The Sunday Read: ‘A Republican Election Clerk vs. Trump Die-Hards in a World of Lies’

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 14 July 2024

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Cindy Elgan glanced into the lobby of her office and saw a sheriff’s deputy waiting at the front counter. “Let’s start a video recording, just in case this goes sideways,” Elgan, 65, told one of her employees in the Esmeralda County clerk’s office. She had come to expect skepticism, conspiracy theories and even threats related to her job as an election administrator. She grabbed her annotated booklet of Nevada state laws, said a prayer for patience and walked into the lobby to confront the latest challenge to America’s electoral process. The deputy was standing alongside a woman that Elgan recognized as Mary Jane Zakas, 77, a longtime elementary schoolteacher and a leader in the local Republican Party. She often asked for a sheriff’s deputy to accompany her to the election’s office, in case her meetings became contentious. “I hope you’re having a blessed morning,” Zakas said. “Unfortunately, a lot of people are still very concerned about the security of their votes. They’ve lost all trust in the system.” After the 2020 election, former President Donald J. Trump’s denials and accusations of voter fraud spread outward from the White House to even the country’s most remote places, like Esmeralda County. Elgan knew most of the 620 voters in the town. Still, they accused her of being paid off and skimming votes away from Trump. And even though their allegations came with no evidence, they wanted her recalled from office before the next presidential election in November.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, my name is Eli Saslow, and I'm a writer at large for the New York Times.
0:17.0	As a journalist who spends most of my time out in the country talking to voters, I hear about election denialism constantly.
0:25.4	This is not some far-flung conspiracy theory. A third of people who are in our
0:30.5	Congress right now and more than 60% of Republicans in the United States
0:34.7	believe that Joe Biden was fraudulently elected. They do not believe in elections.
0:39.9	They think our democracy is fundamentally broken and not working.
0:43.8	I wanted to try to understand that better, and also to understand what it meant in places
0:49.2	when they had lost all faith in elections and in our ability to run them.
0:56.5	So I started calling election administrators all around America.
1:01.1	I became particularly interested in Nevada because it's a swing state where
1:05.2	potentially every vote matters, every county matters, and it's also a place where some of
1:10.9	these conspiratorial ideas about what's happening in our elections have taken deep root.
1:17.2	So I started talking to more than a dozen clerks around the state.
1:25.6	What I learned from many of these clerks was that their lives had become massively difficult and their jobs frankly had become a living
1:30.7	hell. Death threats are relatively common. All kinds of skepticism from
1:36.0	people that they meet in the grocery stores in these small towns where they know
1:39.9	the voters and the voters still believe about them that they're doing a bad job.
1:45.2	But the phone call that shocked me the most
1:47.7	was when I reached out to a woman named Cindy Elgin,
1:50.6	who's the clerk in Esmeralda County. It's a really small place. Everybody knows
1:56.2	everybody. The whole county has less than a thousand people. And it's a place that voted
2:02.2	82% for President Donald Trump in 2020.
	...

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