David Becker’s quote in this story sums up the issue:

‘David Becker, the executive director and founder of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, which works with election officials of both parties to make elections more secure and accessible, said there’s no need for the new criminal penalties.  

“These are coming out now in complete defiance of reality,” he said, describing the 2020 election as a great achievement of American democracy. 

“Instead of throwing a parade for these people and thanking them for their service, they’re being targeted with these new criminal penalties and new police forces focused on their efforts, because of a lie.”‘

Also this:

‘“This is debilitating for democracy,” Becker said. “These are bullying tactics. These are efforts to try to scare election officials away from doing what is their duty and either chase them out of office or convince them to violate their oaths.”

Becker described election officials as exhausted and questioning if the job is worth it. “We’re going to see the potential of losing an entire generation of professional election officials, which is bad in and of itself because we rely on them to run smooth elections, but who replaces them?”‘

If we take as a given that the United States is unfortunately undergoing a period of democratic erosion or backsliding, comparable to what has occurred in other democracies around the world, the question (at least to me) is how best to reverse this negative trend and, especially, to avoid it from getting even worse? I don’t think successful reversal can happen overnight, and my instinct is that it must start with transparency and other related measures that make it as difficult as possible to make new election denialism “Big Lie” claims in defiance of what transparent procedures clearly show. Yes, Trump’s Big Lie has done horrible damage, including of the kind that Becker (and this article more broadly) describes, but preventing additional damage of the same type seems to me be a necessary first step before it’s possible to undo the damage that’s already occurred.