‘Big lie’ comes to Utah with effort to access voter data
Free and fair elections?
Maybe not for much longer if a handful of political extremists have their way.
As conscientious Millard County voters diligently cast their ballots ahead of Tuesday’s primary election, a Fourth District Court case—and attendant media campaign—is ongoing that looks to sow doubts about the integrity of Utah’s elections.
Tiny Millard County is even named in the civil lawsuit, one of three jurisdictions sued in March by two “moms” breathlessly concerned about the integrity of the 2020 election. Utah and Juab counties were also sued.
The case stems from election officials in those counties rejecting records requests seeking all manner of normally secure election materials—not ballots, per se, but “Cast Vote Record, Project Backup Database, and Tabulator Tapes and Ballot Images for the 2020 elections,” the lawsuit states.
The plaintiff “moms” are Jennifer Orten, of Draper, and Sophie Anderson, of Salt Lake City. The duo call themselves “Two Red Pills” online, a reference to a scene in the 1999 film “The Matrix.” The “red pill” ostensibly opens the eyes of its taker to an unsettling or life-altering truth, versus the blissful ignorance “blue pills” provide.
Their website proclaims they are in the business of “Preserving Freedom, Fighting Evil and Exposing Corruption.” It even includes a page for merchandise, t-shirts and stickers referring to their fight for election records, with phrases such as “Vexatious Requester” and “I am a self-appointed, un-elected, un-trained, un-certified individual.”
Orten and Anderson have 40 separate appeals of previous records request rejections concerning election records before the State Records Committee, according to a motion to dismiss their lawsuit filed by Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, the state’s top elections officer.
Henderson’s May 5 motion argues that election records are protected by the state’s election code and not subject to the open records law, GRAMA. It also says the women have no standing to sue the counties over records from elections that have already been legally certified.
But that hasn’t stopped the “red pills” from making a splash in the Trumpified, extremist media landscape that proliferates online—the ladies have given dozens of interviews since January and appeared alongside such radical luminaries as Roger Stone, Mike “MyPillow” Lindell and Richard Mack, founder of a fringe organization called Constitutional Sheriffs & Peace Officers Association, which has called for nationwide “election fraud” investigations.
This all stems, of course, from Donald Trump’s loss to Joseph Biden in the 2020 presidential election, as well as widespread, and completely debunked, claims of voter fraud related to Trump’s loss.
The 2020 election lies were so thick they directly led to a violent conniption by fringe radicals looking to disrupt the counting of electoral college votes—a purely ceremonial function—at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Criminal prosecutions resulted for hundreds of riot participants.
And subsequent investigation by the January 6 Select Committee in the U.S. House has so far revealed a likely high-level, multi-pronged, but ultimately failed, effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. The committee called a surprise hearing for Tuesday to consider new evidence after adjourning last week’s explosive hearings until July.
It remains to be seen if that investigation, or a related one in Georgia, will lead to criminal charges for higher level plotters in Trump’s orbit, including the former president himself.
Meanwhile, energized actors on the right are riding the coattails of the “Big Lie” and making names for themselves among those of like-minded political predilections—a recent Washington Post analysis identified more than 100 GOP primary election winners across the nation who support 2020 election fraud claims.
In Utah, Orten and Anderson are among the most vocal.
But like their cohorts in other states, they have a chicken-and-egg problem—the duo are basically spreading a conspiracy theory yet providing virtually zero evidence to support it.
During a June 23 appearance on the “Sheriff Mack Show,” Orten sort of confessed to having no evidence of voter fraud in Utah, only the suggestion of it based upon her reading of election officials’ reactions to her denied records requests.
“It was the project backup database request that I think really triggered them (state and local officials) because that was the one, how do you explain it, it would really just blow everything wide open on what was going on in our (voting) machines and in our elections,” Orten said on the show, adding a dusting of paranoia for effect. “That triggered them. It got men on my porch. It got a lot of things, trackers on cars, surveillance, followed, hacked, bugged, you name it. But nothing deterred us at all. To be honest with you, we didn’t give a whole lot of worry to any of that.”
Orten also told the show she “heard” the state has already destroyed the 2020 election data and it “should get really, really interesting” once the issue gets into court. State law provides for the storage of election data for 22 months before it is destroyed.
Anderson parroted similar evidence-free assumptions.
“If they wouldn’t have these reactions to every one of our actions (records requests), there’s a good chance we might have said ‘you know what, there’s nothing here,’” Anderson told the show. “It’s the cover-up and the lack of transparency that has helped us just fight, fight, fight.”
Anderson later offered this logical fallacy: if Utah’s elections were so safe and secure, why is her effort being deterred.
“Why in the world if our elections are the gold standard, they’re beautiful, they’re perfect, they’re fair, they’re transparent, why are they so adamant to stop us?” she conspiratorially intoned.
Lending credence to the ladies’ shtick is none other than a Utah state legislator, a former San Juan County commissioner named Phil Lyman, who last regular session introduced a bill that would have restricted voting across the state— HB371, which failed to even get out of committee, would have removed ballot drop-off boxes and curtailed vote by mail among numerous other statutory changes.
“Jen and Sophie represent everything that’s right with America,” Lyman proclaimed on Mack’s online program last week. “It’s supposed to be government by the people. When there’s a threat on our system, a certain level of indignation and hostility is required of citizens.”
The lieutenant governor’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit brought by Orten and Anderson makes plain—Lyman should probably know better—the idea of having unelected, untrained, uncertified citizens rooting around in secure election materials and voting infrastructure is potentially a recipe for disaster.
“In this case, the Election Code does not create a right of action for unauthorized individuals to possess or examine Election Materials and does not create a right for groundless judicial review of long-concluded, certified elections,” the lieutenant governor’s motion to dismiss reads. “As noted above, the Election Code dictates that Election Materials be sealed and destroyed without opening and without examination by anyone. And there is no provision in Election Code that allows for unauthorized yet self-appointed lay persons to second-guess and independently re-run the vote count after official elected canvassers have statutorily validated the election results.”
The motion later goes on to argue that “Allowing random re-audits of officially certified elections on demand would circumvent the statutory process already in place to contest elections and is not in the public interest.”
Orten and Anderson are, thus, virtually attacking the very rules in place to ensure election integrity—elected, trained officials following state law in order to run secure elections counting secret, private votes of citizens— thus potentially compromising the very thing they argue they are seeking to protect.
In their response to Henderson’s motion to dismiss, they claim they are not contesting election results—what then are the allegations of fraud meant to prove if not that election results are fraudulent and should be contested?
“The Lieutenant Governor’s Office cannot identify any authority upon which the (records) requests should be denied, but instead erroneously try to morph this judicial review action into an election contest,” the ladies’ attorney, Chad Shattuck, wrote in a May 19 response to Henderson’s motion. “This action is not an election contest. It is an effort to enforce Utah law on public employees that have refused to comply with it due to the threats made against them by the Lieutenant Governor’s Office.”
Fourth District Judge Derek P. Pullan is set to hear oral arguments in the case on Henderson’s motion to dismiss on July 13.
No doubt whatever the outcome, even a bitter pill for the Two Red Pills, will be more grist for the radical media mill—damage to future elections to be determined.
