A Montgomery County commissioner’s effort to educate voters is now an Emmy-nominated short film

Montgomery County Commissioner and Penn Valley denizen Neil Makhija jokes that he never thought his “side hustle” making a video about election integrity would get him nominated for an Emmy.

Now, he and a team of artists and voting-rights advocates are in the running for two News and Documentary Emmy Awards for their short film, “You’re Being Lied To About Voter Fraud. Here’s the Truth,” which was published by the New York Times in October.

An attorney and law professor, Makhija was elected to the county commission as a Democrat in 2023. He became the first Asian American county commissioner in Pennsylvania history. He also became the chair of Montgomery County’s elections board, putting him at the helm of elections at a time when voting integrity — and Pennsylvania — found themselves in the national spotlight.

The six-minute video, produced by Sharp As Knives, a New York-based media company, features watercolor illustrations by Molly Crabapple and is set to Makhija’s narration that warns of the dangers of election misinformation. Makhija and Jordan Wood served as executive producers, and Max Boekbinder and Jim Batt of Sharp As Knives were senior producers.

The video has been nominated for two Emmys — outstanding graphic design in the news category and outstanding art direction/set direction/scenic design in the documentary category.

Makhija ran for office with the goal of protecting voter rights.

“When I took office as chair of the board of elections, I found that the lies about our elections had become worse than ever,” Makhija narrates in the video. “Every public meeting is full of conspiracy theories.”

While colleagues suggested he shrug off the claims, he took to explaining the voting process to individual constituents, hoping to break through with helpful information about how Montgomery County’s elections functioned.

Every now and then, he said, it worked.

That “taste of effective persuasion” gave him the idea to scale up his civics lesson. He had previously seen videos from Sharp As Knives, including a 2019 video narrated by U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) about the Green New Deal.

He reached out to Sharp As Knives, scraped together initial funding from family and friends, and got started on the project. Over the course of almost a year, Makhija worked with the production company on narrative structure and illustration ideas. After crowdfunding the first piece of the project, voting-rights nonprofit democracyFIRST funded the rest.

Last year, Makhija pitched the video to news outlets. The New York Times published it in October.

“Our elections are secure,” Makhija says in the video, describing the layers of protection that exist to ensure all eligible voters get one vote per election, and no more.

“Pulling off widespread voter fraud with 10,000 different locally run elections across the country would be like trying to rob every bank in America at the same time. It’s just not happening,” he says as the video continues.

Though the idea for the video began as a civics lesson, Makhija said the stakes are higher than just helping people understand how recounts work.

Seeing threats and violence in his own backyard, Makhija began to see that the continuum from election misinformation to threats and violence was “a very clear, straight line.” Bullets were fired into the Montgomery County Democratic Committee office in 2021. After being elected in 2023, Makhija himself received threats and his home address was leaked online.

Up until the last minute of the 2024 election, he said, skeptics were “sowing the seeds of doubt in order to overturn the election.”

Referencing violence toward election officials like himself, Makhija said, “People were willing to go through those lanes because they believed in the misinformation. Those who are feeding it, they should know better.”

The winners of the News and Documentary Emmy Awards will be announced at ceremonies on June 25 and 26.