Rural Elections Officials Still Combating Election Misinformation

Wednesday, October 18th, 2023 -- 12:01 PM

(AP) Kim Pytleski could barely sleep the night before.

She replayed the PowerPoint slides in her head, packed her notebook and took a deep breath. The clerk from a rural Wisconsin county north of Green Bay was preparing for a public meeting to explain the election process to residents. She didn’t know who she would encounter.

Would some deny the results of the last presidential election? Would the conversation get combative? Most importantly, would she get through to anyone? They were questions Pytleski never expected to ask herself when she started the job in Oconto County more than 14 years ago.

But since then, election conspiracy theories have taken root in the rural, heavily Republican county in northeastern Wisconsin. It’s among large swaths of the country where distrust of voting and ballot-counting, fanned by former President Donald Trump’s false claims of a stolen election, maintains a stubborn grasp.

Pytleski, who was born and raised in the county, hears conspiracy theories nearly everywhere she goes: Democrats are paying people to stuff ballot boxes with illegal votes, absentee voting allows rampant fraud, voting machines are hacked by foreign powers.

She receives skeptical letters and emails. When she’s defended the election process, Pytleski, a lifelong Republican, has been called a RINO, a Republican in Name Only.

“You know pretty much everyone,” she said of the towns that make up Oconto County, which has consistently leaned Republican in presidential elections over the past two decades, except when former President Barack Obama won here in 2008. “The joke is that if someone moves here, you have to live here 30 years before you’re considered a local. It’s a warm feeling, being in a place like this.”

But, she added, “election denialism has gotten its hold on it.” For elections officials and grassroots democracy groups in the presidential swing state, it has been an uphill fight to combat the doubts and the people who continue to spread them.

They describe grappling with an almost faith-like pull of conspiracy theories perpetuated by online misinformation and far-right figures. Still, they press on, taking on the issue one community event and one conversation at a time, hoping for a half-step forward.

Feel free to contact us with questions and/or comments.