💣EPISODE 7: THE MACHINE LEARNS TO RUN ITSELF

There’s a particular kind of dread that comes not from watching a wall collapse, but from watching it lean. Slowly. Incrementally. In ways that individually seem survivable — a crack here, a settled foundation there, a board replaced with something slightly softer — until one day you look up and realize the structure you thought you were living inside has become something else entirely, and the people who made it that way are now the ones holding the keys.

That’s where we are.

This is Episode 7 - the last one, for now… this series will be expanded with another episode each and every time they try a new move -  and the story we’ve been tracking across six episodes — the probing, the pressure-testing, the rehearsal of disruption — has arrived at its most dangerous chapter: not the assault from outside, but the occupation from within.

The actors we’ve followed since Episode 1 — the election deniers, the procedural saboteurs, the lawyers who filed the bad-faith suits and the officials who made the bad-faith calls — are not outside the gates anymore. They’re inside. They’re running agencies, chairing committees, sitting on state boards that oversee the very processes they spent years attacking. The stress test didn’t just reveal the system’s vulnerabilities. It taught the people applying the pressure exactly where to push.

Let’s talk about what institutional capture actually looks like, because it doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t arrive with a banner and a manifesto. It arrives as a personnel decision. It arrives as a reappointment. It arrives as a quiet restructuring of an advisory board, a shift in who gets to interpret ambiguous statutes, a change in who decides what counts as a “discrepancy” sufficient to delay certification.

Across the country, election administration infrastructure has been quietly, methodically repopulated. In Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Nevada — the five states that formed the obsessive core of the 2020 denial ecosystem — individuals aligned with election-denial narratives have moved into positions of formal authority over the processes they once sought to delegitimize. Some are county commissioners. Some sit on canvassing boards. Some have been appointed to oversight roles in state election administration. The through-line isn’t party affiliation. It’s a specific, documented orientation toward the legitimacy of elections — one that treats certification as negotiable and administrative discretion as a weapon.

This is not a conspiracy. It’s a pipeline. And it has been operating in plain sight.

The Heritage Foundation’s Honest Elections Project and affiliated organizations have spent years recruiting, training, and placing what they call “election integrity” advocates into local administrative roles. The result is a network of officials who share a set of assumptions about what they are empowered to do — assumptions that are, in many cases, legally untested, factually unfounded, and strategically useful. When those officials act on those assumptions — refusing to certify results, demanding post-election audits with no statutory basis, treating routine administrative procedures as occasions for ideological intervention — they aren’t acting alone. They are acting as nodes in a system that was deliberately built to produce exactly this kind of pressure.

The cumulative effect of what has been normalized over the past five years cannot be overstated. In 2020 and 2021, the actions that shocked us — officials refusing to certify results in Wayne County, Michigan; the Otero County Commission in New Mexico withholding certification; canvassing board members in Georgia demanding handcounts with no legal authority to compel them — were treated as anomalies. Outrages. Exceptions that the system ultimately overcame.

They were not exceptions. They were practice.

The normalization has been thorough and methodical. Threats against election workers — which the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency both documented at alarming scale following 2020 — have continued, with workers in Maricopa County, in Fulton County, and in counties across the country receiving death threats, harassment campaigns, and targeted doxxing. The effect has not simply been to frighten individuals. It has been to hollow out the institutional knowledge base on which accurate, efficient election administration depends.

The turnover numbers are brutal. A 2022 survey by the Brennan Center for Justice found that one in three election workers were considering leaving the profession. By 2023, the departures had materialized at scale. In state after state, experienced election directors — people who carried in their heads the institutional memory of thousands of edge cases, the knowledge of which precincts run slow and why, which voting machines have quirks, which community liaisons to call when turnout is unexpectedly high — have left. Retired early. Taken jobs in the private sector. Or, in a number of documented cases, been pushed out by newly elected county officials hostile to their professional judgment.

What replaces them matters enormously. What replaces them, in too many cases, is people with strong opinions about election fraud and thin experience running elections.

The legal gray zones that have been manufactured over the past several years are not accidents. They are architecture.

State legislatures in Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, and elsewhere have passed laws and proposed constitutional amendments that blur the lines between legislative authority and administrative independence in election administration. The Independent State Legislature doctrine — the theory, partially and inconclusively addressed by the Supreme Court in Moore v. Harper in 2023, that state legislatures possess near-plenary authority over federal elections unconstrained by state courts or state constitutions — has not been fully resolved. The Court’s ruling in Moore rejected the most extreme version of the theory, but left enough ambiguity in the doctrine’s edges to sustain ongoing litigation and legislative maneuvering.

Those edges are being exploited. In Georgia, the State Election Board — restructured in 2021 to give the Republican-controlled legislature more appointment authority — has promulgated rules giving county election boards expanded discretion to investigate results before certification. The rules are legally contested. Their effect, if applied, would be to create procedural delay mechanisms that could push certification past statutory deadlines — the same deadlines that, as we documented in earlier episodes, formed the backbone of the legal strategy to leverage alternate slates of electors.

In Wisconsin, efforts to reassert legislative control over the Wisconsin Elections Commission — including an attempt to allow the legislature to remove commission administrators without cause — have been fought in court and in the legislature simultaneously. The litigation is ongoing. The administrative uncertainty is real and present.

In Arizona, a series of conflicting court rulings about the use of hand-count audits, the authority of county boards to delay or condition certification, and the standards for challenging machine tabulation results has created a legal landscape so murky that local officials — many of them new, many of them trained in election denial adjacent frameworks — have genuine discretion to make consequential decisions with no clear legal guardrail.

This is the gray zone. Not chaos, exactly. But not law, either. The space between what is clearly permissible and what is clearly prohibited has been deliberately widened, and the people now empowered to operate inside that space were selected, in many cases, precisely because they would use their discretion in a particular direction.

Then there are the 700 boxes.

In January 2025, federal agents — acting on authorization that has not been fully explained publicly — seized approximately 700 boxes of Fulton County election materials. The materials include ballots, poll books, absentee ballot applications, and other election records from the 2020 general election and subsequent runoff contests. The chain of custody for these materials remains a matter of genuine legal dispute. Questions about who has access to them, under what authority, and subject to what restrictions have not been definitively answered in any public forum.

Let that land for a moment.

Election materials from one of the most scrutinized counties in American electoral history — the county at the center of a state-level criminal prosecution of Donald Trump and eighteen co-defendants, the county that has been the subject of more bad-faith “audits,” harassment campaigns, and conspiracy theories than perhaps any jurisdiction in the country — are now in federal custody under circumstances that are, to put it plainly, not fully transparent.

The Fulton County case itself has been frozen, suspended in the procedural amber of pretrial litigation over prosecutorial disqualification and questions about the case’s relationship to the federal proceedings. The state criminal process has not moved meaningfully in months. And the materials at the center of that process are now held by the very federal government whose leadership has, at minimum, a categorical interest in the outcome of proceedings related to those materials.

This is not to assert a specific outcome. It is to name, plainly, the situation: a conflict of interest so structural, so obvious, and so unaddressed that to treat it as routine would be its own form of institutional failure. The integrity of those materials — their preservation, their accessibility to parties with legal standing to review them, the documentation of who has touched them and when — is not a procedural footnote. It is a foundational question about whether the evidentiary record of the 2020 election in Fulton County can be trusted to survive in the form in which it was created.

There is a woman named Wandrea “Shaye” Moss. You may remember her from her congressional testimony in June 2022. She was a Fulton County election worker. She processed ballots. She did her job. And then Rudy Giuliani stood in front of a legislative committee and accused her, by name, of stuffing ballot cases with USB drives. The accusation was false. It was demonstrably, provably, completely false. It did not matter. The clip went viral in the disinformation ecosystem. Death threats followed. Her family was targeted. She stopped leaving her house. She gained weight because she was afraid to go outside. Her grandmother — her grandmother — had strangers show up at her door.

Shaye Moss won a defamation judgment against Giuliani. She will likely never collect. That is not the point.

The point is this: what happened to Shaye Moss was not a side effect of the disinformation campaign. It was the campaign. The purpose of the lie was not merely to cast doubt on the election results. The purpose was to make the cost of doing this job — of being the person who counts the votes, who processes the ballots, who shows up and does the essential unglamorous administrative work of democracy — prohibitively, terrifyingly high.

It worked. Not completely. Not everywhere. But enough. Enough to hollow out the ranks. Enough to ensure that when the next cycle comes, the people counting the votes in contested jurisdictions will disproportionately be people who either entered the field recently enough to have no memory of how things are supposed to work, or who entered the field specifically because they believe the system is rigged and want to be inside it to do something about that.

The chilling effect is not theoretical. It is documented, measured, and ongoing. And it has accomplished exactly what it was designed to accomplish.

Here is the question that sits at the center of everything we’ve covered in this series: Can a system designed to withstand external assault withstand coordinated internal pressure applied through legitimate-seeming mechanisms by actors who understand the system’s rules well enough to use them against its purposes?

The answer the past five years have given us is: we don’t know yet.

The courts have held, mostly. The rule of law has bent severely but not broken, mostly. Individual officials — Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, Vice President Mike Pence, election administrators in dozens of counties in battleground states — have, at enormous personal cost, done what the law required. That matters enormously. It is not nothing. It is, in fact, the reason we are still having this conversation in a country that still has functioning democratic institutions, however strained.

But.

The vulnerabilities are now mapped. The mechanisms of pressure are now institutionalized. The actors who ran the stress tests are now, in many cases, running the systems they tested. And the next election cycle will not present itself as a crisis in the way that 2020 did — explosive, obvious, impossible to ignore. It will present itself as routine. As normal. As the ordinary operation of democratic machinery. And inside that machinery, the gears will have been subtly, deniably, legally-adjacent-ly adjusted.

The question is not whether someone will try again. The question is whether the system will notice in time, and whether the people still committed to its integrity will have enough institutional standing, legal authority, and simple critical mass to hold the line when the pressure comes from inside the room they’re already in.

That question does not have an answer yet. That is, in the end, the point.

This series has been about watching a democratic system subjected to stresses its designers did not fully anticipate, and tracing the people and mechanisms through which those stresses have been applied, normalized, and institutionalized. It has not been a story about inevitable doom. It has also not been a story about guaranteed resilience. It has been a story about contingency — about the fact that democratic institutions do not run themselves, do not protect themselves, and do not survive the determined effort to capture them from within without active, informed, organized resistance from the people who depend on them.

The machinery is still running. The actors are still in place. The 700 boxes sit in federal custody under unresolved conditions. The state legislatures are still drafting. The gray zones are still expanding. The experienced administrators are still leaving, and the people replacing them still have axes to grind. And somewhere in Fulton County and in Phoenix and in Milwaukee and in Maricopa, there are people — ordinary people, unglamorous people, people who just showed up to do a job they believe in — who are going to have to decide, again, whether to hold the line when someone in authority tells them they don’t have to.

The whole thing depends on them. The whole rickety, beautiful, imperfect, indispensable thing.

That’s not nothing. That’s everything.

Don’t look away.