Power Up: These anonymous public servants are playing a huge role in making sure your vote counts

?: The New Yorker has the first excerpt of former president Barack Obama’s new memoir, “A Promised Land,” as he “looks back on his toughest fight” – passing a health-care bill. Obama writes: 

• “When I think back to those early conversations, it’s hard to deny my overconfidence. I was convinced that the logic of health-care reform was so obvious that even in the face of well-organized opposition I could rally the American people’s support. Other big initiatives—like immigration reform and climate-change legislation—would probably be even harder to get through Congress; I figured that scoring a victory on the item that most affected people’s day-to-day lives was our best shot at building momentum for the rest of my legislative agenda.” 
• “As for the political hazards that Axe and Rahm worried about, the recession virtually guaranteed that my poll numbers were going to take a hit anyway. Being timid wouldn’t change that reality. Even if it did, passing up a chance to help millions of people just because it might hurt my reelection prospects—well, that was exactly the kind of myopic, self-preserving behavior I’d vowed to reject.” 

ON THE FRONT LINES: For the poll workers and election officials across America, this is the final stretch of a marathon that started well before Election Day next Tuesday. Though Adrian Fontes, the county recorder in Maricopa County, Ariz. — the 2nd largest election jurisdiction in the country — prefers a non-sports related analogy. 

“You start with Thanksgiving, roll through Hanukkah and Christmas, and then you hit New Year’s Eve to close the whole thing down — that’s a holiday season … That’s how elections now operate,” Fontes, told us over the weekend. Maricopa County has already processed over one million ballots, according to Fontes, and his office is tabulating well over 100,000 ballots a day in advance of Nov. 3. 

The well-oiled pipeline in Maricopa County’s tabulation center, as described by Fontes, stands in stark contrast to the chaotic picture of mail-in voting that officials at the very top of the food chain are painting — starting with President Trump. 

• Trump cast an in-person ballot for himself at an early voting site for himself in West Palm Beach, Fla., over the weekend and falsely claimed, once again, that going physically to the polls is “much more secure than when you send in a ballot.”

Hundreds of anonymous public servants like Fontes, and Tina Barton, the clerk overseeing the election for the city of Rochester Hills, Mich., have been preparing for voting season since 2016. But 2020 presents a special challenge for poll workers and election officials as the coronavirus pandemic and highly charged politics have led to fast-changing rules about voting, lots of misinformation about how it works, and a large upswing in early voting and mail-in ballots.

‘More challenging than it’s ever been’: Behind the scenes, an army of local election officials is fiercely committed to pulling off their contests without a hitch, which includes disseminating as much accurate election information as possible. They’re leveraging their close ties with neighbors, family and friends  to assuage concerns about voting amid a pandemic that’s so far seen a record volume of ballots.

• “Our election officials are out there working for us and they are the unsung heroes of our democracy,” Liz Howard, a senior counsel for the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program, told Power Up. They “are fighting for their voters at all levels — working local contacts, federal contacts, fighting for money — and fighting for the most secure and safe options on election day, which requires a huge amount of coordination and work.” 

Howard, a former deputy commissioner for the Virginia Department of Elections, has trained hundreds of election officials over the past four years on topics ranging from cybersecurity to voter intimidation via war games and tabletop exercises imagining worst-case scenarios. She helped roll out the Brennan Center’s “I am an Election Official” campaign seeking to shine light on and provide support for the 2020 workers.

This year, election officials have seen an uptick in questions and concerns about mail-in voting — even in places like Arizona and Utah, two states that have successfully held mail-in elections in previous cycles. 

Barton, a Republican currently running for Oakland County clerk, and Fontes, a Democrat running for reelection as Maricopa County recorder, have managed elections for 15 and three years, respectively. The told us they’re deeply troubled by the swell of misinformation flooding the system, making their jobs — including educating the public — that much harder.

• “All of our election systems we have are at some level built on trust and faith in public and election officials … and that’s how the core of our Democracy works. So what keeps me up at night is that we have American politicians casting doubt against American citizens who are just helping their neighbors,” Fontes said.
• “I can find a way to purchase all the products I need for personal protective equipment, I can find a way to make my workers safe, and buy more machinery, and lay out the process so that it’s smooth from start to finish. Volume is something we can handle,” Barton told us. “But I cannot control the massive amounts of bad information toying with the minds of voters and breaking down their confidence that they have in the system.”

• In Republican-leaning Rochester Hills, Barton told Power Up she’s received a deluge of phone calls from voters who initially requested an absentee ballot but are now deciding to vote at the precinct, in-person: “People are concerned about the integrity of the absentee process. They want to watch as their ballot is being tabulated,” she told us. “I always explain the measures in place to protect their vote. If they still feel like they want to go to the polls, I tell them that they should vote in whatever way makes them feel most confident that their vote will be counted.”
• In Maricopa County, which has been a stronghold for the GOP in Arizona, Fontes says he’s seen a slight drop in number of voters who automatically receive a ballot by mail  — but that it’s been offset by a “HUGE” rise in new enrollment.
• In Weber County, Utah, another majority-Republican community, confidence in by-mail elections has also waned: the county now requires “three full-time phone operators to field calls from residents ‘suddenly worried about voting by mail,’” Ricky Hatch, the county clerk and auditor, told our colleagues Isaac Stanley-Becker and Tony Romm. 
• “Voters refer to ballots being thrown in a ditch, a river and dumpsters,” Hatch, a Republican, told Isaac and Tony. “They mention ‘dogs receiving ballots’ and worry about things such as foreign interference and ‘rogue postal workers.’ Some ask about dead people voting, he said.”
• “In many cases, the worries can be traced to baseless or alarmist statements by President Trump and posts on his Twitter feed. Others have been fed by headlines stripped of context and misleading reporting in the mainstream media, according to election administrators, voting rights advocates and experts in online communication,” per Isaac and Tony. 

Casting a vote by mail has become a ritual for most Arizona voters for over two decades. Fontes credited Gov. Doug Ducey (R-Ariz.) for pushing back against Trump’s rhetoric against the mail-in voting system during a meeting at the White House in August. 

• “In Arizona, we’re going to do it right,” Ducey told a reporter about the state’s mail-in voting system. “It will be free and fair. It will be difficult, if not impossible, to cheat. And it will be easy to vote. Seventy-eight percent of the citizens already vote by mail in Arizona. But we’ve been doing this since 1992. So over the course of decades, we’ve established a system that works and can be trusted.”

Even still, Fontes admits Arizona hasn’t been completely inoculated by the “homegrown misinformation” that’s been disseminated not just by the president, his allies, and the right-wing media ecosystem but by mainstream media coverage, according to a study released earlier this month by Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. 

The viral misconceptions and false narratives that have taken hold on the Internet and in real life is what keeps Fontes up at night. “Domestic adversaries of the system influencing the citizens who actually handle the ballots — that’s disheartening, that bothers me. It’s not so much that they are interfering with the system — they’re not. But they are interfering with the confidence that Americans have in each other,” Fontes told us.

Stamping out misinformation isn’t the only battle Barton has been fighting. Unlike Fontes, Barton’s team is not allowed to start tabulating mail-in ballots until Election Day. A law, however, passed by the Republican-controlled legislature now allows Michigan’s election clerks who oversee jurisdictions with a population of at least 25,000 to start processing mail ballots for 10 hours on Nov. 2. That means Barton’s office “can take the ballot out of the secrecy sleeve and starting putting the ballots in stacks — no tabulation takes place … it’s only one step out of a three or four step process.” 

• Still, Barton counts it as a victory and hopes the legislature continues to ease the time crunch: “It’s imperative that we prove to the legislature that we can do this and do it safely and with integrity,” she added.
• “I think one of the biggest problems in America elections today is that policymakers are not listening to the administrators and not paying attention to models that really work well in other places, and applying it in their own backyards,” said Fontes, who said that the processing rules in place in Michigan are “setting the state up for failure” because of the increase in volume of mail-in ballots.

Regardless, Barton and her team are prepared to work overnight — and maybe then some — to get their job tabulating the ballots done. 

The decentralized nature of the U.S. election system can seem confusing at a national level. There are 10,000 jurisdictions at the county or municipal level, according to Howard, which means local election officials often have to learn a series of detailed and unique procedures. Howard referenced ‘Quesenbery’s Rule,” as formulated by Charles Stewart, a political science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: “Every general statement about how states run elections is false in at least one state.” 

• “Tens of millions of Americans routinely vote without facing long lines or other challenges, but I’ve never seen see a headline of ‘Local Election Official Aces Incredibly Complex Technological and Administrative Test,’” Howard writes. 
• “The divisiveness and anger seems to be at an all time high, and we’ve seen that with voter situations where people automatically concern you have ill intent,” said Barton. “But I want people to vote with confidence and with security. Election officials are just as concerned as their fellow neighbors and citizens about getting this right. I don’t know a single election official out there that wants to make a mistake. We are doing everything we can to deliver an election with integrity and perfection and security.” 

NEW VIRUS OUTBREAK INSIDE WHITE HOUSE: “The presidential campaign was roiled over the weekend by a fresh outbreak of the novel coronavirus at the White House that infected at least five aides or advisers to Vice President Pence, a spread that Trump’s top staffer acknowledged he had tried to avoid disclosing to the public,” Philip Rucker, Josh Dawsey and Amy B Wang report.

• Pence and second lady Karen Pence have tested negative: “Officials said the new list of those infected includes the vice president’s chief of staff, Marc Short; his top outside political adviser, Marty Obst; his personal aide Zach Bauer, known as a ‘body man,’ who accompanies him throughout his day; and two other staff members.”

Pence will continue campaigning, despite being in close contact with Short: “He told aides that he was determined to keep up his appearances through the week despite his potential exposure, irrespective of guidelines, officials said,” our colleagues write.

• What those in his orbit are saying: “Some aides said they would have preferred tele-rallies because if the vice president is infected while on the road in the final days of the campaign, it is likely to become a major news story for several days. [Today], Pence is expected to visit the Capitol to preside over the Senate vote to confirm Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court.”
• “Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) decried Pence’s plans to continue with his scheduled events. ‘God help us,’ Schumer said in a speech Sunday on the Senate floor.”

But there was confusion last night about whether the veep would actually show today on the Hill:

• “Pence’s public schedule for Monday, released Sunday night, does not include a trip to the Capitol, although his plans can be revised during the day. He plans to return to Washington shortly after 6 p.m. Monday after campaigning in Minnesota,” Seung Min Kim reported.
• Senate Majority Leader Mitch :McConnell, who has been highly critical of how the White House has not abided by public health guidelines on its property, on Sunday declined to answer multiple times whether he preferred that Pence stay away from the Capitol for the confirmation vote.”

SAY WHAT?: Meanwhile, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows made an extraordinary admission that the administration had effectively given up on trying to slow the virus’s spread, our colleagues write.

• “We’re not going to control the pandemic,” Meadows said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “We are going to control the fact that we get vaccines, therapeutics and other mitigations.”

Joe Biden and his campaign immediately attacked the remark: “This wasn’t a slip by Meadows; it was a candid acknowledgment of what President Trump’s strategy has clearly been from the beginning of this crisis: to wave the white flag of defeat and hope that by ignoring it, the virus would simply go away,” Biden said in a statement. “It hasn’t, and it won’t.”

CASES, HOSPITALIZATIONS RISE: “New reported infections nationwide surpassed 80,000 for the first time ever Friday and again Saturday, as hospitalizations push past 40,000 and daily death tolls begin to climb,” Hannah Knowles and Jacqueline Dupree report.

Local health systems are bearing the brunt, again: “In Texas, authorities are scrambling to shore up resources in El Paso, where intensive care units hit full capacity on Saturday and where covid-19 hospitalizations have nearly quadrupled to almost 800 in less than three weeks. In Utah, the state hospital association warned that if current trends hold, it will soon have to ask the governor to invoke ‘crisis standards of care’ — a triage system that, for example, favors younger patients,” our colleagues write.

• Devastating quote: “It’s an extreme situation, because this means that all your contingency planning has been exhausted,” Greg Bell, president of the Utah Hospital Association, told our colleagues.

BARRETT NEARS CONFIRMATION: “Barrett’s nomination broke through one more hurdle ahead of her all-but-assured installation to the Supreme Court,” Seung Min reported.

The final confirmation vote is expected tonight: “Senators voted about 1:30 p.m. in a rare Sunday session, 51 to 48, to advance her nomination to replace the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg,” our colleague writes.

• McConnell celebrated the GOP’s impending victory: “We made an important contribution to the future of this country,” [McConnell] said, praising Barrett as a ‘stellar nominee’ in every respect. “A lot of what we’ve done over the last four years will be undone sooner or later by the next election. They won’t be able to do much about this for a long time to come.”
• “Two GOP senators — Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — voted with Democrats on Sunday to oppose Barrett’s nomination from advancing, although Murkowski plans to support the federal appeals court judge on the confirmation vote on Barrett’s merits.”

More celebrations may be in order:

Another large White House event could also happen. Remember, it was Trump’s original introduction of Barrett at the White House Rose Garden that some officials said was the super spreader gathering that infected Trump:

Last night and this morning, Senate Democrats and those aligned with them took to the floor to protest, the Hill reports.

• Some made clear that Barrett’s confirmation process might make them reconsider previous positions, such as expanding the size of the high court.

• “The move was widely anticipated; Washington archbishops are typically elevated to cardinal after their appointments. But it is nonetheless symbolically significant in the U.S. Catholic Church, where Black people have been underrepresented among the leadership.”
• The history making archbishop: “Gregory, 72, was appointed archbishop of Washington last year to take over for Cardinal Donald Wuerl, who had been accused of mishandling clerical abuse cases. As a cardinal, Gregory will be eligible to vote in any papal election until he reaches the cutoff age of 80.” 

Gregory made waves this summer after condemning Trump’s visit to a shrine to Pope John Paul II: “Gregory said of the shrine and its leadership that it was ‘baffling and reprehensible that any Catholic facility would allow itself to be so egregiously misused and manipulated in a fashion that violates our religious principles, which call us to defend the rights of all people, even those with whom we might disagree,’ ” our colleagues write. The president’s stop came just days after his controversial photo op in front of St. John’s Church.

• What this means to the DMV: “The Catholic Church has a strong presence in Washington’s Black community, including its sizable middle class. Black Catholics make up about 13 percent of the Washington Archdiocese — which includes D.C. and its Maryland suburbs — compared with about 3 percent for the nation as a whole. Many Black city leaders are Catholic or went to Catholic schools, including Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D)” and a number of her predecessors.

Several arrests made after clash at pro-Trump gathering in New York: “Seven people were arrested in Manhattan on after fights broke out between a caravan of Trump supporters and demonstrators protesting the president, police said, as political tensions ratcheted up again in New York,” Teo Armus reports.

Inside the Wall Street Journal’s rejection of the Hunter Biden allegations: “It turns out there is a big difference between WikiLeaks and establishment media coverage of WikiLeaks, a difference between a Trump tweet and an article about it, even between an opinion piece in the Journal suggesting Joe Biden had done bad things, and a news article that didn’t reach that conclusion,” the New York Times’s Ben Smith writes in a column exploring how the news and opinion sides of the organization handled what was billed by Trump allies as a bombshell story.

Nancy Pelosi says she would seek another term as speaker: “Pelosi’s commitment underscores Democrats’ confidence that they will be able to retain their majority in the House,” Cat Zakrzewski reports.