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Hi, my name is Eli Sasslow, and I'm a writer at large for the New York Times. As a journalist who spends most of my time out in the country talking to voters, I hear about election denialism constantly. This is not some far-flung conspiracy theory. A third of people who are in our Congress right now, and more than 60% of Republicans in the United States believe that Joe Biden was fraudulently elected. They do not believe in elections. They think our democracy is fundamentally broken and not working. I wanted to try to understand that better and also to understand what it meant in places when they had lost all faith in elections and in our ability to run them. So I calling election administrators all around America. I became particularly interested in Nevada because it's a swing state where potentially every vote matters, every county matters, and it's also a place where some of these conspiratorial ideas about what's happening in our elections have taken deep root. So I started talking to more than a dozen clerks around the state. What I learned from many of these clerks was that their lives had become massively difficult, and their jobs, frankly, had become a living hell.

Death threats are relatively common. All kinds of skepticism from people that they meet in the grocery stores, in these small towns where they know the voters and the voters still believe about them that they're doing a bad job. But the phone call that shocked me the most was when I reached out to a woman named Cindy Elgin, who's the clerk in Esmeralda County. It's a really small place. Everybody knows everybody. The whole county has less than a thousand people, and it's a place that voted 82% for President Donald Trump in 2020. Cindy, the elected Republican County clerk, has been a major leader in this community for a long time. She's had her job for 20 years. Everybody always thought she was doing it well. She helped start the annual rodeo. She hosts the local Thanksgiving, where dozens of people come every single year. It's the main community event. And Cindy herself is a Republican who flies a Donald Trump flag in front of her house. And yet now, because of these deeply seeded, conspiratorial ideas about elections, people in her county started to distrust the machines. Then they'd come to distrust the people who were doing the counting.

They wanted hand counting. They'd come to distrust all these phases of the process. And as this tide got louder and louder and louder, they then started to distrust Cindy. When I first reached out to Cindy, she said, What's happening to me right now is they're trying to recall me from office. Her friends, her neighbors, these people who she'd hosted at Thanksgiving, had instead become convinced that she was a tool of the deep state cabal who was trying to skim votes away from Trump in this far-flung county in umbilical cord, Zekas asked. She believed it only because she had experienced many similar revelations during the last few years, ever since she heeded Trump's warnings about the, corrupt, lying mainstream media and decided to disconnect her television.Her friends introduced her to far-right media platforms online, like Mike Lindell's Frank Speech and The Elijah List, where each day she listened to a rotation of self-proclaimed patriots, biblical prophets, and also sometimes political figures like Lara Trump. They offered Zekus not only conspiratorial ideas, but also the promise of a community that extended far beyond the loneliness of her house, with a grandfather clock ticking away in the living room and views out the window of an emptyness that stretched clear into California. Each day, something urgent was happening in the far corners of the Internet, something big and dark and secret, and that knowledge fueled her days with both purpose and agency. She came to believe, along with millions of others, that COVID was a creation of the federal government used to manipulate the public and steal elections. That two doses of the vaccine would make men infertile. That Trump had been anointed to lead a, quote, government cleansing. That fighting had already begun in underground military tunnels. That Trump's election in 2024 was preordained by God. That he would return to power with loads of gold collected from other countries that had capitulated to his power.That during his next term, Americans would have free electricity, zero income tax, and MedBed, powered by a secret technology that could harness natural energy to heal diseases and extend human life, and that the only thing standing in the way of this future was a deep state so malicious and vast that its roots extended all the way into tiny Esmeralda County. The whole idea for Cindy and the rest of them is to cripple Trump, Zekas said. That little tyrant, Wise, said, We have no idea how many votes they're skimming. But Cindy sure does, Zekas said.Overtake your expectations with the arrival of the brand new, fully electric Audi Q6 e-tron, available exclusively for 242 ordering. The new launch edition Audi Q6 e-tron, with a range of up to 570 kilometers, also features a complementary upgrade design package, included in the monthly rate of €698. All roads lead to your new Audi Q6 e-tron. Terms and conditions apply. Audi. Vorsprungdurchtechnik.When their allegations weren't forcing her out of bed with nausea late at night or inducing another panic attack or prompting her husband to search for real estate in California. Elgin sometimes found herself laughing at the sheer absurdity of the county's transformation. For as long as she could remember, nobody had been interested in her job. She sometimes ran for re-election unopposed. What does a clerk even do? Her friend sometimes asked. The county had such a nonchalant, trusting relationship with elections that once, after two candidates tied for Commissioner in 2002, they settled the race by drawing cards from a deck. But now, two decades later, Elgin was being flooded by emails asking about the license plate numbers of her poll workers and the temperature data of her equipment storage room. Major violation concerns, read the subject line of one recent email, which listed dozens of obscure legal statutes and codes. Nrs 293b. Nrs 1960. 264, NRS 197. 246, and on and on it went. Thank you for your thoughtful request, Elgin often replied. She kept her emails concise and factual, and increasingly, she saved her unfiltered reactions for her phone calls with Nevada's other election clerks, many of whom were navigating their own crises in the continued fallout of the 2020 election.Lander County commissioners had tried to seize the county's own election equipment. Nye County had voted to count ballots partially by hand. Lyon, Elko, and Lincoln counties had put forward proposals to remove their Dominion machines. The election office in Clark County had received a threat letter with traces of fentanyl powder. About half the state's election officials had quit or resigned since 2020, and several had been replaced by vocal election deniers. Jim Hindle, the new clerk in Story County, was awaiting a felony trial for allegedly trying to sign over Nevada's six electoral votes to Trump in 2020. And now he oversaw election integrity in 2024. Welcome to another day at the center of the circus, Elgin said one afternoon in May, on a phone call to Amy Birgins, the clerk in Douglas County. Are they still calling for your head on a stick? Birgins asked. What's the latest with the recall petition? We'll confirm signatures at the courthouse next week and then make a ruling, Elgin said. The conspiracy theorists are coming out of the woodwork with their tinfoil hats. I call them my Kool-Aid drinkers, Elgin said. She estimated that more than half of the 45,000 registered voters in Douglas County belonged in that category.They believe that elections were rigged and that Biden had been fraudulently elected. And for a while, Elgin had thought that, too. She had been working in an administrative job for the county during the 2020 election, and she listened to her family members spread conspiracy theories about Dominion machines and read a friend's false Facebook posts about the thousands of dead people voting in Nevada. Then the county clerk abruptly resigned, and the commissioners appointed Bergens to lead a voting system she didn't trust. She devoted her first several months to learning about the state's mandatory election safeguards, machine inspections, signature verifications, and the certified canvas to confirm each vote. The reality is, Trump lost, she eventually concluded. I did a complete 180. Our elections are more accurate and secure than ever before in American history. The challenge was convincing anyone else. She offered public tours of the county's voting machines and livestream the counting of each mail-in ballot, but almost nobody bothered to watch. Her best friend continued to send her videos of people lambasting Dominion machines. Her father and two of her adult children said they didn't entirely trust elections. In the 2022 midterm, one voter sent in his ballot with a death threat written to Bergens, and now the county Sheriff was keeping an eye on her house.This job is hard enough without everyone throwing us under the bus, Bergen said. The responsibility to get it right, the scrutiny, we already feel the weight of our entire democracy. And meanwhile, they just repeat the same lies over and over, Elgin said. Eventually, people go, Oh, I think I heard that somewhere before. I guess it must be true. The only thing we have to give in return are facts, Bergen said. Elgin had also tried to offer her constituents a series of concessions. She updated the county's dominion system so that all voters were given a verifiable printed ballot and four chances to double-check their vote before it was cast. The county commission questioners asked to confirm the electronic results in 2022 by recounting all ballots by hand, and she reluctantly agreed. They asked her to swear that her recount was accurate, and she swore. They decided they still didn't trust her results and voted to recount a third time, a seven-hour process that confirmed the exact tallies and brought the county within minutes of missing the state's deadline to certify elections. Voters had pushed for her dismissal based on term limits that didn't apply to her They had asked all three women who worked in her office to replace her as clerk, but none felt qualified.Some days, I drive home after work and I wonder why I'm still doing this, she said. Her job was one of the lowest paid elected positions in Nevada. Her husband was already retired, and they had grandchildren in California. I believe in my bones that we have to protect the integrity of our process. But if I'm recalled because of all this, I'll survive, she said. Of course you will, Bergen said. But if the whole system gives away to disinformation and lies, what's left to protect? On the morning of the recall verification, Zekas came to the courthouse with her friend, Theresa Moeller, chair of the local Republican Party. They sat in the galley and said a prayer. Let today be earthmoving, Zekas said. Let the ripple stretch far and wide. A representative from the Secretary of State's office and the clerk from neighboring Nye County arrived to help run the process, and Elgin carried the recall petitions to a table at the front of the courtroom. Let's go over some basic ground rules first, said Cory Friedhoff, the Nye County clerk. The petition against Elgin required at least 114 signatures to force a recall election because that number represented a quarter of Esmeralda County residents who voted in 2022.The petition had been submitted with 142 names, but each person's information needed to be verified against the signature and address that the county had on file. So today, We're checking those signatures, and you're here just to witness, Elgin told Zekas and Moller. You're not here to debate or interject. There's an official process that needs to be followed, and we have to trust that process. There's more to it than trust, Zekas said. Will I get to know which signatures you were accepting and which ones you were tossing off? Not today, Elgin said. I don't like the secret part, Zekas said. Why don't I get my basic right to know what is happening with the recall? You are just here to witness, Elgin said again. They started checking the petitions, first for the district attorney and then for the auditor. When they started working on Elgin's petition, she volunteered to walk away from the table and sit in the galley. Seeing all those names again, I think I'll just go back there and pray, she said. She walked past Zekus and Moler, sat in the far corner of the courtroom with her husband, and pulled up Psalm 86 on her cell phone.Oh, God, the proud have risen against me, she read, as Friedhoff began to check the names on her petition one by one. Number 13, the address doesn't match, Friedhoff said. We need to verify. Number 18, no, she said. We need to verify the signature. They paused at one point for a bathroom break, and Friedhoff instructed everyone to clear the room except for one administrator from the clerk's office who would guard the petitions. Something fishy is happening, Zecas said as she walked into the hallway. That woman could be tampering with signatures right now, and we'd never know. She turned back into the courtroom to watch, which made the employee feel uncomfortable. I'd like to remind Find everyone that it's now considered a felony in Nevada to intimidate election workers, Friedhoff said a few minutes later as people filtered back into the room. And then she returned her attention to the signatures. Number 28, we need to verify the address. Number 32, signature. Number 38, address. Zekis wrote notes in case she needed evidence for a future appeal and rubbed essential oils on her wrist to stay calm. Maybe the address addresses were wrong because people had gotten confused and written down their PO boxes instead of their physical street address, she thought.Maybe some of the signatures didn't match because people's handwriting deteriorated with age or because younger voters had never learned how to sign their names in cursive. We knew they weren't going to make it easy, Zekus whispered to Moller. God might have a different plan. You don't have to knock the bull off its feet all at once. He might want this to go all the way up through appeals. To the First district Court. By the time Friedhoff finished examining the petition, she had questions about 67 of the 142 signatures. One petition contained a potential fact air on the affidavit, and a notary had signed on the wrong line of the form. It was clear the recall petition would be ruled insufficient. That concludes our process, Friedhoff said. Well, not quite, Zekas said. She sorted through the papers in her lap, looking up laws and state statutes, and then writing down the numbers of obscure legal codes. There were still six months left until the next presidential election was held in Esmeralda County, and already she was thinking of new ways to dismantle a process she didn't trust. I know my rights, she said. There are procedures in place.You can still pursue, Elgin said. If you don't like what's happening, you have the right to appeal. I'm aware, Zekas said, and I will.Boost your career with the Dunleary Institute of Art, Design and Technology Springboard-funded courses. 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umbilical cord, Zekas asked. She believed it only because she had experienced many similar revelations during the last few years, ever since she heeded Trump's warnings about the, corrupt, lying mainstream media and decided to disconnect her television.

Her friends introduced her to far-right media platforms online, like Mike Lindell's Frank Speech and The Elijah List, where each day she listened to a rotation of self-proclaimed patriots, biblical prophets, and also sometimes political figures like Lara Trump. They offered Zekus not only conspiratorial ideas, but also the promise of a community that extended far beyond the loneliness of her house, with a grandfather clock ticking away in the living room and views out the window of an emptyness that stretched clear into California. Each day, something urgent was happening in the far corners of the Internet, something big and dark and secret, and that knowledge fueled her days with both purpose and agency. She came to believe, along with millions of others, that COVID was a creation of the federal government used to manipulate the public and steal elections. That two doses of the vaccine would make men infertile. That Trump had been anointed to lead a, quote, government cleansing. That fighting had already begun in underground military tunnels. That Trump's election in 2024 was preordained by God. That he would return to power with loads of gold collected from other countries that had capitulated to his power.

That during his next term, Americans would have free electricity, zero income tax, and MedBed, powered by a secret technology that could harness natural energy to heal diseases and extend human life, and that the only thing standing in the way of this future was a deep state so malicious and vast that its roots extended all the way into tiny Esmeralda County. The whole idea for Cindy and the rest of them is to cripple Trump, Zekas said. That little tyrant, Wise, said, We have no idea how many votes they're skimming. But Cindy sure does, Zekas said.

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When their allegations weren't forcing her out of bed with nausea late at night or inducing another panic attack or prompting her husband to search for real estate in California. Elgin sometimes found herself laughing at the sheer absurdity of the county's transformation. For as long as she could remember, nobody had been interested in her job. She sometimes ran for re-election unopposed. What does a clerk even do? Her friend sometimes asked. The county had such a nonchalant, trusting relationship with elections that once, after two candidates tied for Commissioner in 2002, they settled the race by drawing cards from a deck. But now, two decades later, Elgin was being flooded by emails asking about the license plate numbers of her poll workers and the temperature data of her equipment storage room. Major violation concerns, read the subject line of one recent email, which listed dozens of obscure legal statutes and codes. Nrs 293b. Nrs 1960. 264, NRS 197. 246, and on and on it went. Thank you for your thoughtful request, Elgin often replied. She kept her emails concise and factual, and increasingly, she saved her unfiltered reactions for her phone calls with Nevada's other election clerks, many of whom were navigating their own crises in the continued fallout of the 2020 election.

Lander County commissioners had tried to seize the county's own election equipment. Nye County had voted to count ballots partially by hand. Lyon, Elko, and Lincoln counties had put forward proposals to remove their Dominion machines. The election office in Clark County had received a threat letter with traces of fentanyl powder. About half the state's election officials had quit or resigned since 2020, and several had been replaced by vocal election deniers. Jim Hindle, the new clerk in Story County, was awaiting a felony trial for allegedly trying to sign over Nevada's six electoral votes to Trump in 2020. And now he oversaw election integrity in 2024. Welcome to another day at the center of the circus, Elgin said one afternoon in May, on a phone call to Amy Birgins, the clerk in Douglas County. Are they still calling for your head on a stick? Birgins asked. What's the latest with the recall petition? We'll confirm signatures at the courthouse next week and then make a ruling, Elgin said. The conspiracy theorists are coming out of the woodwork with their tinfoil hats. I call them my Kool-Aid drinkers, Elgin said. She estimated that more than half of the 45,000 registered voters in Douglas County belonged in that category.

They believe that elections were rigged and that Biden had been fraudulently elected. And for a while, Elgin had thought that, too. She had been working in an administrative job for the county during the 2020 election, and she listened to her family members spread conspiracy theories about Dominion machines and read a friend's false Facebook posts about the thousands of dead people voting in Nevada. Then the county clerk abruptly resigned, and the commissioners appointed Bergens to lead a voting system she didn't trust. She devoted her first several months to learning about the state's mandatory election safeguards, machine inspections, signature verifications, and the certified canvas to confirm each vote. The reality is, Trump lost, she eventually concluded. I did a complete 180. Our elections are more accurate and secure than ever before in American history. The challenge was convincing anyone else. She offered public tours of the county's voting machines and livestream the counting of each mail-in ballot, but almost nobody bothered to watch. Her best friend continued to send her videos of people lambasting Dominion machines. Her father and two of her adult children said they didn't entirely trust elections. In the 2022 midterm, one voter sent in his ballot with a death threat written to Bergens, and now the county Sheriff was keeping an eye on her house.

This job is hard enough without everyone throwing us under the bus, Bergen said. The responsibility to get it right, the scrutiny, we already feel the weight of our entire democracy. And meanwhile, they just repeat the same lies over and over, Elgin said. Eventually, people go, Oh, I think I heard that somewhere before. I guess it must be true. The only thing we have to give in return are facts, Bergen said. Elgin had also tried to offer her constituents a series of concessions. She updated the county's dominion system so that all voters were given a verifiable printed ballot and four chances to double-check their vote before it was cast. The county commission questioners asked to confirm the electronic results in 2022 by recounting all ballots by hand, and she reluctantly agreed. They asked her to swear that her recount was accurate, and she swore. They decided they still didn't trust her results and voted to recount a third time, a seven-hour process that confirmed the exact tallies and brought the county within minutes of missing the state's deadline to certify elections. Voters had pushed for her dismissal based on term limits that didn't apply to her They had asked all three women who worked in her office to replace her as clerk, but none felt qualified.

Some days, I drive home after work and I wonder why I'm still doing this, she said. Her job was one of the lowest paid elected positions in Nevada. Her husband was already retired, and they had grandchildren in California. I believe in my bones that we have to protect the integrity of our process. But if I'm recalled because of all this, I'll survive, she said. Of course you will, Bergen said. But if the whole system gives away to disinformation and lies, what's left to protect? On the morning of the recall verification, Zekas came to the courthouse with her friend, Theresa Moeller, chair of the local Republican Party. They sat in the galley and said a prayer. Let today be earthmoving, Zekas said. Let the ripple stretch far and wide. A representative from the Secretary of State's office and the clerk from neighboring Nye County arrived to help run the process, and Elgin carried the recall petitions to a table at the front of the courtroom. Let's go over some basic ground rules first, said Cory Friedhoff, the Nye County clerk. The petition against Elgin required at least 114 signatures to force a recall election because that number represented a quarter of Esmeralda County residents who voted in 2022.

The petition had been submitted with 142 names, but each person's information needed to be verified against the signature and address that the county had on file. So today, We're checking those signatures, and you're here just to witness, Elgin told Zekas and Moller. You're not here to debate or interject. There's an official process that needs to be followed, and we have to trust that process. There's more to it than trust, Zekas said. Will I get to know which signatures you were accepting and which ones you were tossing off? Not today, Elgin said. I don't like the secret part, Zekas said. Why don't I get my basic right to know what is happening with the recall? You are just here to witness, Elgin said again. They started checking the petitions, first for the district attorney and then for the auditor. When they started working on Elgin's petition, she volunteered to walk away from the table and sit in the galley. Seeing all those names again, I think I'll just go back there and pray, she said. She walked past Zekus and Moler, sat in the far corner of the courtroom with her husband, and pulled up Psalm 86 on her cell phone.

Oh, God, the proud have risen against me, she read, as Friedhoff began to check the names on her petition one by one. Number 13, the address doesn't match, Friedhoff said. We need to verify. Number 18, no, she said. We need to verify the signature. They paused at one point for a bathroom break, and Friedhoff instructed everyone to clear the room except for one administrator from the clerk's office who would guard the petitions. Something fishy is happening, Zecas said as she walked into the hallway. That woman could be tampering with signatures right now, and we'd never know. She turned back into the courtroom to watch, which made the employee feel uncomfortable. I'd like to remind Find everyone that it's now considered a felony in Nevada to intimidate election workers, Friedhoff said a few minutes later as people filtered back into the room. And then she returned her attention to the signatures. Number 28, we need to verify the address. Number 32, signature. Number 38, address. Zekis wrote notes in case she needed evidence for a future appeal and rubbed essential oils on her wrist to stay calm. Maybe the address addresses were wrong because people had gotten confused and written down their PO boxes instead of their physical street address, she thought.

Maybe some of the signatures didn't match because people's handwriting deteriorated with age or because younger voters had never learned how to sign their names in cursive. We knew they weren't going to make it easy, Zekus whispered to Moller. God might have a different plan. You don't have to knock the bull off its feet all at once. He might want this to go all the way up through appeals. To the First district Court. By the time Friedhoff finished examining the petition, she had questions about 67 of the 142 signatures. One petition contained a potential fact air on the affidavit, and a notary had signed on the wrong line of the form. It was clear the recall petition would be ruled insufficient. That concludes our process, Friedhoff said. Well, not quite, Zekas said. She sorted through the papers in her lap, looking up laws and state statutes, and then writing down the numbers of obscure legal codes. There were still six months left until the next presidential election was held in Esmeralda County, and already she was thinking of new ways to dismantle a process she didn't trust. I know my rights, she said. There are procedures in place.

You can still pursue, Elgin said. If you don't like what's happening, you have the right to appeal. I'm aware, Zekas said, and I will.

Boost your career with the Dunleary Institute of Art, Design and Technology Springboard-funded courses. Enhance your skills with our blended learning courses in digital marketing, entrepreneurship, circular economy, and data analytics. Iadt Springboard courses are free or 90% funded. Apply today and take the next step in your professional journey. Visit iadt. Ie to apply.