"No way Trump can lose without fraud" - Election officials in the South preview election denial to come

Months of investigation reveal more than two dozen conspiracists working as election officials in just two states — Arkansas and Mississippi. Far more are spread throughout the country.

This story is being published in conjunction with a story at Popular Information that details Republican efforts to make online voter registration virtually impossible in Arkansas. Many editions of American Doom are free but this story is behind a paywall because it’s the result of months of investigation into election denial officials in Arkansas, Mississippi and elsewhere across the country. You can support our efforts to expose election deniers, hold right-wing extremists accountable and track other threats to democracy for as little as $5 a month.

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Phil Terrell watched the 2020 election unfold from his longtime home in Murfreesboro, Arkansas, where for the last 30 years he’s been the manager of an Ace Hardware store there. Like many Arkansans, Terrell didn’t believe that Biden had won. Democrats in places other than Arkansas had cheated, Terrell believed. Maybe it was through voting machines or mail-in ballots that he thought were a major problem. Somewhere, fraud had occurred, and the election had been stolen from Donald Trump.

In the years that followed, Terrell followed news about election fraud while regularly attending meetings of the Pike County Republican Party. When a party member who sat on the Pike County Election Commission was elected mayor of a nearby town, local Republicans had to find someone to replace him. They looked to Terrell. 

“I thought about it and thought about it because it’s a lot of responsibility, a lot of work,” Terrell told American Doom. Eventually, Terrell accepted. 

Now, he’s one of two Republican members on the commission, which is responsible for overseeing local elections, staffing polling locations, adjudicating ballots and certifying election results. The third member is a Democrat. 

“I took this job because of all the problems I saw,” Terrell said. Those “problems” are instances of election fraud that Terrell has learned about from right-wing media, sometimes through his Facebook feed. There, Terrell is not unlike many Americans who have shared election conspiracies and misinformation on the platform.

“Gas prices are shooting up faster than the Biden vote count at 2 a.m.,” read a meme that Terrell shared on his personal Facebook page in February 2021 — before he had been appointed an election commissioner, he notes. 

Terrell is among 17 election commissioners across Arkansas who believe falsehoods about the 2020 election, according to a review of their Facebook posts by American Doom. In the South, they are far from alone.