News

(NEW YORK) — After officials in Nye County, Nevada, accepted a pitch from a Republican nominee for secretary of state to stop using voting machines for the general election and move to hand counting instead, long-time county clerk Sam Merlino decided to walk away from the job she loved.

For Merlino, a Republican, the move was the last straw as her county continued to be consumed by unsubstantiated conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.

“It was just so disheartening after everyone had put in so much hard work, and then to have everybody question what we’ve been doing for years,” Merlino, who resigned two weeks ago, told ABC News. “I loved working with the voters, I was always at a polling place on Election Day. I loved the process.”

Since the 2020 election, states across the country have seen a slow exodus of election officials prompted by an unprecedented level of misinformation, harassment and threats, according to election experts and officials.

And now, with only three months until Election Day, election offices in at least nine states including Colorado, Arizona, Nevada, Texas and New Jersey have seen a new wave of departures and early retirements, ABC News has learned.

Elizabeth Howard, senior counsel for the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan think tank that tracks election rules, told ABC News that the loss of so many local election officials is a “significant concern” because “there’s a huge amount of institutional knowledge that we are losing across the country.”

“Election administration has grown increasingly complex over the past few decades, and election officials are perpetually trying to balance technology with accuracy and reliability, and have an accurate voter registration list and make it as easy as possible for eligible voters to cast a ballot that’s accurately counted,” Howard said.

‘We can’t get our real work done’

In Gillespie County, Texas, the county’s entire three-person election department resigned last week due to threats and misinformation, a staffer told the Fredericksburg Standard.

“It is concerning that it’s happening this close to an election and that now the county officials are scrambling to put together a team that is going to be qualified and trained to run the election in November,” said Sam Taylor, spokesperson for Texas Secretary of State John Scott.

Taylor told ABC News that Texas has seen a 30% turnover rate among county officials over the past two years, with several officials across the state resigning due to threats of violence.

In a report released this month by the U.S. House Oversight and Reform Committee, election administrators expressed concerns about staffing ahead of the midterms.

“[T]he job of an Election Official has changed dramatically over the years and it’s not a position that just anyone can learn in a few short months,” Arizona election officials said in the report. “It takes years to become an industry expert. The fact so many of us are leaving the field should concern every person across the country.”

The report detailed how false claims of election fraud in the 2020 election have led election administrators to face a combination of threats, lawsuits and misinformation that one election official said were “distracting us to the point where we can’t get our real work done.”

‘Disrespect and disdain’

Efforts to discredit and overturn election results have been fueled and supported on a national scale by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, who pushed false conspiracy theories about the 2020 election after Donald Trump lost his reelection bid. This past weekend, Lindell hosted the “Moment of Truth Summit,” where hundreds of people gathered in Springfield, Missouri, to hear him and other election deniers rail against voting machines and discuss their ongoing efforts to contest the 2020 vote by, among other things, petitioning election officials for voting machine information and election data.

Among those who appeared at the event virtually was Colorado county clerk Tina Peters, who became a leading figure in the election denier movement last year when she was accused of and then indicted on election tampering charges after authorities say the election software she used for her county wound up in the hands of a consultant, and screenshots of the software appeared on right-wing websites. Peters pleaded not guilty in early August.

Peters, who in June lost the Republican primary in her bid to become Colorado secretary of state, detailed for summit attendees how she had paid for a recount in that race, and urged them to be “courageous” in confronting election results.

“Tina Peters lost, started talking about fraud and how election officials are in on it,” Matt Crane, the director of the Colorado County Clerks Association, told ABC News. “She lost by 15 points and yet she still requested a recount that’s taken time away from clerks who would have otherwise been working to prepare for the general election. All of that continues to put pressure on clerks.”

Like many other states, Crane said that Colorado has seen election officials resign or retire early, ahead of the November election.

In Florida, Supervisor of Elections Mark Early told ABC News that election officials in the state have “felt the hate” from 2020 election deniers.

“It’s the disrespect and the disdain that your neighbor might have for you nowadays,” Early said. “Now the threats are out there and people are looking at you out of the corner of their eye and just kind of shaking their head or just very blatantly coming up to you and saying negative things, even if it’s not a death threat.”

“All of this is taking a toll on our ability to conduct elections,” explained Early, who said there have been numerous resignations and early retirements. “We’re losing staff members.”

A former Georgia election worker testified at the House Jan. 6 hearings in late June that after former President Trump and his lawyers spread lies about her actions counting Georgia 2020 ballots, violent threats toward her and her family forced her out of her job.

“It’s turned my life upside down. I no longer give out my business card … I don’t want anyone knowing my name,” Wandrea Moss testified.

As more and more election administration posts are left empty, Howard said a recent Brennan Center survey showed that officials are concerned about who’s going to take the place of those leaving.

“Some of the election officials are concerned that the people that are going to replace the outgoing election officials believe the lies that have been told about how our elections run and are not going to understand how the system actually works,” Howard said. “Certainly, if you have somebody that is an election denier that’s responsible for running the election, that’s a concern.”

Even more concerning, Howard said, is that she expects another exodus of election workers after the 2022 election cycle — potentially leaving even more vacancies ahead of the 2024 presidential cycle.

‘It’s just too much’

Nevada, too, has seen a wave of resignations in at least half a dozen counties over the last few months as election deniers continue to challenge the 2020 results.

While numerous departing officials cite non-work-related issues as the reason for their departure, many point to how difficult their jobs have become over the last two years as they’ve faced increased scrutiny and mounting hostility from skeptics.

Last month, Washoe County Registrar of Voters Deanna Spikula resigned after 15 years with the registrar’s office. She told the Nevada Independent in January that she had received death threats and was concerned for the safety of her front-line election workers who face voters in person.

At the time, Spikula said she had already lost one staff member to another county department, but that she loved her job and was remaining in her position. But six months later — two weeks after Nevada held its state primary — she submitted her resignation.

“It’s just too much,” Washoe County Communications Manager Bethany Drysdale said of the harassment that local election workers have faced over the past few months, including being followed to their cars and being called “traitors.”

“It’s really difficult to pull the really long hours and face the animosity from the public,” Drysdale said. “Our interim registrar of voters is really focused on keeping hours down and making sure that nobody is too overwhelmed or too overworked leading up to the election, so they can really be here and give it their all during the election.”

In Pennsylvania, Berks County Elections Director Paige Riegner submitted her resignation this month following May’s state primary, after the Pennsylvania Department of State sued Berks and two other counties for excluding mail-in ballots that didn’t have the date handwritten on the security envelope.

And in Pennsylvania’s Luzerne County, election director Michael Susek resigned last month after only eight months on the job, to go work for an organization “committed to advancing election integrity and the profession as a whole on a national level,” according to local reports. His departure made him the state’s fourth county election director to step down since 2019.

‘Just overwhelming’

Robin Major, the Board of Elections administrator in Monmouth County, New Jersey, said that for small local election offices, losing just one or two staffers can put a significant strain on the department.

Major told ABC News that in recent months her office has lost two out of its eight staff members, with one of them retiring and another going to work in a different department.

“I think we’re seeing it across the state,” Major said. “We have seen a number of colleagues in our professional association who have decided to retire because the amount of work is just overwhelming and we’re not properly compensated” — a situation Major said has been exacerbated by a new statewide mandate requiring counties to conduct an election audit after every general election.

Major also said that “people questioning things” has put an extra burden on her office.

We’re getting an increased number of requests on a daily basis that are just impossible to fulfill,” she said. “So that puts on a lot of pressure, also, while you’re trying to run an election.”

Sylvia Albert, the director of voting and elections at the liberal watchdog group Common Cause, said that the increased retirements and resignations mean that the country must invest in “the infrastructure to train the next generation of election workers.”

“We’re going to run an election and we’re going to make sure people can vote — we’re just going to have to use all hands on deck,” she said of the upcoming midterms. “But we should be looking towards a long-term solution of proper investment in the election system.”

Copyright © 2022, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(WASHINGTON) — The Pennsylvania Senate race took a heated — and personal — turn on Tuesday as an aide to Dr. Mehmet Oz, the Republican nominee and former cardiothoracic surgeon who for years offered medical advice as a popular TV host, was quoted derisively blaming Democratic opponent John Fetterman for his own stroke.

“If John Fetterman had ever eaten a vegetable in his life, then maybe he wouldn’t have had a major stroke and wouldn’t be in the position of having to lie about it constantly,” Oz communications adviser Rachel Tripp said in a statement, first reported by Insider, responding to Fetterman’s attacks on Oz as elitist and out of touch.

The Oz campaign comment drew immediate reaction on social media, including from Fetterman, who tweeted, “I know politics can be nasty, but even then, I could *never* imagine ridiculing someone for their health challenges.”

“I had a stroke. I survived it. I’m truly so grateful to still be here today,” he added.

Fetterman — who told a local outlet in 2018, when he was mayor of a small Pittsburgh suburb, that he had lost nearly 150 pounds by adopting a diet that included more vegetables — acknowledged in the days after the stroke in May that he “should have taken my health more seriously.”

But the tone of Tripp’s statement was deemed inappropriate by a group of pro-Fetterman physicians who earlier spoke out against Oz at an event organized by Fetterman’s campaign.

“No real doctor, or any decent human being, to be honest, would ever mock a stroke victim who is recovering from that stroke in the way that Dr. Oz is mocking John Fetterman,” Dr. Valerie Arkoosh, the Democratic chair of the board of commissioners in Montgomery County, said in a statement provided on Tuesday by a Fetterman spokeswoman.

The Oz campaign doubled down, however, telling ABC News in a statement late Tuesday: “Nice try. Dr. Oz has been urging people to eat more veggies for years. That’s not ridicule. It’s good health advice. We’re only trying to help.”

The latest salvo — in a race in a battleground state that could tip control of Congress — represents a departure from Oz’s other lines of attack since Fetterman’s stroke, which have involved largely dancing around it by jeering at Fetterman for his absence from the trail without referencing what sidelined him.

Oz had struck an even more sympathetic tone immediately after Fetterman announced his stroke. He tweeted then: “I am thankful that you received care so quickly. My whole family is praying for your speedy recovery.”

“I think he just had it,” Stacy Garrity, the state treasurer and a co-chair of Oz’s campaign, told ABC News on Tuesday night. “I think he just got tired. He’s probably tired of hearing about veggies,” she said, referring to the Fetterman team’s repeated swipes over a video showing Oz shopping for vegetables to make crudités and criticizing Democrats for grocery prices.

The volley of statements threatened to overshadow Fetterman’s separate appearance on Tuesday afternoon in Pittsburgh to tout a key labor endorsement — only his second public campaign stop since his stroke. With many eyes still on his health, he spoke for roughly four-and-a-half minutes and exhibited patterns similar to those he showed at a rally in Erie earlier this month, speaking often in choppy sentences. (He told a newspaper last month that he was working with a speech therapist as he recovered.)

Amid now-routine jokes about the “crudités” video and Oz’s residential history outside of Pennsylvania, Fetterman also pledged to “stand with the union way of life” before exiting the venue without answering a group of reporters who flanked him as he walked.

Among those ignored questions was whether Fetterman would agree to debate Oz this fall, an issue Oz has hammered in recent days as Fetterman has remained largely mum about his plans to share a stage with his opponent.

“We’ve said we’re open to debating Oz,” Joe Calvello, a spokesman, said in response to a question that a reporter posed to Fetterman.

Oz’s campaign says he has agreed to five debates, including one on Sep. 6. Fetterman’s campaign says it refuses to set a schedule on Oz’s terms.

But according to a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette report, the campaign has yet to respond to an invitation emailed nearly a month ago to both campaigns by a politics editor at KDKA, a TV station in Pittsburgh planning the Sep. 6 debate.

Oz has accepted the invitation, the station’s news director told the Post-Gazette.

Asked by ABC News to respond to that report, a Fetterman spokesperson sent a statement from Rebecca Katz, a senior adviser to the campaign, who called Oz’s focus on debates “an obvious attempt to change the subject during yet another bad week for Dr. Oz.”

Copyright © 2022, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(WASHINGTON) — As another deadline nears on the restart of payments for America’s $1.7 trillion in federal student loans, President Joe Biden is poised to decide whether to cancel debt for a subset of Americans and continue to keep a pandemic-era pause on the repayments — a sweeping move he has openly weighed in some form or another since his time as a candidate.

Without action, numerous Americans will — for the first time in two years — have to start paying their student loans on Sept. 1.

But multiple people familiar with White House policy discussions told ABC News that the loan pause, first put in place under President Donald Trump during the disruptions of COVID-19’s onset, is expected to be extended. Talks about debt cancellation, which were still underway Tuesday, have so far coalesced around forgiving approximately $10,000 for people who make less than $125,000 a year — though details are still being worked out.

An announcement on the federal student loans could come as early as Wednesday, sources familiar with the plan said.

In an interview on Tuesday afternoon, U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona told ABC News that the much-anticipated decision on loan forgiveness would come “soon” but was vague on details.

“We recognize it’s an important issue for many families. And we want to make sure that they get the information directly from the president,” Cardona said.

The White House did not confirm any further details, saying only that the president would have more to say on this before Aug. 31.

“As a reminder, no one with a federally-held loan has had to pay a single dime in student loans since President Biden took office, and this Administration has already canceled about $32 billion in debt for more than 1.6 million Americans — more than any Administration in history,” White House spokesman Abdullah Hasan said, referring to debt relief for people who went to fraudulent universities and a restructured program to forgive debt for people who work in public service for 10 years.

But more specific details on how much money will be forgiven and for who are in high demand for the more than 45 million Americans who still have federal student loan debt.

One-third of federal loan borrowers have less than $10,000, meaning they could see their debts completely wiped out should this policy come to fruition. Another 20% of borrowers, around nine million people, would have their debt at least slashed in half.

Such a major cancelation may seem like a big step for Biden to take without Congress, but legal and policy experts say it’s clearer: The move would be well within the president’s authority — it just hasn’t been wielded before because of the political implications.

“The president has some pretty broad authority under the Higher Education Act,” said John Brooks, a law professor at Fordham University who focuses on federal fiscal policy.

“A lot depends on the size of the cancellation. The smaller the amount of cancellation, the easier the question is,” Brooks said. “Wiping out all student debt with a single stroke might be tougher, but the president through the secretary of education does have the power to adjust the amount of loan principle that any borrower has.”

Still, Biden could get taken to court — possibly by loan servicing agencies who would lose revenue or by members of Congress who may believe Biden is spending money in a way that hasn’t been appropriated by legislators.

Outside experts also wonder how long the processes would take to cancel student loans once a policy is announced — and how complicated it would be for borrowers to work their way through it, which are details that have yet to be released.

Some fear that people might fall through the cracks if applications to cancel debt become too labor-intensive because of the prospective income cap.

“The White House is about to ask the Education Department to do something that is extraordinarily difficult, and that is going to have the effect of denying debt relief to low-income folks, economically vulnerable folks, who have the hardest time navigating these complicated paperwork processes,” Mike Pierce, executive director and co-founder of the Student Borrower Protection Center, a think-tank that advocates for universal debt cancellation, told ABC News in an interview.

Pierce and other supporters for more progressive debt cancellation, including the NAACP, said the smoothest path would include full and universal cancellation for everyone.

“If the rumors are true, we’ve got a problem. And tragically, we’ve experienced this so many times before,” NAACP President Derrick Johnson said in a statement Tuesday, reacting to the details of the potential policy announcement.

“President Biden’s decision on student debt cannot become the latest example of a policy that has left Black people – especially Black women – behind. This is not how you treat Black voters who turned out in record numbers and provided 90% of their vote to once again save democracy in 2020,” Johnson said.

But for many borrowers and advocates for canceling student debt — particularly the nearly half of people with federal student loans who would see their debt extinguished or cut significantly — Biden’s policy would still be cause for major celebration and be seen as a start to reforming the college and university system, where rising costs have become a major area of focus.

For Michigan teacher Nick Fuller, a possible Biden announcement on student loans could come just before the financial crunch of winter, when his heating bills skyrocket.

Though Fuller worked hard his first few years out of school to pay down his school debt, and then had his loan frozen for much of the pandemic, he’s concerned that restarting payments on top of monthly living costs could put him over the edge.

“I think things will get really tight in the winter because my utility bills are higher,” Fuller told ABC News. “I mean for January and February — the highs are zero and the lows are -20 [degrees] for almost two months.”

The frozen temperatures might sting a little bit less if Biden forgives $10,000 of Fuller’s remaining student loan bills, he said.

“It’s about two-thirds of the debt that I have left,” he said.

That would make payments “a lot more affordable and a lot more manageable in my situation,” he said.

Easing the student debt crisis — which is also how Trump Education Secretary Betsy DeVos described the issue in 2018 — could also aid a crippling teacher shortage that has caused thousands of staff vacancies at the start of the latest school year, something Fuller has seen himself.

Pinched salaries and rising inflation have had many teachers on edge with the loan forgiveness deadline approaching.

And because Black students are among the fastest growing group of people taking on debt, advocates argue that canceling some student loans could also begin to address racial inequities.

Shareefah Mason, the dean of Educator Certification at Dallas College, feels this impact firsthand as a Black woman with student debt. She leads the apprenticeship component of a program that pairs students with residency partners to ensure they earn while they learn, effectively reducing education debt for aspiring teachers.

“I bear the weight of $70,000 in student loans,” Mason told ABC News. “The data shows that student loan debt exponentially impacts and disproportionately impacts Black women.”

The average amount of student debt accrued by Black women is more than any other group at $38,800, according to Education Trust, a nonprofit focused on education reform.

But Mason’s program, the very first full-time paid teacher apprenticeship in the state of Texas, allows students to earn one of the cheapest bachelor’s degrees in the state, Mason said.

The goal, she said, is to aid future educators in breaking the generational barriers that she has faced as a Black woman.

Mason said “they will not have to worry about student loan debt,” which could open more doors for minority communities that have historically lacked the means to access higher education.

“My students will be able to earn, as a first year teacher in the city of Dallas, upwards of $60,000,” Mason said.

For the nation’s most impacted borrowers, Mason said, “there needs to be a space created for them to make enough money to pay their student loans without having to sacrifice their ability to create generational wealth for their families.”

Copyright © 2022, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.