Date: August 30, 2024
Source: The Arizona Republic, USA TODAY NETWORK
Author: Sasha Hupka
An Arizona county official who fought off threats and defended election results will take on a new role to preserve democracy from the nation’s epicenter of election denialism.
Maricopa County Supervisor Bill Gates will take charge of a new laboratory at Arizona State University this fall, training students in election administration and offering support and resources for tenured election officials. It’s a perch from which he hopes to build a pipeline of hardened, experienced election workers and combat threats to democracy.
The move also allows Gates, a Republican and a prominent voice against voting conspiracies, to keep his foot in a space that has come to dominate his professional and personal life. He was one of several county leaders who faced threats, harassment and public ridicule after false allegations spread of a rigged vote in the 2020 presidential race.
Since then, those accusations have grown deep roots in battleground Arizona. Gates has been called a traitor, a coward and a liar. He’s been accused of corruption and betrayal. He’s been the target of both veiled and outright violent threats — via emails, voicemails, social media messages and, sometimes, to his face.
As county staffers counted ballots in November 2022, a Phoenix man emailed Gates and threatened to poison him “multiple times over again to make sure your death, or corpse, is carried out.” Days later, dozens of people showed up at the county’s election certification meeting to level scathing comments at Gates and his colleagues. Some went as far as calling the supervisors “evil.”
Last year, Gates announced that he wouldn’t seek reelection. He had been diagnosed with PTSD as a result of election- related harassment endorsed by members of his own political party, and the turmoil had also taken its toll on his wife and three daughters.
But Gates said he was loathe to leave elections entirely behind. He has always been interested in voting and democracy, dating back to his time as an election attorney for the Arizona Republican Party. As a political candidate — first for Phoenix City Council, and later for his county seat — he had experienced the other side of the fence.
He also didn’t want to feel pushed out — although he said his decision to leave his ofice wasn’t prompted by outside pressure or the opinions of others.
“There’s one way, which is to say, ‘I went through this trauma, so the way to deal with it is just exit and not be involved at all,’” Gates said. “To me, there is a bit of a feeling that it’s sort of, you know, being run of.”
Gates said the chance to lead the Mechanics of Democracy Laboratory and teach students about government, public policy and election operations was too good to pass up. It helped that his family was supportive of the idea.
“I feel like I’m in a position where I can handle this, and our family can handle it,” he said. “If I’m just doing something else where I can’t continue to talk about what happened to me, those stories are kind of lost. And this way, maybe I can share that.”
Training the ‘next generation’ of election workers
Gates will lead his new laboratory in collaboration with two other former county officials.
Shannon Portillo, a Democrat, served for years as a county commissioner in rural Kansas prior to becoming director of ASU’s School of Public Affairs. Thom Reilly, a political independent, previously worked as county manager of Clark County, Nevada, which is home to Las Vegas. He now is co-director of ASU’s Center for an Independent and Sustainable Democracy.
The three were specifically chosen to represent the partisan array of Arizona and other swing states. The concept, which Gates called “partisan inclusivity,” also mirrors the way that political parties, partisan election observers and partisan poll workers provide balance in election administration.
“How can you talk about politics and elections by pulling out party labels? No, we have party labels,” Gates said. “We’ve made a conscious decision as a country, which is diferent than pretty much the rest of the world, that we don’t have these nonpartisan, nonelected groups that run elections.”
Together, they hope to draw in a politically diverse group of students who will form a talent pipeline to help ofset a national shortage of election officials. The situation is particularly dire in Arizona, where many counties have been hit hard by election staff turnover.
“We need new folks in this,” Gates said.
He will develop a curriculum that includes lessons ranging from the logistics of building a ballot and the fundamentals of government contracts to media training and data analysis. Gates called it “a completely diferent way of looking at elections.”
“Do we have enough workers? How do we have a pipeline of students who are interested in this work? What are the challenges and land mines? All this information is both from a classroom perspective and from a national perspective, and it is important,” Reilly said. “We’ll look at the mechanics of it, whether it is done correctly, and how do you navigate the distrust that’s out there.”
The program will also mandate an internship component, giving students a shot at real- world elections experience and voting officials much-needed extra hands — particularly in smaller jurisdictions where workloads are often especially high.
“What people often forget about elections is more of them are run at the rural level, more small communities are running elections that don’t have as much infrastructure as urban areas,” Portillo said. “In Douglas County, Kansas, we had to do everything big counties do.”
For others, laboratory will offer resources, continuing education
Gates also hopes to pull aspiring attorneys, journalism students and election officials into classes, workshops and talks.
He believes lawyers can benefit from lessons on the ethics of representing partisan candidates and political parties, and journalists can learn more about how elections work and how to debunk misinformation. He said he is also acutely aware of the need for continuing education for people already in the elections business, who increasingly must deal with complicated questions from the media and vitriol from some voters.
“This was not really anything that people had to focus on before, you know,” Gates said. “It was, ‘OK, how did things turn out as far as who won the election.’” As the laboratory launches, Gates said some of his focus will be on fundraising to ensure election administrators will be financially supported in ongoing learning. He envisions ofering scholarships and online modules that can help working professionals avoid unnecessary travel.
“It’s someone from a Greenlee County or something like that, where we can help to defray their costs,” Gates said. Greenlee County, located on the eastern edge of Arizona, is the state’s least populous county with just under 10,000 residents. Clifton, its county seat, is about a five-hour drive from downtown Phoenix.
Gates also hopes the laboratory serves as a place where students and professionals alike can discuss the personal challenges that elections can pose for those who run them, particularly in light of the rise of voting conspiracies. He said election administrators must know that “it’s OK to talk about this and it’s OK to say you’re not OK,” and he believes a university environment will provide space for that discussion.
But Gates said he doesn’t know whether he will continue to see threats and harassment in his new role.
“I think that we see these institutions of higher learning as safe places to have these kinds of discussions, to participate in them,” Gates said. “But certainly to the extent that there things from the outside — I mean, it won’t be anything new.”