Election official says Lincoln man was first-time voter, not 'ballot mule'
LINCOLN — Lancaster County's top election official blasted a "shameful and unAmerican" video posted to social media over the weekend by a member of the Nebraska Republican Party who erroneously identified a young voter returning his mail-in ballot to a Lincoln drop box as a "ballot mule."
In a statement Monday, Election Commissioner Todd Wiltgen said the young man captured in the video — which showed him riding a skateboard, placing a ballot in the drop box at Eiseley Branch Library and snapping a selfie — was voting in his first presidential election and took a photo to capture the milestone.
The Election Commission investigated the incident and identified the first-time voter after Elliott Bottorf, the co-chair of the Nebraska GOP's election security subcommittee, posted the innocuous scene to the social media website X on Saturday, claiming without evidence that the voter was a ballot mule in a post that had garnered 1.4 million views by noon Monday.
In his statement, Wiltgen called Bottorf — who he did not name — "a member of a malicious conspiracy theorist group" that is "spreading false and misleading information to deceive the public and undermine confidence in our elections."
Wiltgen, a Republican who was appointed to head Lancaster County's Election Commission by Republican Gov. Jim Pillen last year, said the commission's staff grew concerned about the voter's safety when commenters on Bottorf's post and subsequent posts spreading the misinformation threatened to harm the young man. He said the commission contacted Lincoln Police, who reached out to the voter.
"It is shameful and unAmerican to intimidate and threaten anyone for exercising their right to vote," Wiltgen said, later calling on Bottorf to "remove the post and apologize immediately."
Even before Wiltgen's statement, the Lancaster County Republican Party had combatted the misinformation on X, telling followers in a social media post to "calm down" and noting the young man pictured in the video was confirmed to be a first-time voter returning his mail-in ballot.
At first, Bottorf refused, sowing further doubt without evidence. In a series of posts, he showed a close-up screenshot of the blurry video and claimed the voter was dropping off a "stack" of ballots. He also called for the voter to be publicly identified.
But hours after Wiltgen called on Bottorf to apologize and delete the post, he walked back the post Monday morning but did not remove it from X, the social media website formerly known as Twitter.
In a tweet, Bottorf said it was "heartening to learn that this young voter was simply 'casting his first ballot in a presidential election,' a milestone worth celebrating. It's always a pleasure to see young adults engaging in their civic duty."
Bottorf also seemed to defend his initial post in Monday's follow-up post, calling it "a mark of our times that concerned citizens feel the need to keep watch over every aspect of the electoral process to protect the sanctity of the vote."
In an email to the Journal Star, Bottorf said he did not take the video of the skateboarding voter but "simply reshared what had been sent and previously ignored by election officials." He also said he is not associated with the unnamed group that Wiltgen labeled a conspiracy theorist group, calling those comments defamatory.
"Since when is exercising the First Amendment and answering the call for 'watchfulness in the citizen' etched on our state Capitol a crime?" Bottorf said.
His posts came as former President Donald Trump, who blamed his 2020 defeat on false claims of widespread election fraud, is spending much of the final stretch of his latest presidential bid trying to discredit the legitimacy of this year's election.
At a Sunday rally in Pennsylvania, Trump said his political foes are "fighting so hard to steal this damn thing." At other weekend rallies in Virginia and North Carolina, he accused Democrats of "cheating."
The former president and his allies have produced no evidence of widespread fraud or Democratic attempts to rig this election or the one in 2020, which Trump lost to President Joe Biden.
His rhetoric has nonetheless helped sow doubt in America's elections, including in Nebraska, where voters in 2022 approved a change to the state's constitution to require voters to show photo identification before casting a ballot in elections going forward.
Even after the state's voter ID law took effect this year and repeated assurances from state election administrators that Nebraska's has the "gold standard" in election integrity, Republican state lawmakers have still questioned the state's election security, including the allowance of "no-excuse" early and mail-in voting.
Election integrity remains a platform issue for the Nebraska GOP. The party's website claims the "move to mail-in and drop-box voting in Nebraska has undermined the integrity of our electoral process."
Nebraska law has since 2005 allowed for counties with fewer than 10,000 residents the option to conduct all-mail elections, and 11 counites have switched to the mail-only format in the years since, mostly in 2018 and 2020, the Flatwater Free Press reported. Nearly 80% of voters in the 11 rural counties backed Trump over Biden in 2020.
The Nebraska GOP did not respond to a request for comment Monday.
