Election deniers, officials gearing for fight over U.S. midterms

Various "Stop the Steal" groups, which sprung up in the wake of the 2020 election, have encouraged supporters to organize armed stake-outs at dropbox voting locations.

Ten election inspectors sit around a table in the basement of the Clerk’s office in Canton, Michigan, learning de-escalation techniques. The building itself has been upgraded with new security measures, and four police officers are now assigned to patrol the township’s 12 polling locations on Midterm Election Day.

“Since 2020, emergency planning and security planning has been a key function of election planning. That was not the case prior, but it is the case now,” said Canton Clerk Michael Siegrist, who recently published a manual for maintaining order on Election Day.

Siegrist, a Democrat, is one of many Americans from across the political spectrum who see the midterms on Nov. 8 as a crucial test for American democracy. And they’ve spent the past two years preparing for a fight.

“Since 2020, there are people who have been out there doing push-ups, getting stronger, doing everything they can to try to understand the system for the sole purpose of probing it for weaknesses,” Siegrist told Global News. “We used to only receive that from foreign governments.”

Siegrist’s Canton Township is just a short drive from Detroit, which has become the epicentre of conspiracy theories around election fraud. On Nov. 5, 2020, one day after the last U.S. presidential election, angry crowds answered Donald Trump’s call to “stop the count” by forcing their way into Detroit’s TCF convention centre where poll workers were counting the ballots.

“There was an influx of people that came in that had no (elections) training and were very ginned up on trying to stop things,” said Chris Thomas, who was working as an elections supervisor at the TCF Centre. “They’re banging on windows and yelling at the workers. So we had a bit of a chaotic time.”

Thomas, 73, has dedicated his life to elections integrity. He spent nearly four decades leading the elections division in the office of Michigan’s secretary of state, serving under Republicans and Democrats alike and forging a reputation as a nonpartisan elections expert.

He retired in 2017 but was asked to return on a special assignment in 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic and President Trump’s warnings of a Democratic plot to steal the election. Thomas will be coming out of retirement again on Nov. 8 to help protect the process from “election deniers.”