonight. You guys aren't
part of it, you never have been. You're irrelevant. Let's go,
Let's go, just to get answered. Let's go. Patrick physically
(09:18):
escorted us to the door. People were staring. It felt
really uncomfortable at deep mistrust of us as journalists. To
be honest, we were relieved we got outside. We were
trying to decide whether or not to leave when Jeremy
spotted us. Jeremy, how's it go? We were in guarded outs.
(09:44):
I just told all of them that you are my guests,
and then I'll keep working on over because that's ridiculous.
He was apologetic and we stayed chatting with him in
the parking lot for a while. He had just wrapped
up the finale with the Red, White, and Blueprint docuseries,
and aired it at a special event in Humboldt County, California,
(10:08):
where another group was trying to grow a similar movement.
I'm glad that people finally care about local politics. That's
why I started this whole thing with Red, White, and
Blueprint documentary. My goal was to wake people up to
the needle they could actually move instead of just focusing
on the presidency. And I've seen that. It's it's really
(10:31):
really encouraging to see people finally care. I'm just excited
that people are standing up and actually caring about local government.
Around this time, I checked my phone to see if
any early returns had started to come in. They had,
and they did not look good for the Liberty Committee candidates.
(10:52):
Most of them were losing substantially outside in the parking lot,
though the mood didn't change, not yet. People still seem
to be in a party spirit. So Kathleen and I
left to go grab some dinner. But that's when we
missed some pivotal action because while we were eating, folks
(11:13):
at Country Strong Fitness evidently saw the results and some
of them decided to leave the party and to head
downtown straight to the county elections office. By now it
was around ten o'clock. The ballots had all been collected
from drop boxes and precincts. Workers were starting to tabulate
(11:33):
the votes and posting results online. Kathy Darling Allen, the
county clerk, was overseeing things like me. Most of the
reporters who had been on the ground all day had
already left. Ballot counting takes a while and would continue
for several more days. That's the norm for these kinds
of elections. But Donnie Chamberlain, the local journalist you've heard
(11:58):
in earlier episodes, still working. She was at the elections
office taking notes for her report. Later she told us
about what happened that night. I was just kind of
still hanging around. I had this feeling like it wasn't
over yet. And Kathy Darlene came out to the lobby
and she said to me, who wants to scoop? And
(12:18):
I said I do. She goes follow me. So we
went through the elections department through the back door into
the alley, which was all dark, and all the precinct
vehicles are lined up, you know, making their drop off
some ballots. And she points to a it's a trail,
it's a game trail. Camera hidden in a tree right
(12:41):
pointing directly at the back door of the elections department,
and um, she said, as far as they knew, it
wasn't there before. You could see freshly cut branches where
they got. You know, they have fixed it and we
still don't know who put it there, But so that
was kind of the first thing. It was kind of bizarre.
A trail camera, the kind that hunters and scientists use
(13:02):
to take animal photos in the wild, was pointing at
the back door of the elections office. That is pretty bizarre.
Clearly someone didn't trust what was happening inside, Donnie said.
Then the crew from the party rolled up. According to Donnie,
he said, they were there to observe the count, but
(13:23):
some of them got confrontational. They're all walking very rapidly
toward the back door, which was open for workers. Kathy
Darling is still standing there because she was talking about
the camera. Normally she wouldn't have been out there in
the alley. I suspect she had other stuff to do.
And this group came up and they started basically verbally
assaulting Kathy Darling Allen, who, of course, as a city
(13:47):
clerk and registrate our voters one of them, Donnie said,
got right in Cathy's face. You know, at one point,
he's standing so close to her that she is saying,
are you going to touch me? I mean, just back up,
are you going to touch me? And he's he was
quite agitated. These election observers eventually moved upstairs to the
(14:09):
area where ballots are being processed, but according to Donnie,
they weren't just observing. They were disrupting the process, challenging
Cathy on the way she was doing her job, and
getting in the way of staff. Later I talked to
Kathy about this night. She said it was all pretty
upsetting and counterproductive to what she was trying to accomplish.
(14:31):
It's bizarre because there are concerns that were not going
to count the ballots, and I don't think they quite
understand that what's happening right now is actually slowing down
with the count. We're not going to count things faster
um with all these distractions, So we will count as
fast as we can count on the world process as
fast as we can process um with their observation, Cathy
(14:55):
stayed at the office until almost three am. By that point,
she said they were still observers on site a few
of them spent the night in folding chairs outside, and
yet throughout the whole ordeal, Kathy said she did her
best to remain calm. It wasn't always easy, but she
(15:16):
tried to answer questions plainly to provide accurate information. She
really wanted to connect. It's almost like, you know, one
vote or one person at a time, we have to
convert and reassure and reassess and talk about their concerns.
You know, this whole process um of people reading bad
(15:41):
and false information online is my my assumption that that's
most of this is coming from about stuff that happened
in other states. And I don't feel like you had
any But those were those conversations successful with any of
the folks you talked to you last night or three individually?
I think so? Um, But honestly, you know, are they
(16:04):
placating me and smiling and smiling nodding? I don't know.
I don't know these people really personally, you know, so
I just have not going to judge whether we've been
effective or not. We'll we'll continue to try. Um and
gendering trustment process is a huge priority for us. And
you know, one of the ways we know being condescending,
(16:29):
being shaming people for having believed things about the election.
Um is not going to help them change their mind. Right. Yet,
the onslaught of doubt and denial was having an impact.
It was demoralizing, Cathy said, and that's a widespread feeling
(16:50):
in her field right now. In one recent national survey,
one in five local election officials said they were likely
to quit. The credibility of elections and the people who
facilitate them are under attack all over the country. More
on that after the break. My name is Matthew Wile,
(17:24):
and I am the executive director of the Democracy Program
at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, d C. I
called up Matthew to hear more about how election in
nihilism and conspiracy theories are affecting the voting process and
democracy overall. In many states and counties, the laws around
(17:44):
the election observation are pretty fuzzy, he said, and people
who don't have all the information about what's going on
can easily misinterpret what they're seeing and that really keeps
them up at night. I think the laws are still
very gray. Um, what is allowable, the capacity, how many
people you can have, and certainly what we learned in
(18:09):
was that observation without any kind of training or context
provided by people who know what they're looking at, leads
to this information. Matthew gave the example of Fulton County, Georgia,
where Trump supporters used video footage of a pair of
election workers, a mother and daughter named Ruby Freeman and
(18:31):
Shay Moss, to spread lies about election fraud. Afterwards, those
women who recently testified in the January six hearings were
targeted and harassed relentlessly. They received death threats, one of
their homes was broken into. This is what Matthew was
worried about now, the thread of distrust if my candidate
(18:56):
loses and so the election officials are barren the brunt
of those threats, and since we've seen a huge amount
of turnover in those local election officials, not only is
their turnover among these officials, but some of the folks
running to take their places are themselves election deniers. Matthew said,
(19:18):
even though the laws and provisions around election integrity have
only gotten stronger, not weaker over the last two decades,
but he doesn't expect the lies and conspiracy theories to
go away anytime soon. If people keep losing the faith
in the system, things could get really ugly, he said.
(19:41):
If people don't have confidence in the basic premise that
the people who are in office are there legitimately, the
laws they passed, the policies they make are kind of
by default and not legitimate either, and that that's a
pretty dangerous spiral. So I do think that we've taken
our elections for granted, you know, for most of our history,
(20:03):
for over to undre years. I think there's been a
surge since you know, Florida two thousand two to focus
a lot more on it, to professionalize the field, and
we've been doing that, but we are under attack again.
And I don't think that anyone will like the results
of a nation that cannot trust their election apparatus, because
(20:23):
it's just going to leads it up, you know, the
kind of death spiral of democracy that we don't we
don't want to enter into. When Kathleen and I woke
up and learned what happened the night before, we jumped
in the car to head back to the Shasta County
Elections office. Soon after we got there, a group of
(20:43):
women showed up to observe the count staff members opened
the doors to the building and gave us all a
visitor badges and we followed the group inside to the
room where the ballots are being sorted. This room, it
was kind of amazing. There were stacks of bins filled
with ballots dropped off the night before. Workers were opening
(21:06):
them up and counting the number of ballots. They were
pulling off the special tabs that covered voters signatures so
they could run them the resorting machine called the Agilus.
This all had to happen before the actual votes were
counted by another machine, but that was in a different
room upstairs, which the election staff lovingly called the bat Cave.
(21:28):
Just taken all the supplies, so all the supplies from
the poll workers that weren't dropped off last night, they
have to organize all those and then they're taking them
upstairs to the warehouse upstairs that holds all the supplies
from the flying places upstairs. That was Anna Rodriguez election
office staffer who explained all of this. She had been
working there nearly fifteen years, and she fielded many questions
(21:52):
from the group of observers. It seemed like people genuinely
wanted to understand the process. One woman asked about the
bins did election workers only break the seals on them
once they're ready to process the ballots inside. They wait
until they in the process. It correct because there's a
control sheet on top of that bin, and so we
just want to make sure it's telling us where those
(22:13):
came from, right, So we don't want to more congloberate everything.
We want to make sure that that bin is processed
and done before we open the next bin. Yes, but
the most part, things were pretty cordial between Anna and
this group of observers. She was patient, matter of fact friendly,
but it was clear that not everyone in the room
(22:33):
really trusted the process. At one point, one observer asked
Anna about a set of bins that she believed was missing.
It turned out everything was where it was supposed to be,
but it was a tense moment. Soon after that, a
familiar face walked in, Richard Galardo, the guy we had
(22:55):
met manning the security booth outside the political fundraiser you
heard in early her episode. He was here to observe
the ballot count, and he'd been here yesterday too. You
were here last night, right all day yesterday. I was
here last night and I watched the drama. Unfortunately, so um,
(23:17):
some people are just very passionate, you know what I mean.
I was very passionate about flex integrity. Richard told us
he had a lot of concerns. He thought it was
a conflict of interest for Kathy Darling Allen to run
for clerk while also overseeing the election. He thought she
should recuse herself. So when I asked Kathy about this later,
(23:41):
she told me this scenario is perfectly legal under state law.
But Richard didn't like that Cathy followed other California election laws,
like providing ballot drop boxes, which he thought increased the
potential for fraud, even though there's no evidence for that.
I'm not saying the fraud he happens under her watch,
(24:01):
but she's aware that the fraud is increased if she
follows all of the laws, even though she has discretion
to not follow something that is a big problem with
Kathie Allen. We said goodbye to Richard to head upstairs
with the rest of the group to another ballot counting room,
and I thought about his fear that fraud could occur
(24:24):
even if it wasn't. I wondered how Anna felt she
fielded all these questions. We rode in the elevator with
her while others took the stairs. It's a tough spot
because you're serving your community and you know, you know
(24:45):
what you know. But it's good. I'm glad folks are
here and they're asking questions. I think it's important we're
doing it for them. Do you feel like their conversations,
this relationship you're golding is helping. I hope. So it's
hard though, because you don't know um their version of
it when they leave. So you hope what you're seeing
(25:07):
is what that's my hope, you know. All right. Up
on the second floor, we stood with the observers for
a while, looking through the plexiglass window into the bat
cave where people's votes actually get counted. Witnessing this all,
it was kind of profound. There was such a ritual
(25:30):
to it, so many specially ordained bins and tables and rooms.
It was like being inside the inner sanctum of democracy.
You couldn't get any closer. And yet, even being that
close to the source of their uncertainty, observers we met
still had doubts. They just couldn't fully trust what they
(25:54):
were seeing, even with their own eyes. In July, the
final results were tallied and the county certified the election
for almost all of the positions Clerk, Superintendent, d A. Sheriff.
The incumbents one with big majorities that met the far
(26:14):
right candidates lost in the end. Maybe a lot of
Shasta County voters were sick of the political drama, or
another explanation, a lot of folks might have just picked
the most familiar names. It's common for voters to favor incumbents,
But folks continued to question those results at county board
(26:36):
meetings and on social media. Some of the same folks
we met inside the elections office and who had been
there the night before expressed they still weren't confident in
the process. And there were also two races that would
go to a runoff in November, and those were the
two seats on the county board. If the Liberty Committee
(26:59):
candidates one either of them, the Board of Supervisors would
retain its far right majority. Clearly, Shasta's wild ride wasn't
over yet. All through this series, we've been asking one
big question, how our extremist ideologies reshaping life in local communities.
(27:22):
I've gotten a lot of answers. I've seen how conspiracy
theories and radical ideologies disrupt the normal functions of local government.
I've seen how threats and intimidation silence neighbors, and I've
seen how confrontations and harassment are pushing elected officials and
(27:43):
civil servants to the break. All throughout, one major theme
has permeated this story, and that is mistrust. Mistrust and
government and media. In science, we've seen how that mistrust
drove large numbers of people to reject pandemic guidelines, to
(28:04):
reject the election results, and to reject mainstream news sources.
And at the local level and the stories you've just heard,
we've also seen how it causes people to reject each other.
So is it possible to rebuild that trust. I don't
(28:25):
know the answer to that question. But when I asked
Cathy about all the scrutiny that she and her staff
are facing right now, she said something interesting. For all
the harm created by the mistrust and doubt, she also
thought there was a tiny silver lining. We need people
(28:46):
to get off the couch and pay attention to what
government's doing at all levels. That's that's that's not a
bad thing. Sometimes I don't think this group understands it.
I'm with them on that I'm a citizen here too.
I'm a taxpayer here, I'm a voter here in this community.
I don't want people doing backroom deals and um being
unethical in power. That's not okay. Maybe that's why I
(29:09):
am so willing to kind of go over and above
and explain and explain and walk around and explain and
talk about you know, I just I really really want
folks to understand how this process works and to know
that they're included. They have to be included. All people,
Cathy said, are part of the process because that's how
(29:30):
democracy works. That's the system she believes in, and we'll
fight for so long as she's county clerk, she said.
On the other hand, just because you can participate in
democracy doesn't give you a free pass to try and
tear it down. When I spoke to her a few
weeks later, Kathy told me that in the next election,
(29:54):
she's going to spend less time giving attention to anyone
who tries to attack her office because she started to
accept that she and her staff can't reach everybody, no
matter how patient and informative they are. She said, she
can't compete with the louder voices, the ones who are
falsely claiming that elections cannot be trusted Right now, those
(30:18):
kinds of claims could be leading the United States to
a scary place. And it's striking how it only takes
a small group to spread ideas like that. Democracy is
surprisingly pliable, isn't it. It's so easily bent and reshaped
by the people with the loudest voices and the deepest pockets.
(30:40):
But it also means that, at least at the local level,
it can be bent back. That concludes this part of
the series. We're going to leave the stories of Squim
and Shasta there for now. We'll be back in the
fall with more episodes of bed Rocky USA, but sadly
I won't be back to host them. I'm going to
(31:02):
do a year long journalism fellowship at m I T.
For the next year, I'll be studying the science of
cities alongside an amazing cohort of fellow reporters. But you'll
be in great hands with our team of Bloomberg journalists
and producers. From the bottom of my heart, thank you
to everyone who has listened and supported the series. You
(31:23):
can find me on Twitter at ms Laura Bliss. This
episode was reported and hosted by me Laura Bliss. Kathleen
Quillian is our senior producer. Samantha Story is our story
editor and executive producer. We had additional editing help from
Nicole Flato, original music and scoring by Zachary Walter, and
(31:46):
audio engineering by Blake Maples. Jennifer Sondag is head of
Bloomberg City Lab. Bed Rock USA is a production of
Bloomberg City Lab and I Heart Radio. For more podcasts
from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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