President Joe Biden has made a very curious choice in nominating Dara Lindenbaum to the Federal Election Commission. The FEC exists to bolster public faith that campaigns run with integrity. Lindenbaum, in contrast, is an attorney who swore under oath to baseless and since-withdrawn election conspiracy theories designed to undermine faith in election outcomes.
In a lawsuit she filed in November 2018 on behalf of Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams’s nonprofit group, she signed her name to several bad-faith allegations, many of which had already been debunked at that time. But one of these allegations truly stands out for its brazen fearmongering and lack of credible evidence: the charge that faulty or rigged voting machines were actually switching voters’ choices when they went to vote in the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election.
Under penalty of perjury, Lindenbaum signed her name to a complaint alleging that “voting machines switched … votes from Leader Stacey Abrams to Secretary [and now-Gov. Brian] Kemp.” She was representing the nonprofit organization created by Abrams, the Democratic nominee who lost that race by nearly 55,000 votes and is on track to lose again for governor this year.
Ironically, Abrams’s group and her attorneys have since withdrawn the allegation about machines changing votes from Abrams to Kemp. That’s because former President Donald Trump started making similar allegations after he lost Georgia in 2020 by a much narrower margin. He was only building upon Lindenbaum’s earlier and equally baseless efforts to undermine public faith in Georgia election outcomes.
The withdrawal of this extremely serious allegation in a still-active lawsuit that might depend on it casts additional doubts upon its veracity. Indeed, one can conclude that its truth or falsity mattered little to Lindenbaum and the other attorneys who signed the original complaint. As officers of the court, attorneys are not permitted to say just say whatever their clients want — they are forbidden from repeating facts or making allegations that they know to be false.
Sen. Ted Cruz raised this issue during Lindenbaum’s confirmation hearing. “As an officer of the court, you were willing to put your name on a legal pleading alleging that the machines used in Georgia in 2018 were switching votes illegally from one candidate to another,” the Texas Republican said. “Is that correct?”
“Yes,” she replied. But trapped between this conspiracy theory and the possibility of being caught in a lie at her own confirmation hearing, Lindenbaum refused to discuss the matter further, citing the litigation as her excuse.
Lindenbaum has helped undermine public faith in election outcomes without any credible evidence. That is enough on its own to disqualify her from this election-related position. But the worse possibility is that she actually participated in a client’s misrepresentation in court. Either way, she has no place on a commission that decides questions about elections. It would be akin to putting Bernie Madoff on the Securities and Exchange Commission or appointing Bill Clinton to the Justice Department’s Office on Violence Against Women.
As the experience with both Abrams and Trump shows, baseless election denialism is toxic to the body politic. It heightens partisan animosity and prompts people to reject the legitimacy of duly enacted laws and legal outcomes. Sometimes, such allegations even suppress the vote by discouraging participation. They also cause undue stress within target populations and encourage the false belief that the entire system is rigged.
Abrams, for her part, has still not admitted her 2018 loss for governor, even though it was not close. Expecting to lose, she made many bad-faith allegations about voter suppression even before the 2018 election transpired. Not only were most of these debunked at the time, but the record-setting turnout of that 2018 race suggests that claims that voter suppression occurred at all, let alone on a scale big enough to generate the 55,000-vote margin by which she lost, were always transparently false.
Government at all levels, especially the state level, should be doing what it can to bolster public faith in election outcomes, not undermine it. There are enough conspiracy theorists in government as it is. There is no need to compound the problem by confirming this flawed FEC nominee.
