Really appreciate this opportunity.

It really is important to me to have the chance to come and talk to people around the states and to be able to answer their questions directly.

You know, I know elections are something that are absolutely, you know, sacred to people.

And so being able to get answers to your questions is something I think you'll find I do not take lightly.

[woman] All right, the first question I have is "If election results can be trusted, why are you here?"

(audience laughs) (piano music) Running elections is not easy.

But even when we had tough times in the past, we didn't see anything like this level of scrutiny.

Not even close.

(door lock beeps) [Wesley] There's so much that people just don't recognize that happens in elections.

To get the calendar blocked, get everything set up, classes for election workers, prepping, you know, all the other precinct tabulators.

(keypad beeps) All of our software stuff has to be looked at.

Polls, materials.

So it's constant.

[Tonya] There's so many details in elections.

And election officials don't have room for error.

Thank you.

That creates anxiety.

And in this environment, you just don't know what to expect anymore.

But it's an honor.

My job is to make sure the voter's voice is heard.

So I'm a complete dork about elections.

We got the Future Voter stickers.

So excited.

[Daniel] The administration of an election is a thankless job.

Nobody grows up and says, I want to be an election administrator.

You stumble into it.

And you like it because, it's worthy.

It's a worthy profession.

You're helping people.

- I love all the process of it.

The logic of it.

Like, yes or no.

On or off.

One or zero.

You win or you lose.

(birds chirp) - Wisconsin always has close elections.

We are the like, most purple of purple states.

Knowing that the margins are gonna be narrow, we have to be on top of so much.

(phone rings) [staff] Yeah, let me transfer you to one of our election administration specialists.

- Yesterday, we received 175 phone calls and 461 emails.

[Meagan] As the nonpartisan chief election official for the state, I support the officials who handle everything at the local level, including election day.

It is an enormous event.

I mean, we have about 4,000 polling places that will be up and running in 2024 during the presidential election.

We have 1,850 municipal clerks.

We have probably about 40,000 poll workers.

Think about that just from like, an events planning perspective.

If somebody plans a big event, it's usually in one place on one day.

You sort of have these set conditions.

Imagine running 4,000 events on a single day.

(laughs) It has to be done perfectly.

And we have four statewide elections in 2024.

So we're about to start, not just a sprint, we're about to start that marathon that is election year.

DTE, with all of this power outage, are we meeting with them or have we met with them?

- We haven't met with them.

- These buildings, I'm really concerned with this weather.

- Yeah.

- As cold as it is, election is in a couple weeks.

- For the presidential primary election, we received 26,760 applications.

[Janice] Being an elected official in the city of Detroit, you live in a fishbowl.

You feel like you're always being watched.

The community wants it done well.

And they want it done right.

And I've always been the kind of person, if you can do better, do better.

I was a teacher, and a mother, and a wife.

And the election result, I think what, 2004, took two weeks for us to get for the city of Detroit, the largest city in the state, to get all of our election results.

And I thought we can do better.

So I told my husband, you know what?

I'm gonna run for this because this makes no sense.

And I consider myself an educator still.

But the walls have been brought down, right?

I'm no longer confined to a classroom.

But I teach an entire city.

(siren blares) [Daniel] Detroit is a gritty town.

We've been battle tested.

And its people demonstrate that same spirit on a day-to-day basis.

Now, in '85, when I first started working here with punch cards, elections remained under the radar.

The only thing that you heard about elections were the results.

You never heard about the administration of the process.

It wasn't until the 2000 presidential election that people began to look at elections differently.

And for the first time, election workers who had always operated behind the scenes were in the spotlight.

(tense music) - Election officials, we plan for a perfect election.

That's the goal.

There's so much that goes into it.

And I'm a planner.

I love to know ahead of time how everything's gonna work.

These are all color-coded too.

Everybody has a color code.

So all of their poll books match their color codes.

We're setting everything up for logic and accuracy testing.

If you pull off the seal, it shows a void mark on it.

So once the bipartisan teams get done testing, these all get a seal on them and they're locked.

We're adding security to the office.

We're adding cameras.

We're adding sensors.

These are the scanners that go to the color coded.

Like Poplar Ridge is green because it's in the Tinora school district.

And they're green.

(laughs) It's just a really good feeling.

Like, I get to let people vote.

I mean, there's not a lot of people that can do that.

(ballots shuffle) (phone rings) Marion County Election Center.

This is Diana.

How may I help you?

You have 29 days before any election to declare a party.

[Janice] 500,000 registered voters in the city of Detroit.

We have 200 and some odd polling locations.

[Tonya] So they had enough signatures for the constitutional amendment.

So it'll be on the November ballot.

- Which one?

- The abortion issue.

[Daniel] When we get those ballots, they go down to the Department of Elections.

They verify the signatures.

They upload that information in the mission-qualified voter file.

[trainees] I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands.

One nation under God, indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all.

Glad everybody is back.

It's great to see so many faces that I recognize.

I'd like to start.

Yeah, seeing if there's any questions anybody has out there as it relates to the election process.

Anything's fair game except for politics and personal opinion.

I do run on party ticket.

I've been a registered Republican.

I probably shouldn't name the party.

But I did, so.

I've been registered with the party, you know, basically since day one.

But there are no politics as it relates to partisanship inside here.

I feel, as a supervisor of elections, you know, I get to hold a position that, at the end of the night, tells you who won and who lost.

And so my own personal opinion should never cause you doubt.

[Tonya] Each office in Ohio is run by a bipartisan team.

I'm affiliated with the Republican party.

Roseanne, my partner, is actually affiliated with the Democratic Party.

So we gotta enable everything on 'em.

I think it's really beneficial that we don't have one party running an election.

Everyone's represented.

And somebody comes in and doesn't know what party we are here, then we're doing our job well.

- This is my ninth presidential election cycle.

And there's one thing that gets said, I think, at every single one of them.

And that is, "This is the most important presidential election cycle in our lifetime."

So do you believe this one?

The 2024 presidential election cycle is the most important in our lifetime.

You know, I do.

Not from a political candidate perspective like that.

It's for the process of conducting elections in and of itself.

Because the election process is under attack.

Election officials across this country have been under attack since 2020.

Falsely accused of conspiring to steal or rig the last presidential election.

[crowd] Stop the steal!

Stop the steal!

[reporter] Amid a torrent of misinformation and falsehood, election denialism is now a potent political force.

[voter] I am very worried about the fairness and security of our elections if Meagan Wolfe remains in charge of them.

It's Ms.

Wolfe that allowed for the use of illegal drop boxes and ballot harvesting.

And there's so much more.

- The criticism of election officials that we're experiencing.

That's really been the change over the last few years.

When the pandemic happened, the environment was so heightened that making claims about elections in order to sort of disparage the process, that really started to take off.

(crowd shouts) [Trump] This is a fraud on the American public.

This is an embarrassment to our country.

[Meagan] Here in Wisconsin, it was a concerted effort to just pile these claims out of thin air on top of election officials through litigation, through public records requests, through courts, through audits, through recounts.

All of a sudden, you know, instead of people looking at the record that's in front of them, they were just sort of making things up out of anger.

It just felt overwhelming.

We were no longer working in a place of reality.

We had now crossed over into this place where facts didn't matter anymore.

(voice breaks) [Wesley] Several of my colleagues, not only here in Florida, but across the country, we started receiving calls where they would personally name us and personally blame us for the outcome of the election.

You know, one of my colleagues, just south of me a little bit, who's registered, same party affiliation as I am, and they're saying, you know, he was in on the conspiracy to elect the Democratic candidate in here.

I'm like, did you see the results?

Former president won the state of Florida.

And won by a substantial amount.

You know, so it didn't make sense to me, still, to this day.

To what end are we doing this?

You know, to what end?

Some stunning testimony before Congress from Detroit city clerk Janice Winfrey.

She says she's losing staff and living in fear because of claims of fraud in the 2020 election.

- And the greatest threat came to me when I was taking a walk just to clear my mind.

[Janice] The park is two blocks from my home.

One day, this big 6 foot 3 guy gets out of the car.

"Because I've been watching you.

I notice you don't have your dog with you today.

And because of you, Trump lost.

Why did you allow Trump to lose?

And you're gonna pay for that."

And a neighbor, who happened to be driving by, she saw me, and she said, "Ms.

Winfrey, are you okay?"

I said, absolutely, I'm not.

And she kind of circled her car around this man so that I could get home.

So I did not tell my husband when I got home.

I got very angry.

And I went out looking for him.

I know.

What was I gonna do, right?

(laughs) What it did for me.

It gave me this adrenaline.

It's like, are you kidding me?

How dare you?

How dare you?

[Tonya] It's just a constant demonizing of election officials when we could go back to 2015 and nobody knew we were here.

And it was kind of great.

Now, I go to church.

And someone's sitting at the end of the pew that has just been attacking us on social media.

This was happening with different election officials across the country.

I hate that elections have been demonized.

I hate that people don't understand what we do.

Because we're really proud of what we do.

I mean, we know we run good elections.

We test everything.

We go through every checklist.

We make sure everything is done to the letter of the law.

'Cause we want the community to see us as people who are fighting for what's right and fighting to make sure that people's voices are heard, no matter what the outcome.

[Daniel] What happened is that the process of making sure that the candidate who wins is the individual who received the most votes, that whole process has been politicized.

[Interviewer] You already shared that things changed in 2020.

Can you talk about what kinds of pressures were you under?

Tremendous pressure.

I had COVID a couple times.

My husband had COVID.

And he was suffering with stage four cancer.

So it felt pretty chaotic.

[crowd] Stop the count.

Stop the count.

Stop the count.

[Daniel] This is Hall E of then TCF Center where we were tabulating more than 174,000 absentee ballots.

This room was saturated with energy.

When the initial results were reported, Trump was leading in Michigan.

But after Wayne County began to report their results, Biden was up.

And then that's when this chanting erupted.

[crowd] Stop the count.

Stop the count.

Stop the count.

[Daniel] But even in the midst of all of the chaos, every last one of those ballots were tabulated.

But then the certification of the election results went to the state board of canvassers.

And that's where the major challenge came.

[Janice] The board of canvassers did not want to certify our elections.

And they were making it very partisan.

And that really irks me because I'm a non-partisan clerk.

But they said they would not certify unless I present myself in person via Zoom.

This is the first time I recall ever being called in to speak before the board of canvassers.

But when you tell me that we won't certify unless you present yourself, and you know that I have COVID, and you know that my family is not well, I do it anyway.

We've done everything to ensure that our process is open.

That our process is transparent.

And that it is administered... I just picked my husband up from the hospital and then I went into the conference room and said my piece in terms of why this election should be certified.

And thank the Lord it was certified.

And I went home.

(phone rings) [receptionist] Marion County supervisor of elections.

This is Madison.

How can I help you?

Did you want all the elections by mail this year?

[caller 2] Hello, Mr.

Wilcox.

It has been brought to my attention that you think this election is yours.

(phone beeps) [caller 3] This is not your election.

It's the election of the people.

So if you want to live in a communist country, you go to Cuba or Venezuela.

You go eat dogs over there.

But not us, all right?

[radio host] Wesley Wilcox goes on CNN and tells people that, basically, he's above audits.

That you're not gonna audit his elections because he does it right.

And you just have to believe he does it right because he says so.

- I mean, some of the things that get tossed at me.

Like, "You're not doing your job.

You're not competent.

You need to follow the law."

And I'm like, I am following the law.

[radio host] Let me tell you, Mr.

Wilcox.

I have got a platoon of lawyers ready to bring you to court.

And the citizens of Marion County won't stand for shenanigans in the upcoming elections.

- You know, I'm being attacked for things that I supposedly said that I never said.

The local guy that was on the radio.

I'd been on that show a couple times.

You know, talking about election stuff.

Known him for a long time.

And the lack of decency to text me and say, "Hey, we heard you said this.

You know, if you said that."

You know, I'm like, you know, at least contact me and see.

And I'll show you everything I've got.

Everything I've done, I've done in a public manner.

[voter] Representative Vos, I'm calling on you to have impeachment papers at the ready to remove her from office so that the state can restore my civil right to have my vote counted.

[reporter] Tonight, there's a new turn in the fight over who will lead Wisconsin's elections.

Senate Republicans wanna have a nomination vote so they can reject Wisconsin elections commission administrator, Meagan Wolfe.

- Today, Republicans held the first public hearing on Wolfe's renomination.

[voter] These are felony crimes.

This is the cause of Meagan Wolfe.

We will not back down.

We will not tire out.

We are watching your every move.

Not only don't renew her.

Fire her.

[Meagan] You know, some of these people, the way they'll just say my name or they'll describe me.

They just do it with such anger.

Such vitriol.

It's really almost absurd how drastically the tables turned on me.

I mean, in 2018, my commission bipartisanly, unanimously supported me as the administrator.

And then the Republican-controlled senate unanimously confirmed me.

But after the 2020 election, it felt like I became public enemy number one.

(dramatic music) [reporter] The governor has implemented or approved extra security for her.

We've talked about this before.

Documented some of the threats targeting her.

[Ann] But I can tell you that some of them are threats to her safety and her family's safety and wellbeing.

And some of them have been treated as very legitimate.

In other words, from people who've had plans, and intents, and opportunities to do harm.

- You know, I don't fault people that have these strong feelings and opinions about elections.

I have strong feelings about elections.

I think we all do because we know how important it is.

All I want is to show people how elections work so that they can have confidence in the process.

You know, if there's tough questions tonight, that's okay.

I live my life in the hot seat.

I really do.

And it's my great pleasure tonight to talk to you about the different levels of Wisconsin governments and what everyone's role is in Wisconsin elections.

[voter] This question's for Meagan Wolfe.

What do you have in place to be able to tell the difference between an eligible voter and extra names that they didn't qualify or aren't eligible?

People who your municipal clerk has said, we've reviewed a voter registration, and we say that this person is lawfully able to appear on the poll book.

[voter] In looking for quote unquote, "fraud cases," how many of those per election?

A lot of general elections, there's less than 20.

But if some type of fraud were committed, there is also audits that are done after the election.

And so what they're doing in that audit is they're gonna hand count those ballots and ensure that the total is the same as the total on the electronic tabulation equipment.

So every single ballot cast in the state of Wisconsin has to have a paper trail.

I am wondering why my father, who passed away, is still on an inactive role.

Should he not be completely off because he is deceased?

- So, so much for safe and secure elections.

Are you gonna pledge to stop that from happening this year?

Yes or no?

Are you gonna stop that?

[participant] Why aren't you doing anything about it?

Answer the question.

(crowd shouts) (crowd claps) [Wesley] The thing that I think the vast majority of election administrators have wished is, you know, not to be any part of the news story.

We never wanted to be part of the story.

But now, unfortunately, we are.

We've had to add security.

Four years ago, you could have shaken the hand of the person on the other side of the desk right there.

And, now, you're behind glass.

We had to add monitors and security cameras.

Because in today's world, when people come to visit us, one of the first things that crosses our mind is, are you there to harm us?

So those are things that have had to come into this process that weren't ever really contemplated before.

That's hard to kind of, you know, accept that no matter how well we do our jobs, no matter how perfectly the election is run, no matter how many recounts we have, no matter how many audits of the election we have, there's still gonna be these claims that are made.

But as I look ahead to November, you know, if I'm being really frank, I worry about how the turmoil around my position, if it's going to be an easy way for those that wish to sow distrust on elections, if it'll be an easy way for them to sort of cast out on the state of Wisconsin.

And so I worry a lot about, am I making the right decision by continuing to push back?

But I also think that we cannot set the precedent that harassing, bullying, threatening an election official is an effective way to get rid of them.

We cannot let that be the case.

Because then it's gonna keep happening.

[Janice] Our country is in a very delicate place.

It's almost scary.

I don't allow myself to be afraid.

But I do feel that all the more reason why we have to do what we do, as election administrators, to the best of my ability.

But more than that, to the letter of the law.

I believe that democracy is in our hands.

It's in our hands.

(guitar strums) I miss him so much.

But he would want us to keep going.

He would want us to, "Go big or go home."

That's what he says, right?

So that's what we're gonna do.

We're gonna administer this election like we've never administered an election.

In the spirit of Perfection.

[Wesley] I like what I do.

I like the election process.

I still believe I'm the best person to do this here for Marion County, Florida.

And I'm a little obstinate.

I don't want anybody to think they've run me out.

It's gonna take a little bit more.

[Daniel] The biggest challenge is, in order for a democracy to be true, people have to engage.

[Tonya] Our next election is going to be a superhero theme.

At the polls, on election day, if you wanna wear a superhero T-shirt, you are more than welcome.

We are calling you guys defenders of democracy this time instead of poll workers because poll worker's just not a good enough title for you anymore.

You do way more than that.

(crowd laughs) I don't know if there's going to be animosity or issues in the general election.

But I think anything that happens after the November election is not in my control.

If people don't trust our counts, if people don't trust the transition.

Hold it there until you see it come on.

The only control I have is to make sure our election is run properly and fairly.

And the rest?

That's up to the voters.