Dion Nissenbaum discusses his recent news story, “FBI Probe of Ohio Voting Rights Group Expands to Include an Affiliated National Advocacy Network,” and other Trump administration threats to the midterm election he’s been covering for VoteBeat National, a nonpartisan local reporting on elections and voting.
SCOTT HARRIS: I’m very happy to welcome to our program Dion Nissenbaum, senior reporter with VoteBeat National, a nonpartisan local reporting on elections and voting. Diane, thank you so much for making time to be with us on our Counterpoint program tonight.
DION NISSENBAUM: Thanks, Scott. I’m glad to be here.
SCOTT HARRIS: Before we talk about what’s been going on in Ohio and the work you’ve been doing covering some really major issues there, I wondered if you just tell our listeners a bit about VoteBeat and the work and your journalist colleagues do with VoteBeat.
DION NISSENBAUM: Sure. Yeah. VoteBeat is, as you said, a nonpartisan, nonprofit newsroom dedicated to voting and elections issues. It’s been around in one form or another about six years. In its current format, it’s been around about four years and I am the new national reporter for the company and we have reporters in sort of key states around the nation: Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin, which all play pivotal roles in federal elections and not to brag about my colleagues, but some of the best deeply sourced reporters on this beat. They know the elections officials on the ground, break a lot of news about what’s happening on voting and elections issues. And so as you well know, voting in elections is kind of a key issue. It’s been a big target for President Trump and we expect our work over the next two to four years to be pretty important as we keep an eye on what happens with our midterm and then the next presidential election.
SCOTT HARRIS: Absolutely critical given the fact that unfortunately we have a lot of local newspapers that have died. We have many journalists out of work. Thousands of these journalists are finding new jobs in public relations. They’re not doing the work they used to do. And so your service really is vital, as you said, especially when democracy and elections are under attack. So thank you for doing this. And I hope we’ll stay in touch because you guys are doing some really important work as we’ve been saying.
DION NISSENBAUM: Sure. For sure.
SCOTT HARRIS: So in your recent article, “FBI Probe of Ohio Voting Rights Group Expands to Include an Affiliated National Advocacy Network,” you discuss what some believe is a campaign of intimidation through a politically motivated investigation conducted by the FBI. I wondered if you could tell our listeners about what happened in Ohio to people working with the local voting rights group.
DION NISSENBAUM: Right. Yeah. About two weeks ago, the FBI—dozens of agents—were on the ground in Ohio questioning both staff members and volunteers with a group called the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, which is one of the leading voting registration groups, voting advocacy groups based in Cleveland. And they work primarily with progressive groups, get a lot of help from national progressive organizations and were targeted by the FBI. They came in with search warrants to their office. People with the group said that they turned up at people’s homes, questioning them about potential voter registration fraud in Ohio.
And that was the start of the reporting. It was broken by some reporters at MSNBC, I believe about a week and a half ago. And then when we started to look into it, we learned that the investigation was broader and that the FBI had served subpoenas on at least one major national group called America Votes, which is a leading national progressive group founded by folks like the leader of Emily’s List and other organizations.
The folks at America Votes have been told that they are not a target of the investigation and that the FBI is looking for information about the funding they provided to the Ohio Organizing Collaborative. And we have heard that subpoenas have gone out to other national organizations that have worked with this Ohio group, but haven’t yet confirmed which ones. It does seem like all of these efforts are focused on the work in Ohio, but it’s to be determined. We haven’t seen the search warrants. We don’t know the scope of it and with this FBI, as you well know, it’s taken an expansive approach to looking at past elections issues. They’ve seized ballots in Fulton County, Georgia related to the 2020 election. They have been on the ground in Maricopa County, Arizona looking at the results of the 2020 election out there. And so we’re not clear exactly what they’re after in Ohio.
SCOTT HARRIS: Have there been any indictments or arrests? And as you just said, there really doesn’t seem to be any substance at least that’s been revealed publicly about what this investigation is after.
DION NISSENBAUM: Yeah, certainly no arrests, no indictments. This seems to be the beginning of a process. There was some reporting out of Cleveland that there may be a focus on a contractor that works with the Ohio Organizing Collaborative called, I believe it’s called Blackfork Strategies. And it’s a group that works with this Ohio group and there have been some complaints about potential voter registration problems there dating back a year or so, but that’s still speculation on our part. And I think what you’ve seen with this FBI is sort of an effort to look at past complaints that may have been examined and pick them up again and see if they can find something new. There’s been certainly no arrests or indictments out of the seizure of the ballots in Georgia. Nothing’s come of the investigation in Arizona. As you well know, these are issues President Trump has been championing, arguing that he was cheated out of the victory in 2020 and sort of directed his Department of Justice to look into these issues and we’ve still seen nothing come of any of these cases.
SCOTT HARRIS: We’re speaking with Dion Nissenbaum, senior reporter with VoteBeat National, an online publication that covers elections and threats to elections all over the country. Dion, I did see a recent interview with Pastor Harrison, who’s the chair of the Ohio Organization Collaborative. He answered the question about intimidation. A question was put to Pastor Harrison, chair of this group that’s being investigated, and he reports, “Not only have we not been intimidated,” he says they’ve redoubled their work, that this has been lighting a fire under everybody to understand what’s at stake in the next election. If the FBI is in league with the administration in terms of trying to criminalize people who engage in advocacy for voting rights, then they want to put more energy and time into their project. Have you found anything like that or … ?
DION NISSENBAUM: I would say that in my reporting on the scope of the investigation, I would say that the folks that I reached out to were pretty wary of talking about it. If the FBI comes knocking on your door, that can be quite intimidating whether you have anything to hide or not. Some people are going to be energized and fight back, but that is the power of the federal government and gives them broad investigative power and that’s not something you can sneeze at. So I would say in my reporting, we certainly found a lot of people that were reluctant to talk. They were still trying to understand the scope of the investigation. I think at the national level, if they feel like they aren’t a target, maybe they feel less intimidated and it sounds like the folks that you spoke with are feeling energized and ready to stand up for their rights.
So I think it runs a gamut across the board.
SCOTT HARRIS: Yeah. No, I certainly understand anybody who would be reluctant to talk about it or go back on the road on an engagement of activities that could get you in trouble with the government. So yeah, intimidation is a very, very important thing to consider here in terms of elections. On a bigger topic, I wondered if you would address for our audience the corrosive effect of claiming the American election system is riddled with fraud and more specifically, we’ve seen a lot from the Trump administration, unsupported claims that undocumented immigrants are illegally voting in large numbers in U.S. elections all across the country.
DION NISSENBAUM: Yeah. This is one of the things I think about quite a lot. I’ve been a journalist my whole life and I’ve seen that the trust in journalists over the last 50 years has plummeted in America. I’m sure you remember a time when people like Walter Cronkite were considered the most trusted man in America and now Americans across the political spectrum just look at legacy media, mainstream media with skepticism and that has hurt our ability to do accountability journalism. If you don’t believe what you read, then you’re less likely to act. And I certainly support everybody looking for facts and getting multiple sources of information. I think that’s important for everybody to do, check your sources. And you’re starting to see that erosion in trust now with America’s voting system and trust and faith in American elections is now starting to erode. And to me, that’s kind of a canary in that coal mine kind of moment where if Americans are losing faith in their electoral system, then you’re going to start to see more erosions of trust and faith and confidence that can create bigger problems.
So it’s concerning and it’s difficult to fight back. VoteBeat all the time tries to present facts about how few incidents of voter fraud there is—as I’m sure you well know the incidences of non-citizens voting in elections is incredibly rare. There’s no evidence that that kind of voting, that any kind of voter fraud has ever tilted an election and so that hasn’t really sunk in with Americans. There’s still a lot of concern about it. When you have the president of the United States hammering away on it over and over again, it reinforces this feeling of mistrust and I do worry about it and working at VoteBeat with my colleagues to do our best to present factual information so people know what the facts are and that they can trust the democratic system across the country, that there are a lot of checks and balances and that incidences of non-citizens voting in elections is not something people have to worry about.
SCOTT HARRIS: Right. Yeah. There are so many threats to our elections we’ve been covering a lot of them on our program as well. So we have the SAVE Act that Donald Trump is trying to get through the Senate right now, maybe torpedo the filibuster that would likely disenfranchise some 20 million voters by requiring passports or birth certificates. There’s a lot of other things in that bill, won’t get into now. But as you said earlier, there’s a seizure of ballots, Fulton County, Georgia, and in Maricopa County in Arizona. There’s this allegation of foreign interference in U.S. elections that could be some kind of pretext to intervene federally in elections coming up in November. There’s the threat to use the U.S. Postal Service to end mail-in balloting unless voters appear on a list. The Department of Justice is suing states for their voter rolls and so far they’ve been denied by federal judges.
There’s the mid-decade gerrymandering and the Supreme Court gutting of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. There are threats to declare martial law or invoke the Insurrection Act during the upcoming election to have the military seize ballots. And of course you’ve got people close to the president threatening to deploy ICE agents and the U.S. military to polling stations in key swing state cities in November. Anyway, there’s a lot there that I’d love to cover with you in the future, but Dion, maybe I could ask you this. In your coverage of all these multiple threats to elections, what do you see as the most serious or the several most serious threats to derail our midterm election in November?
DION NISSENBAUM: It’s a big question that we ask all the time. We try and separate fact from fiction in terms of is it possible that federal officials could try and seize ballots while the counting is underway. It’s difficult to answer that question to be honest. It’s a bit of a moving target. We look at all of the ways the Trump administration is trying to test the integrity of the elections process with the seizing of ballots from 2020, with the establishment of these databases, with the efforts to have the postal service essentially become a voter registration regulation system.
So it’s difficult to know at this point what could happen. When I talk to the experts, I get a range of opinions. There are some people that believe the system is strong enough to withstand any stresses because as you know, elections are not regulated by the federal government. They’re controlled by states, they’re controlled by county officials. There’s no central way to try and manipulate the system. But then I talk with others who are worried that the president is trying to lay the groundwork for going into some pivotal county and trying to seize ballots while they’re still being counted, which could throw certification into doubt. With this president, he’s taken unprecedented steps in so many ways that it’s hard to know what he might try and do in a federal election coming up. So that’s what we’re going to be doing. That’s what we do every day at VoteBeat is look at these issues and try and separate fact from fiction to figure out where these challenges are.
I’m sorry I can’t give you the best answer right now about where the biggest challenge may lie.
SCOTT HARRIS: No, it’s a huge issue and it’s really where the future of democracy in our country is at stake and you got your hands full with things you’re covering and certainly this lays the kind of foundation for future conversations and certainly please do also leave our listeners with the website so they can find some of the reporting there at VoteBeat.
DION NISSENBAUM: Yeah, it’s very simple. It’s www.votebeat.org.
SCOTT HARRIS: Got it. All right. Well, thanks for spending time with us in your important work at VoteBeat. And as I said, love to stay in touch and have you back.
DION NISSENBAUM: Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
SCOTT HARRIS: Thanks. Take care. Goodnight.
DION NISSENBAUM: Goodnight.
SCOTT HARRIS: That’s Dion Nissenbaum, senior reporter with VoteBeat. This is Counterpoint. My name’s Scott Harris. Here on listener-supported WPKN in Bridgeport.
