Meet Those on the Frontlines of US Democracy in 2024

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Ken Block jokes that he could have been talking to me from the height of luxury. Instead, he was in his Rhode Island office, between calls with clients who know his bluntness is his biggest strength. And he is completely at peace with that reality.

"If I was willing to bring forward tens, if not hundreds of thousands of fraudulent votes—whether they were real or false—I could buy my own island. But that's not what I have any interest in doing," says the former consultant to Donald Trump's failed mission to undo his 2020 loss.

Block is one of TIME's first class of Democracy Defenders , a collection of non-partisan and bipartisan players in the coming elections. There's the former Microsoft CEO who, in semi-retirement, has become one of the best decoders of the government's spending regime. There's the Detroit city clerk who stares down Big Lie protesters with defiant confidence that her system is accurate. There's the organizer who started the year with the goal of registering a half-million new voters at apolitical events like concerts and sporting events. Others represent the entire chain of events that have to take place with credibility for the system to hold up.

As a whole, the folks of this list represent some of the best players defying those who see America's brand of politics as a corrupted, broken system. As TIME's editor in chief Sam Jacobs put it in his introduction of this project: "We also know that the work of encouraging civic participation and trust in our democratic process ultimately comes down to each of us."

As a consultant to Donald Trump's efforts to find a way to challenge or even overturn his 2020 loss to Joe Biden, Block probably knows more accurate and detailed information about every related conspiracy theory and false report than anyone in the United States. Tasked with tracking down the details—and armed with almost a decade of sleuthing for voter fraud—Block had to repeatedly tell the Trump lawyers they were looking for something that did not exist.

"There are some people who talk about voter fraud who lack any real understanding of how elections work. I can forgive them if they just don't understand it. They're excited and they go off and they're wrong. We saw a lot of false claims in 2020 that were there simply because some people got over-excited and made mistakes, but I don't think those mistakes were purposeful," Block says. "You have other people with a much better background and understanding of things who have brought forward and continue to bring forward claims of fraud that are wrong. They know they're wrong, and they do it anyway because they're not interested in the truth."

It's that second category that Block—and others in his class of Democracy Defenders, I suspect—finds most specious.

Four years later, the risk has not faded. Block, in his book Disproven , clinically looks at all the pressure points that remain in democracy and makes persuasive cases on how to strengthen them against the bad-faith players. In a doomsday scenario, it doesn't take too much paranoia to see how things could go off the rails if civic-minded people like those on the Democracy Defenders list take their eye off the prize.

"The threat comes from within," he says. "What I'm most worried about in this election cycle is the role that partisan election officials might play in altering the outcome of an election."

That's not to say American democracy deserves its shaky reputation. In fact, the way in which Block was able to disprove so many of the bonkers claims Trump's team threw at him through forensic accounting and more than a little common sense shows our election system is actually pretty resilient when put to the test. Math, after all, is not vulnerable to alternative facts.

"I don't expect the outcome to magically be fraudulent this time when it wasn't last time. Now, that doesn't mean we shouldn't be vigilant and that we shouldn't be on the lookout for problems, because there are many things we do in our elections that we can and should do much better than we are right now," he says. "But nobody can point to any of those issues and say, because of those issues, we have had an outcome in an election somewhere that we should not have."

That confidence and vigilance is why it might take more than an the evening of Election Night to know for sure who wins, but it's a question with an answer.

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