But Lamb has transformed himself since then. Soon after taking office he found reality television and became a fixture on the immensely popular A&E show “Live PD”, even hosting a spinoff called “Live PD: Wanted” until the series was canceled after Texas sheriff’s deputies were caught on “Live PD” cameras tasing a man to death in 2019. Lamb was also the star of the fifth season of another A&E  show, “60 Days In”, which aired in 2019 and chronicled Lamb turning volunteers into undercover informants inside his jail. In 2021, Lamb then launched his own Live PD-inspired show, called “American Sheriff”, which featured him crossing the country to chit chat with other like minded sheriffs, cut against scenes of Lamb posing in the desert sunset as a camera pans slowly over the shadows of cacti. The show aired on Lamb’s newly-created American Sheriff Network, as does his newest production, a show called “Surviving Mann” where contestants undergo “elite military training”—all viewable for a $5 monthly subscription fee. 

Early this month, Lamb, a Republican, jumped into next year’s race for Arizona’s U.S. Senate seat, currently held by Democrat-turned-independent Kyrsten Sinema,  having fully honed his new “American Sheriff” persona. 

In an ad announcing his campaign, Lamb declares, “It’s time for a new sheriff in Washington,” as a series of images flash across the screen zooming in on the details of his new favorite outfit—cowboy hat and boots with worn tips, a big Western belt buckle, a flak vest emblazoned with his title in large letters, and a Glock on his hip. 

Lamb, who did not respond to questions for this story, is hardly the first sheriff to try and use his role in law enforcement as a stepping stone for higher political office. His predecessor, former Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu, ran two failed bids for congress. The infamous former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio twice ran losing campaigns for mayor of his hometown. But other sheriffs have had more success: Troy Nehls, a Republican Houston-area sheriff accused of racial profiling, won election to the U.S. House in 2020, and Joe Lombardo parlayed his previous job as the sheriff of Las Vegas into a successful campaign for Nevada governor last year. 

But Lamb, while always a self-professed “gun nut,” did not have a great deal of law enforcement experience when he first ran for sheriff. To compensate, he branded himself as a “constitutional conservative” with political ads calling himself  “pro-life,” “pro-gun,” and “pro-religious freedoms.” Unlike many sheriff campaigns, there was hardly a word about crime, jail conditions, or public safety. One 2016 campaign video, titled “The Progressive Are Coming,” featured Hillary Clinton talking about limiting gun sales contrasted with Lamb and his large, Mormon family in a gun store. 

When Lamb took over the sheriff’s office in 2017, he talked about wanting to deploy a “business approach,” which apparently mostly meant focusing on marketing the department through logos and revamped social media. He also generated affiliated merchandise, just as The Apprentice launched Trump Steaks,  creating “American Sheriff LLC”  to sell t-shirts, as well as a nonprofit under the same name, which was investigated for accounting irregularities. Lamb also trademarked what he calls his catchphrase: “Fear Not. Do Right.” It functions primarily as a slogan for Lamb’s t-shirts and is owned by another  LLC he created. In 2022, one of Lamb’s sons, Cade, started a podcast named after the catchphrase and using the same brand logo.

Roberto Reveles, a longtime Democratic activist in Pinal County, says that Lamb reaching for a U.S. Senate seat fits into his long history of trying to capitalize on the new tough-sheriff character he created since taking office. “There are lots of questionable activities by Sheriff Lamb that make no sense, other than exploitation of his office,” Reveles said. “He sells Bibles. He sells rifles. He sells children’s books.”

Just as Lamb courted reality television after becoming sheriff, he also courted the far-right by fixating on issues that were core to the identity of Trump voters. He became a talking head on right-wing media, appearing regularly on Fox News and Newsmax, often broadcasting from his truck as if to show how busy he was policing the streets. In 2020, Lamb created a far-right sheriff organization called “Protect America Now,” which fueled GOP fears about border security, gun confiscation, and “antifa.” 

In 2022, he partnered with leading purveyors of election fraud conspiracies like True the Vote to form something they called Protect America Vote, a fundraising website that offered a form for citizens to sign their local sheriffs up for a mailing list. This was part of a larger pattern of “constitutional sheriffs”—sheriffs who believe that they are the ultimate authority in their county—using their investigative powers to question election results. After the midterm election, the site disappeared.

Other than parroting election denialism, neither Protect America Now nor Protect America Vote appears to have done much more than provide Lamb with another opportunity to market himself. 

In fact, marketing seems to be Lamb’s forte. Devin Burghart, president of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, which tracks far-right sheriff movements, believes that Lamb’s campaign will rely heavily on MAGA rhetoric without any additional substance. “Expect his campaign to begin with soft-focus law-and-order imagery before unveiling viscous nativism and election denial conspiracism with a badge,” he said.

As sheriff, Lamb has pulled numerous stunts on the southern border to inflame nativist fears and dehumanize immigrants, typically inviting some unwitting city-slicker—like Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz or Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk—to trek through spiny bushes to gasp at the backpacks, shoes, and other detritus left behind by border crossers. 

In a short film Lamb made last year with Gaetz (who was investigated, but not charged, for sex trafficking), the sheriff says, with a smirk, that people “can use force … deadly force” against migrants. This year, an Arizona rancher named George Kelly shot and killed a migrant he says was on his property. Lamb has questioned the murder charges prosecutors filed against Kelly and called the rancher a “very nice guy.” “If you don’t appreciate what happened to the farmer who used self-defense…I don’t know all the facts, but I can tell you the bond seems excessive,” Lamb added. 

Gun violence is now the primary cause of death for children in America. This includes record high numbers of homicides, suicides, and accidents. This year has had the highest number of school shootings in the past two decades. Yet, Lamb continues to advocate for unlimited gun ownership and open carry. He raffles assault-style weapons and poses with guns, charging people $500 in a fundraiser “for an evening of shooting, food, and fun.” On his podcast, Lamb’s son Cade recently praised Kyle Rittenhouse for killing two people and injuring one, depicting the teenager shooter as a righteous tough guy. 

While the sheriff prided himself on defying COVID regulations, he largely ignored deaths and hospitalizations, which hit Latino communities more than white ones. Instead, he argued for “personal responsibility.” “As long as I’m your sheriff, we will NEVER mandate the vaccine,” he said in a video that went viral and ended up on Fox News. He touted it as a recruitment strategy.

Lamb also declared Jan. 6 a triumph of people exercising their Second Amendment rights, and described the rioters as “very loving Christians”—ignoring the five police officers who either died from their injuries or committed suicide, as well as the over 1,000 people charged with crimes. 

In next year’s Republican primary for Senate, Lamb is expected to face other candidates with strong affiliations to the MAGA movement. Kari Lake, a close Trump ally who lost a close governor’s race in 2022 but has refused to admit defeat, is reportedly mulling a run, as is Blake Masters, another prominent election denier who lost the state’s 2022 Senate race. Meanwhile, U.S. Representative Ruben Gallego is running as a Democrat, and Sinema has yet to announce her intentions.

While Lamb still plays the tough-talking, border-trekking sheriff in his run for Senate, one of the first ads his campaign released this month uses a recent family tragedy to make a personal appeal to voters. It begins with Lamb talking about the pain of losing his son and granddaughter in a car crash just before Christmas last year, illustrated with news footage of the devastating wreckage. About 40 seconds in, the ad then pivots when Lamb mentions that his son struggled with drug addiction. “He even spent time in my jail for issues stemming from fentanyl use,” he says, “Even the sheriff’s office is being touched by this drug crisis.” 

“I know what deadly drugs and the criminals peddling them are doing to families and communities, I know what it did to my family,” Lamb says before pivoting to  this campaign promise, a declaration of war: “It’s time to declare the drug cartels terrorist organizations and use military force to wipe them out, just like we did to ISIS.”

The post Arizona’s Self-Styled “American Sheriff” Wants to Go to Washington appeared first on Bolts.

Each of the previous three states to consider voter-ID ballot measures—Missouri in 2016, and Arkansas and North Carolina in 2018—had approved them by at least 10 points each. In Arizona, a 2004 voter-ID measure that was less stringent than Proposition 309, had passed comfortably, too. At least on this issue, the concerns of organizations like the ACLU and the League of Women Voters kept being ignored.

But Arizonans on Nov. 8 bucked this history, despite Proposition 309’s huge fundraising advantage and the lack of organized opposition. They narrowly rejected the measure by about 18,000 votes, or 0.76 percent.

It was the first defeat in ten years for a ballot measure increasing voter ID mandates in the U.S., according to the National Conference of State Legislatures’ database. (Minnesotans rejected a voter ID measure by eight percentage points in 2012.)

Local advocates on both sides of the measure told Bolts that they were surprised by the outcome but explained it by naming several factors, starting with antipathy to Trumpism.

“Fundamentally, I just don’t think we can look at this one in a vacuum,” said Sarah Gonski, a Phoenix-based elections lawyer who has represented Democratic candidates in the state in recent cycles. 

The measure was placed on the ballot on a party-line vote by Arizona’s GOP-controlled legislature, which spent much of the past two years rehearsing the former president’s lies about widespread fraud in the 2020 election. This inextricably linked it to controversial, top-of-the-ticket Arizona candidates who ran for office this year on election denialism, local politicos said. Proposition 309 appeared just down the ballot from far-right election deniers Kari Lake, who lost the governor’s race, Blake Masters, who lost the U.S. Senate race, and Mark Finchem, who lost the secretary of state’s race. 

“I think that rejecting this initiative, which is a policy proposal that gets a lot of support usually, is intimately tied up with rejection of the Big Lie narrative that has pervaded Arizona’s political environment for the last two years,” said Gonski.

Bie Lie figures have been wildly successful in radicalizing people who previously trusted standard elections procedures. But their efforts have also made the broader electorate pay far more attention to once-obscure matters of election administration. Secretary of state races this year drew record spending, especially on the Democratic side.

Advocates in Arizona say this new context prepared many to more carefully consider proposed changes to voting rules than they may have in the past.

“I think that the population is a lot more interested in what used to be pretty dry, bureautic understandings of the way ballots are processed and the way election security is run,” said Gonski, who is now a senior policy advisor at the Institute for Responsive Government. “They’re paying attention and they’re interested to know so much more about elections and the way they work, and that does a huge amount for people understanding how secure our elections actually are.”

J.D. Mesnard, the Republican state senator who authored Proposition 309, has defended his proposals in recent years by saying that lawmakers should address people’s concerns about fraud even if there is no underlying evidence for them. In an interview with Bolts, he echoed the analysis that Arizonans voted down his initiative as part of rejecting efforts to revisit the 2020 election. 

“To the extent that anybody sees bills focused on improving the integrity and security of our elections, and thinks the only reason you’re running them is because of the 2020 election, this all gets tangled up with people’s sentiments about President Trump and 2020,” he said. 

Mesnard added that his frustration is with Democrats, not Trump: “I’m not trying to place blame on him; don’t get me wrong,” he said. “The opposition did a relatively consistent job of saying this is all feeding into the quote-unquote Big Lie.”

Then there’s the fact that Proposition 309 was a notably harsh voter ID law. It was more restrictive than the measures passed in the last decade in Nebraska, Missouri and Oklahoma. And it zipped far beyond the voter ID law Arizona adopted in 2004.

The measure would have required anyone voting in person to use a photo ID: This would have eliminated voters’ current ability to present two documents as alternatives to a photo ID—say, a bank statement, lease agreement, or utility bill. 

It would also have made it harder for Arizonans to vote by mail, a widespread approach to voting there. Ballotpedia found at least 75 percent of the state’s voters cast ballots by mail in every general election between 2014 and 2020. Proposition 309 would have added more requirements for mail voters: They would have also had to fill out and enclose an affidavit including their driver’s license or ID card number, the last four digits of their Social Security number, or a unique registration number assigned to them by the state’s elections office.

The state has enabled voting by mail since the early 1990s. By 2007, when the legislature created a permanent early voting roll, “Arizona had so many people voting by mail that we literally couldn’t keep up with the applications,” Patrick said.

She added, “Arizonans have been doing this for a long time, and they love to do it, until and unless you have a presidential candidate, and then an incumbent president, suggesting voting by mail is fraudulent.”

Patrick, who now works as co-CEO of The Election Center, the national organization representing state and local elections officials, said Arizonans have had a long time to observe that stricter voter ID requirements don’t just ensnare fraudsters. Not everyone has an identification card, and some who do have ID that lacks a photo or an address.

“These are people saying, ‘I voted for that proposition in 2004, but I didn’t think it would affect me because it was just about fraud and it was just going to affect those other people,’” Patrick said. “Arizonans remember that, and they know that you can be a valid, eligible voter and not have an ID that is required under these specific types of laws.”

Native voters would have felt the brunt of the burdens proposed under Proposition 309, The Arizona Republic documented in October. Many tribes use identity cards that lack photos or home addresses, or otherwise don’t line up with state government standards.

“The reality for Native Americans who don’t have the same type of access to services whether it is the government, or any other things, this just needlessly complicates our ability to vote,” Kris Beecher, a lawyer in Arizona who is a member of the Navajo Nation, told The Republic. Nationwide analyses show that voter ID laws burden more people of color and reduce their participation.

That was of primary concern for groups that advocate for tribal communities, said Angela Willeford, intergovernmental relations project manager for the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community.

“We’re nonpartisan, but we said ‘vote no on 309’, and we never do that typically,” she told Bolts. 

Arizona Republicans likely won’t be able to pass new statutes restricting voting rights for at least the next four years; the governor’s office flipped blue last month for the first time since 2009, handing Democrat Katie Hobbs a veto pen. But the GOP still controls the legislature, and lawmakers could vote again to place a measure like Proposition 309 directly on the ballot, circumventing Hobbs. Mesnard told Bolts he isn’t sure it will. 

Since their defeat, Republicans like Lake and Finchem have fanned false conspiracies about the results and some lawmakers have signaled they will take up the issue.

But Patrick said state and local elections administrators in Arizona are doing more public education than ever around how elections are run, and said she’s heartened that journalistic outlets are dedicating more resources to the elections beat. 

“We used to lament about toiling away in obscurity,” the former Maricopa County official said.

Opponents of 309 prevailed narrowly, but in defeating the measure, Gonski believes, “The people of Arizona started to say that we’re not prepared to give up easier access to democracy in exchange for more heightened security checks on top of what we have. They started to say, enough.”

The post In Rejecting Voter ID Measure, Arizonans Bucked History and Surprised Advocates  appeared first on Bolts.

Pennsylvanians on Tuesday resoundingly rejected the man who had wanted to ignore their vote but now was asking for it. In this perennially tight state, Mastriano lost to Democratic nominee Josh Shapiro by fifteen percentage points.

He was joined in defeat by many other Republicans who echoed Trump’s Big Lie while trying to take over their states’ election administration. (Most states directly elect a secretary of state, unlike in Pennsylvania.) Voters around the country repudiated candidates who signaled they may override the will of the very electorate they were courting.

All election deniers who ran for secretary of state in battleground states—buoyed by endorsements from Trump—lost on Tuesday, blocking major avenues for the former president to manipulate the next election.

Jim Marchant, the Republican nominee in Nevada, came closest, losing to Democrat Francisco Aguilar by two percentage points. In Michigan, Minnesota, and New Mexico, incumbent Democratic secretaries of state crushed their far-right challengers Kristina Karamo, Kim Crockett, and Audrey Trujillo by margins ranging from 9 to 14 percentage points—all far more than Joe Biden’s margins of victory two years ago.

Mark Finchem, an Arizona lawmaker who has since 2020 championed proposals to decertify his own state’s presidential results, repeated just this fall that the votes of Arizona’s two most populous counties should be “tossed out.” He lost his bid on Tuesday, trailing in both of these counties decisively.

Election deniers also failed to take over secretary of state offices in blue states like Massachusetts and Vermont, lost elections for governor in places where the winner can appoint a secretary of state, and fell short for other offices from which they may have exerted significant if indirect influence on elections, such as Michigan’s attorney general or New Mexico’s supreme court. 

“The Big Lie movement has its die hard acolytes, and they’ve captured a huge swath of the Republican Party, but it’s not a winning majority,” Ian Bassin, executive director of the organization Protect Democracy, told Bolts. “In fact, it’s politically toxic, and in competitive states is a lead anchor around the neck of anyone that embraces it.”

Still, Republicans who ran on the Big Lie did not end up empty handed.

A nationwide Bolts analysis in September found that 12 Republicans were running for secretary of state after denying the results of the 2020 election or refusing to affirm the outcome. Eight of them lost. But they won in four red states: Alabama, Indiana, South Dakota, and Wyoming.

“What happened with the election results moved us from the precipice,” Rick Hasen, a professor at UCLA Law who specializes in election law and has written about the threat of election subversion, told Bolts. “We won’t have many election deniers running elections, and probably none or few in swing states.”

“Still there are hundreds of Republican candidates who embraced election denialism and won their races,” he said. “Maybe it’s just cheap talk and it is less worrisome—but it is still antidemocratic and shows that denialism could easily surface again in 2024 or beyond.”

Election deniers won many offices, from Congress down to county commissions, that have important powers when it comes to deciding how to run elections. And two governors with the authority to select secretaries of state, Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas, won reelection; both have previously appointed secretaries who refused to affirm Biden’s election or helped Trump try to overturn the 2020 race.

Many states that did not feature outright election deniers still saw conflicts over new restrictions and rules to combat fraud. When the dust settled, incumbents did well: Democrats secured new terms in Colorado and Washington State, and Republicans did the same in Georgia, Iowa, and Ohio. In Connecticut and Vermont, Democrats prevailed in open seats who have signaled interest in expanding ballot access.

Some secretaries of state in recent years have stepped in against threats to election systems—and Tuesday’s results at least removed the threat that local election deniers will be bolstered by more sympathetic statewide officials, at least in blue and purple states. 

Trujillo, the New Mexico Republican, had stood in solidarity with a county commission that refused to certify its primary results this summer over bogus fraud claims. The local county clerk, a Republican who fought back against the commission, told Bolts in September that Democratic Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver had backed her and that an election denier taking over instead would make her job trickier.

Some secretaries of state are also tasked with certifying their state’s final results, and election observers worried that an official like Finchem or a Mastriano appointee could try to not certify legitimate outcomes they don’t like. In states where they are not involved in certification, secretaries of state have other significant powers. Michigan, for instance, has one of the most decentralized electoral systems in the country, loosely held together by a secretary of state’s authority. Karamo, the GOP nominee, campaigned on proposals to upend this system, some of which she would not have had the legal authority to order. 

Elections for secretaries of state typically happen away from the spotlight, but Trump’s Stop the Steal agitation morphed into an organized effort to recruit and run far-right candidates willing to follow his lead in disrupting U.S. elections. 

Marchant, the Nevada candidate, played a lead role in putting together a national slate called “America First” that brought together 14 secretary of state candidates, all Republicans who ran on introducing election changes in line with Trump’s Big Lie conspiracies, such as cracking down on mail-in voting or ballot drop boxes. 

In the lead-up to November, election deniers also partnered with far-right organizations and like-minded allies in law enforcement and sheriff’s offices to drum up policing and investigations into elections. Florida voted this year under the cloud of the arrests of formerly incarcerated people, who have been targeted by DeSantis’s administration amid shifting eligibility requirements for people with criminal records.

This national coordination among election deniers sparked a counter-mobilizing effort from Democrats who rushed to bring more voter attention to these races.

“Mr. and Mrs. Minnesota are not getting up every day saying, ‘Gee, I wonder what’s going on with the secretary of state’s office right now,’” Steve Simon, the Democratic incumbent in Minnesota, told Politico in October. “And so I do think that someone running for this office generically—me or anyone else—every four years, you’d have to treat it as an exercise of introducing or reintroducing yourself.”

The New York Times reports that Democrats sank nearly $50 million into TV ads for secretary of state races in the four tightest states featuring election deniers for secretary of state—Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota and Nevada—and outspent Republicans 10 to 1. Mastriano was also significantly outspent. He was one of only two candidates for governor on the “America First,” alongside the GOP nominee in Arizona, Kari Lake. Both had lost their bids as of Monday night.

Of the 14 “America First” candidates who ran for secretary of state, nine lost in Republican primaries and four lost in last week’s general election.

Those defeated in primaries include Colorado’s Tina Peters, a county clerk under indictment for breaching the integrity of voting machines, and Idaho’s Dorothy Moon, who once defended voter restrictions on the floor of the legislature based on unfounded allegations that Canadians are coming to Idaho to vote illegally. Others lost to Republican incumbents in primaries in Georgia, Kansas, and Nebraska.

The slate’s only victorious candidate is Diego Morales, who is now poised to take over as secretary of state in Indiana.

Morales echoed Trump’s claims about fraud and called the 2020 election a “scam” to oust the incumbent at the Indiana Republican Party’s state convention. He later softened those statements, calling Biden the legitimate president, but he remains on the website of the “America First” organization as of publication. He beat Democrat Destiny Wells, who hit him for his ties with the far-right, by 14 percentage points.

Three other candidates who espoused aspects of the Big Lie prevailed last week, though they were not part of the “America First” slate. 

Much like Morales, Monae Johnson used conspiracist allegations about election systems to oust South Dakota’s incumbent at a party convention. Her general election was largely a formality in this staunchly conservative state.

In Alabama, winner Wes Allen has questioned the results of the 2020 election, and he has already signaled how that may affect his state. He said earlier this year that, should he win, he would withdraw Alabama from the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), an organization that helps 32 states, and Washington D.C., maintain voter rolls. He explained his position by naming George Soros, shortly after a far-right website published an article that falsely tied ERIC to Soros.

In Wyoming, finally, Chuck Gray secured Trump’s endorsement to win the Republican nod for secretary of state in August, and then ran unopposed in last week’s general election. Gray has called the 2020 election “clearly rigged,” and has focused his attacks on the use of ballot drop boxes, echoing the debunked claims about the “woke left” using drop boxes to steal elections. He has also traveled to other states to meet with election deniers and observe their efforts to sow doubts on results.

These four states are deeply Republican, and the next presidential race is unlikely to be contested in any of them. Still, Democrats are competitive in plenty of elections in those states. Last week, Democratic U.S. Rep. Frank Mrvan’s re-election bid in Indiana was one of the nation’s closest watched. In 2017, Democrats gained a U.S. Senate seat in Alabama, in a special election that Republican nominee Roy Moore tried to block in court in an eerie trial run of Trump’s efforts in late 2020. Republican primaries can be competitive and need to be certified as well.

“It’s a danger to American democracy for people detached from reality and in hock to a political cult to hold governing responsibilities no matter what state they’re in,” Bassin said. “That’s true just as a matter of principle and democratic health, but it’s also the case that even the most deep red states have had contentious elections in recent years and will again.”

“No one should have to rely on a delusional partisan to oversee their elections,” he added.

Since Tuesday’s clobbering, few election deniers have shown a willingness to accept the outcomes. Mastriano, perhaps chastened by the magnitude of his defeat, issued a concession on Sunday evening. “Difficult to accept as the results are, there is no right course but to concede, which I do,” he said in a statement on social media. 

But Finchem retweeted a message last week from a supporter who called the outcome a “Soros orchestrated psychological operation!” after the media called the race for Democrat Adrian Fontes, and he has since repeatedly insinuated that voter fraud was at play.

And those who won now have a platform from which add the imprimatur of a state agency onto baseless allegations of widespread voter fraud.

On Saturday, four days after becoming Wyoming’s Secretary of State-Elect, Gray posted a picture of himself at an event with a conservative activist, former Trump campaign adviser, and also president of the organization Citizens United, who most recently produced a movie that Trumpworld has embraced about the 2020 election. Gray tweeted, “Really enjoyed meeting David Bossie today and seeing his film Rigged.”

The article has been updated with the most up-to-date results as of the evening of Nov. 14.

The post In Secretary of State Races, Election Deniers (Mostly) Lose appeared first on Bolts.

If they win in November, Trump-endorsed election deniers like Arizona’s Mark Finchem and Michigan’s Kristina Kamaro could seize the reins of election administration in key swing states on agendas built on disproven fraud claims and destabilizing changes like eliminating mail-in voting. But these high-profile candidates are just the tip of the iceberg: 17 Republicans are running for secretary of state—or for governor in states where the governor appoints the secretary—after denying the results of the 2020 election, seeking to overturn them, or refusing to affirm the outcome. A handful of additional Republicans haven’t outright questioned Biden’s win but have still amplified Trump’s false statements about widespread fraud.

Trump’s Big Lie, then, is defining the political stakes in most of the 35 states where the secretary of state’s office is on the line, directly or indirectly, in November. 

But beyond the threats of election subversion, secretaries of state affect voting rights in many more subtle ways. Long before Trump, they already featured heated debates around how states run their elections—and how easy or difficult it is for people to register and cast ballots. Secretaries of state may decide the scope of voter roll purges, instruct counties on how many ballot drop boxes to set up, or implement major policies like automatic voter registration. And their word carries great clout in legislative debates over voting. The Big Lie is overshadowing those functions, but in many places these broader issues remain at the forefront. 

This new Bolts guide walks through all of those 35 states, plus Washington, D.C., one by one. Voters are electing their secretary of state directly in 27 states; in another eight, the secretary of state will be selected after the election by public officials—the governor, or lawmakers—who are on the Nov. 8 ballot. (The 15 other states and Puerto Rico will either select theirs after the 2024 cycle or, in a few cases, don’t have a secretary of state at all.)

The stakes are highest in the presidential swing states that election deniers may capture, namely Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, and Pennsylvania (via the governor’s race). But many other states feature such candidates, from Alabama to Maryland; in Wyoming, a Trump-endorsed election denier is the only candidate on the ballot.

And other pressing voting concerns are also shaping these battles. In Ohio, for instance, voting rights groups have repeatedly clashed with the sitting secretary of state on voting access in jails or the availability of ballot drop boxes. In Georgia, the midterms are unfolding in the shadow of new restrictions adopted last year, with the incumbent’s support. In Vermont, the likely next secretary of state says she wants to support local experiments to expand voter eligibility. 

Not all secretaries of state handle election administration; in a few states such as Illinois and South Carolina, they have nothing at all to do with it. Even where secretaries of state oversee some aspects of the election system, the scope of their role can vary greatly. Arizona’s secretary of state, for instance, must certify election results; Michigan’s secretary, by contrast, plays no role in the certification process (that role is reserved to a board of canvassers) but does oversee and guide municipal officials on how to run their elections. 

To clarify this confusing landscape, Bolts published two databases this year. The first details, state by state, which state offices prepare and administer an election (Who Runs our Elections?). The second details, state by state, which state offices handle the counting, canvassing, and certification stages (Who Counts Our Elections?). 

Explore our state breakdown of the 2022 midterms below, or click on a specific state in this interactive map.

Secretaries of State in 2022

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#AL

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#AR

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#AZ

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#CA

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#CO

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections//#CT

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#FL

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#GA

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#IA

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#IL

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#ID

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#IN

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#KS

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#MD

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#MA

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#ME

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#MI

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#MN

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#ND

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#NE

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#NH

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#NM

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#NV

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#NY

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#OH

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#OK

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#PA

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#RI

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#SC

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#SD

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#TX

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#VT

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#WA

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#WI

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#WY

https://boltsmag.org/guide-to-2022-secretary-of-state-elections/#DC

For further reading, also dive into Louis Jacobson’s electoral assessment of all secretary of state races, and the FiveThirtyEight analysis of how each state’s Republican nominee is responding to questions about the 2020 elections. And you can

Alabama

Wes Allen, a Republican lawmaker who won a tight summer primary for secretary of state, has already shown his conspiracist leanings: He said earlier this year that, as secretary of state, he would promptly withdraw Alabama from the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), a organization that helps 30 states maintain voter rolls, citing George Soros to explain his decision shortly after a far-right website published an article that falsely tied ERIC to Soros. 

Allen faces Democratic nominee Pamela Laffitte in November. In this ruby red state, he is likely to win and replace John Merrill, the retiring Republican; Merrill is known for blocking people who criticize his handling of voting rights on social media and for denying the state’s history of voter suppression.

Arizona

Mark Finchem is arguably the election denier with the best chance to win and take over a swing state’s election system. A member of the far-right Oath Keeper militia, which was involved in the Jan. 6 insurrection, Finchem falsely claims that the 2020 election results were fraudulent, has pushed for controversial election audits, and wants to see sweeping changes to Arizona’s election system, including ending early voting and ending the use of electronic voting machines. If he wins, he would oversee the 2024 election, including being in charge of certifying the next presidential results. His intentions would be in question given his continued statements about 2020. He introduced legislation earlier this year to decertify the last election and “set aside” the ballots in three counties, including Maricopa and Pima counties, which together cover two-thirds of the state, as “irredeemably compromised”—a position he repeated in a debate last week.

“When we have conspiracy theories and lies like the ones Mr. Finchem has just shared, based in no real evidence, what we end up doing is eroding the faith that we have in each other as citizens,” responded Adrian Fontes, the Democratic nominee, during the debate. Fontes ran elections in Arizona’s most populous county as Maricopa County Recorder during the early stages of the pandemic; in March 2020, he tried to mail ballots to registered voters during the presidential primary, though his effort was ultimately struck down by courts, and Finchem has criticized him for it. Fontes has also been supportive of expanding voting opportunities through reforms like automatic voter registration. 

Arkansas

Republican incumbent John Thurston says elections are secure in Arkansas, but he also echoes those who sow doubts about how the 2020 election unfolded across the country, and his staff attended a conspiracist symposium hosted by Mike Lindell at state expense. In this staunch red state where Democrats have not won any statewide race since 2010, Thurston faces Democrat Anna Beth Gorman in November.

California

When U.S. Senator Kamala Harris became vice president in 2021, it sparked a game of musical chairs in California politics. Governor Gavin Newsom appointed Secretary of State Alex Padilla to replace Harris, and then appointed Shirley Weber to replace Padilla as secretary of state. A former Democratic lawmaker who championed civil rights legislation, such as a landmark law in 2020 to fight racism in juries, Weber is now seeking a full term. She crushed the all-party primary in June with 59 percent of the vote; Republican Rob Bernosky, who she will now face again in November’s Top 2 runoff, received 19 percent. (Two candidates who, unlike Bernosky, ran as election deniers won a combined 13 percent.) 

Colorado

Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat, has clashed since 2020 with Tina Peters, the Trump-aligned Republican county clerk who is now under indictment for allegedly allowing unauthorized access to voting equipment. The two seemed headed for a showdown in 2022 , but Peters lost the Republican primary in June to Pam Anderson, a former county clerk who, unlike Peters, accepts the results of the 2020 election. (Other election deniers also lost Republican primaries in Colorado at the county level in the primary, Bolts reported.) 

Griswold has still centered her campaign on the threat of election subversion, pointing to her efforts against Peters but also speaking out against election deniers in the national press. “The country could lose the right to vote,” she told The Guardian in August. Anderson, who is a career election administrator, says she would bring a “professional ethic” into the office, and is making the case that Griswold is too focused on advancing her party’s goals. Anderson also supports the major features of Colorado’s system, notably universal mail-in voting.

Connecticut

Stephanie Thomas, a Democratic lawmaker, faces Republican Dominic Rapini in an open contest. Rapini is the former board chair of an organization that promoted conspiracies about the 2020 presidential election, and he himself has raised doubts and false claims of fraud about the legitimate outcome of the race. While Thomas is favored in this blue-leaning state, observers stress that the rhetoric about voter fraud and election denialism can erode public confidence in voting systems even if Rapini loses. In addition, the two candidates disagree on rules around voter ID, which Rapini wants to tighten, and early voting. The state is holding a referendum in November on authorizing in-person early voting, an issue that Thomas supports and Rapini opposes.

Florida (via the governor’s race)

The power to appoint the secretary of state lies with the governor in Florida. Earlier this year, DeSantis—who has a penchant for filing government offices with his allies—appointed Cord Byrd, a staunch conservative who had championed the state’s recent voter restrictions while in the legislature. Byrd has refused to say whether he believes the 2020 election results were legitimate, and he has amplified false rhetoric about widespread fraud. The state’s new elections police force resides in the secretary of state’s office, and Byrd was involved in August in trumpeting the criminal charges against 20 people who had been previously allowed to vote for alleged voting law violations. 

DeSantis is up for reelection against Democrat Charlie Crist, who was the state’s Republican governor more than a decade ago and had a very different approach to voting. Crist would have the authority to replace Byrd should he win.

Georgia

Incumbent Brad Raffensperger famously rebuffed Trump’s attempts to “find” more votes in the 2020 election, and proceeded to defeat a Trump-endorsed election denier in the Republican primary with surprising ease. But Raffensperger has also supported the new voter restrictions that Republicans have adopted since 2020, including tightening procedures around mail-in and early voting, and banning groups from passing out food or water to voters waiting in line. He defended the measures in 2021 as a way to “restore voter confidence.”

Raffensperger faces Democratic nominee Bee Nguyen, a state representative who voted against the 2021 law, has criticized this record and is running on a platform of improving ballot access in Georgia with voter outreach efforts such as translating election materials into more languages and establishing sites for people to submit vote-by-mail applications. 

Idaho

Phil McGrane, the county clerk of Ada County, narrowly defeated two conspiracy theorists in the Republican primary for secretary of state in May. In a state as conservative as Idaho, that was the hard part; he is now favored in November over Democrat Shawn Keenan. On the one hand, this primary marked a defeat for fervent election deniers, who attacked McGrane for accepting grants from a private foundation—as did more than a dozen other counties in Idaho alone—to help run the 2020 election. 

Yet, when asked by Bolts if he agreed that Biden was the legitimate president, McGrane demurred, only saying that Biden was in the White House. He has spoken against Democratic proposals to strengthen voting rights. As county clerk, McGrane has also taken initiatives to make voting more accessible, such as setting up “food truck voting,” i.e. mobile voting centers, and setting up on-demand ballot printers, Bolts reported.

Illinois

This secretary of state’s office is not involved in election administration. (Alexi Giannoulias, the last Democrat to lose a U.S. Senate race in Illinois, faces Republican lawmaker Dan Brady. Incumbent Jesse White is retiring after 24 years leading an office that handles driver’s licenses and state records.)

Indiana

Diego Morales rode the Big Lie to oust the incumbent secretary of state, Holli Sullivan, at the Republican Party’s state convention; he echoed Trump’s claims about fraud in the 2020 election, which he called a “scam.” He has since softened those statements, including calling Biden the legitimate president, and has walked back his previous call to cut Indiana’s number of early voting days by half. Still, he has courted controversy, as the Indianapolis Star reported in July that he used campaign funds to buy a personal vehicle. Morales also twice left jobs at the secretary of state’s office over poor performance.

Democrats see an opening to win a rare statewide office in this reliably red state, and Democrat Destiny Wells is hitting Morales for his ties with the far-right and for wanting to limit voting options like mail-in ballots. 

Iowa

Iowa Republicans have tightened access to voting in recent years with a pair of measures that restrict mail voting, among other policies. Democratic nominee Joel Miller, who currently serves as an elections official in the state’s second most populous county, said in an interview with Bolts that he is running because he opposes those reforms and wants to “make voting easy again” in Iowa. He faults his opponent, Republican Secretary of State Paul Pate, for failing to oppose these voting restrictions. Pate is running for a third term, and the state has veered significantly to the right since his first election.

Kansas

The Big Lie split the Republican primary, with Secretary of State Scott Schwab pushing back against the former president’s conspiracies while his challenger embraced them. Schwab survived by 10 percentage points and now faces Democrat Jeanna Repass, who notes that Schwab has still supported restrictions on ballot access that she vows to fight. In this staunch red state, Democrats have not won an election for secretary of state since 1948.

Maine (via legislature) 

The Big Lie is in the air in Maine. Paul LePage, the former Republican governor who is running to regain his job back, has trumpeted unfounded suspicions of voter fraud and suggested that people were bused in from out of state to vote in Maine—conspiracist claims very similar to Trump’s. Democratic Secretary of State Shenna Bellows has pushed back, faulting him for wanting it to be harder for people to be “exercising their constitutional right to vote.” 

Whether Bellows keeps her job depends on the legislative races in November. A joint session of the legislature selects the secretary of state every two years. Although the GOP has not put a Republican in this office since it briefly seized both chambers in 2010, it has an outside shot at flipping the legislature and thus the secretary of state’s office this fall. 

Maryland (via the governor’s race)

Dan Cox, the Republican nominee for governor, is a staunch election denier who helped organize travel to Washington, D.C. on Jan. 6, 2021. If he wins the governorship, he would get to appoint a secretary of state. (Many election administration duties in Maryland are in the hands of a board of elections; but the secretary of state does sit on the board of canvassers, the body that is tasked with certifying election results.) That said, the state Senate must confirm a governor’s nominee in Maryland, and that chamber is highly likely to stay in Democratic hands. In addition, Democrat Wes Moore is heavily favored in polling and prognostications to beat Cox and to get to appoint a secretary of state himself.

Massachusetts

In his quest for a record eighth term, Secretary of State Bill Galvin has already completed the hardest step by prevailing in the contentious Democratic primary against a local NAACP leader who faulted him for not promoting ballot access proactively enough, as Bolts reported. In this blue state, the party’s nomination is typically tantamount to a general election win. 

Still, the profile of his Republican opponent keeps this on Bolts’s list of elections to watch. Rayla Campbell has closely aligned with Trump and has repeated his lies that the election was stolen. 

If Galvin prevails, keep an eye on how he shifts over his next term. After facing a progressive challenger in the 2018 primary and easily beating him, Galvin grew more supportive of pro-voter reforms such as same-day registration. 

Michigan

Republican nominee Kristina Karamo, an avowed election denier endorsed by Trump, would lead Michigan’s loose constellation of  more than 1,600 local election offices if she wins the secretary of state race. As Bolts reported, Michigan has one of the most decentralized voting systems in the country, but the secretary of state would still have the authority to issue directives and conduct audits of local offices—functions that Karamo could weaponize for her election denialist agenda if elected. Republicans have aggressively targeted election officials who resisted their effort to overturn the 2020 election in the state, and observers worry about how Karamo could further unwind the system. “It’s one thing to be feeling that heat from the outside,” David Levine, a fellow at the non-profit Alliance for Securing Democracy, told Bolts. “If the arsonist is inside the firehouse you’ve got a whole different problem.”

Karamo is trying to oust Democratic incumbent Jocelyn Benson, who oversaw the 2020 election and has defended the administration of that election—including an expansion of absentee voting—against critics. 

Minnesota

Kim Crockett, the Republican nominee, has mirrored Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. At a party convention, she aired a conspiracist video that used anti-Semitic tropes, which led to an apology by the state Republican Party’s chair. If she wins in November against Democratic incumbent Steve Simon, she would gain the power to oversee the state’s election system, which could affect the voting rights of Minnesota’s numerous immigrant communities. As the Sahan Journal previewed, Crockett has a history of making racist and anti-immigrant statements and wants to tighten voter ID restrictions, saying that non-English speaking immigrants have been “exploited for their votes.” Simon, meanwhile, wants to expand language access for voting materials.

Nebraska

Secretary of State Robert Evnen, a Republican, is running unopposed in the general election, but his primary was far more contentious. Evnen secured the GOP nomination in May with just 45 percent of the vote against two candidates who each suggested that elections have security issues and proposed restricting voting procedures; Evnen has rejected fraud allegations, and defended the state’s use of voting machines. But Evnen is also hoping that the state adopts new voter ID requirements, which Nebraskans will be voting on in a ballot measure in November. 

Nevada

Republican Jim Marchant is a lead organizer of the America First slate of secretaries of state candidates, the Trump-aligned coalition who are denying the results of the 2020 elections and laying the groundwork to intervene in 2024. Marchant is vocal about his false beliefs that the 2020 election results were illegitimate, claiming both that the presidency was stolen from Trump and that his own loss in a congressional race was due to fraud. Marchant supported the push for Nevada Republicans to send a slate of false electors to Congress in 2020, and he told The Guardian that he would be open to doing the same in 2024. “We haven’t in Nevada elected anybody since 2006,” Marchant said in January on a podcast. “They have been installed by the deep state cabal.” 

The Republican nominee also wants to end mail-in voting in the state, despite having repeatedly voted by mail in the past. 

Marchant will face Democrat Cisco Aguilar, who has portrayed himself as the sensible alternative to Marchant and his outlandish claims. Aguilar has promised to introduce policy to protect Nevada election workers against “constant harassment” they face at polling places.

New Hampshire (via legislature)

The New Hampshire legislature selects the secretary of state every two years. But despite constant flips in legislative control, lawmakers repeatedly sent Bill Gardner back to the office. Gardner, who served from 1976 until his retirement earlier this year, was a nominal Democrat who defended Republican restrictions in defiance of courts, sat on Trump’s commission to investigate voter fraud, and opposed innovations like online voter registration. His resignation in January elevated his Republican deputy, David Scanlan, to the job. Republicans are slight favorites to keep the legislature in November, though both chambers are in play.

New Mexico

Republican nominee Audrey Trujillo has built her campaign for secretary of state on the Big Lie. As a member of the America First Secretary of State Coalition alongside Nevada’s Marchant and Michigan’s Karamo, Trujillo has  also called for an end to absentee voting except for elderly, disabled, and military citizens. She has also pointed to voting machines as sources of fraud, calling on county election officials to refuse to certify the 2020 election unless a hand count was conducted, adding to the explosive context of ongoing confrontations over conservative efforts in New Mexico to block the certification of elections. 

Trujillo is running against Democratic incumbent Maggie Toulouse Oliver, who has been a vocal proponent of expanding ballot access in the state. In the current legislative session, as Bolts reported in February, Oliver rolled out a landmark package that would have expanded voter eligibility, made Election Day a holiday, and eased mail-in voting, but the package derailed in the legislature. 

New York (via the governor’s race)

This secretary of state is appointed by the governor, and does not oversee election administration. (The current office-holder is an appointee of Governor Kathy Hochul, a Democrat who is facing Republican Lee Zeldin, a member of the U.S. House who voted against approving the 2020 presidential result in Congress; the governor also appoints members of the State Board of Canvassers, who certify results, upon consultation with legislative leaders.)

North Dakota

The Republican primary was critical in this red-state open race, and it saw an easy victory by lawmaker Michael Howe over a candidate who was falsely saying the 2020 presidential result was uncertain. But Howe himself is suggesting that there are problems regarding election integrity in the state, while Democratic candidate Jeffrey Powell says the GOP’s talk of “election integrity” is “code word for voter suppression.” The office of the retiring secretary of state faced complaints and settled lawsuits over poor ballot access for Native residents.

Ohio

Former GOP lawmaker John Adams ran for secretary of state by touting the Big Lie, only to be soundly defeated by Republican incumbent Frank LaRose. But LaRose’s victory was hardly a last stand by moderate forces. He has long clashed with voting rights groups over restrictions to ballot access. In the lead-up to the 2020 election, Bolts reported in March, LaRose sided with Trump’s crusade against mail-in voting and he successfully appealed to overturn a court ruling that would have made it easier for eligible Ohioans to vote from jail.

Since then, LaRose has ramped up talk of voter fraud, secured Trump’s endorsement in his re-election bid, and floated impeaching the state’s Republican chief justice for striking down his party’s gerrymanders.

LaRose now faces Democrat Chelsea Clark, a Forest Park city councilmember, in a state that has swung red over the past decade. Clark says she would push for reforms to expand participation like automatic voter registration and reverse the state’s aggressive purge policies.

Oklahoma (via the governor’s race)

This secretary of state’s office does not oversee election administration. (The winner of the governor’s race, which features Republican incumbent Kevin Stitt, Democratic challenger Joy Hofmeister, and two other candidates, will have the power to appoint a secretary of state, who will oversee clerical functions like corporation registrations. The current office-holder is a Stitt appointee.)

Pennsylvania (via the governor’s race)

Doug Mastriano, the Trump acolyte who participated in efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election and was outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, would have the power to appoint the next secretary of state if he wins the governor’s race in November over Democratic nominee Josh Shapiro. Mastriano has repeatedly signaled he would appoint a secretary of state who shares his mindset and, as Bolts reported in July, the secretary of state could unleash chaos into the state’s system, with election observers worried primarily about the process of certifying results. A secretary of state hand-picked by Mastriano could abuse their power in 2024 by trying to refuse election results from blue-leaning counties like Allegheny (Pittsburgh) or Philadelphia. “It would be uncertain and destabilizing,” Rick Hasen, a professor at UCLA Law who specializes in election law, told Bolts.

Rhode Island

The incumbent secretary of state’s failed bid for governor opened up her office, and Democratic nominee Gregg Amore is favored to take her place in this blue-leaning state. He is a former state representative who advocated for expanding ballot access, including through sponsoring the Let Rhode Island Vote Act, which expanded mail voting and went into effect earlier this year. Amore now faces Republican Pat Cortellessa, who opposes the legislation, telling the Warwick Beacon that it endangers election security and goes too far in enabling people to vote by mail. Cortellessa also wants ballot drop boxes removed from street corners. 

South Carolina

This secretary of state’s office does not oversee election administration. (Republican incumbent Mark Hammond faces Democrat Rosemounda “Peggy” Butler.)

South Dakota

Monae Johnson’s conspiracist allegations that the state’s election system lacks integrity helped her oust Republican incumbent Steve Barnett at a party convention earlier this year. That alone makes her the favorite to become this red state’s next secretary of state. Still, Johnson has tried to erase some of her past rhetoric from her website since securing the party’s nomination, and Democratic nominee Tom Cool is attacking Republicans for threatening South Dakota’s voting systems. “They keep whining about election integrity, which we know are their code words for voter suppression,” Cool said in July. (Note that one of the roles of the secretary of state’s office in South Dakota is to oversee the ballot petition process, which has been targeted by state Republicans, as Bolts reported in June.) 

Texas (via the governor’s race)

Republican Governor Greg Abbott faces Democratic nominee and one-time U.S. Senate hopeful Beto O’Rourke, and the winner of this governor’s contest will have the power to appoint a secretary of state. Last year, Abbott picked John Scott, a lawyer who worked with the Trump campaign on a lawsuit seeking to overturn the 2020 election results in Pennsylvania. As secretary of state, Scott has defended the security of Texas’ elections against local activists who oppose the use of voting machines. O’Rourke has made it a core campaign plank to fault Abbott for championing many voter restrictions, and has pledged to ease the voter registration process and limit voter purges, some of which is handled by the secretary of state’s office. A governor’s appointee is subject to confirmation by the state Senate, which is likely to stay in Republican hands.

Vermont

By U.S. standards, Vermont is pushing the boundaries of democratic participation. The state adopted universal vote-by-mail, and some towns are now looking to allow noncitizens and 16- and 17-year olds to vote in local elections. Vermont is only one of the few places in the country that allow anyone to vote from prison. Sarah Copeland Hanzas, a state lawmaker and the Democratic nominee to take over the state’s open secretary of state office, supports these policies. She tells Bolts that, if elected, she would look for new ways to expand both ballot access and voter registration—including for incarcerated people.

Copeland Hanzas’s Republican opponent in this blue-leaning state is H. Brooke Paige, a perennial candidate who is part of the large network of GOP election deniers running for secretary of state as he echoes the former president’s lies about the 2020 election.

Washington State

Republicans have won every secretary of state election in Washington State since 1964—that’s 15 consecutive elections. But they won’t even have a candidate on the ballot this November, as the GOP was shut out of the Top 2 spots in the August all-candidate primary.

The two candidates who moved on to the runoff are Steve Hobbs, the Democratic incumbent appointed by Governor Jay Inslee in 2021 after Republican Kim Wyman resigned to take a job in the Biden administration, and Julie Anderson, the Pierce County clerk who is running as an independent. (A Republican lawmaker, Brad Klippert, is also mounting a write-in campaign.) Before becoming secretary of state, Hobbs was a moderate lawmaker who antagonized progressives in the legislature and fought some of Inslee’s priorities, a record that Inslee touted as a sign that Hobbs would be an antidote to “political polarization.” Still, Anderson is grounding her bid on the argument that a secretary of state should be nonpartisan; she also makes the case that she, unlike Hobbs, has worked in election administration for more than a decade.

Washington, D.C.

This secretary of state is appointed by the mayor, and is not involved in election administration. (Democratic Mayor Muriel Bowser is running for re-election, and she is heavily favored.)

Wisconsin

This secretary of state’s office is not involved in election administration in Wisconsin, but GOP nominee Amy Loundenbeck wants it to regain oversight over elections from the State Elections Commissions, a bipartisan agency besieged by conservative attacks since 2020. The Associated Press reports she is remaining vague about the specifics, though some GOP lawmakers have already introduced legislation to this effect. (The party would need to flip the governorship for such a bill shift to stand a chance.) Loudenbeck has said she does not believe the 2020 election results should be overturned but has echoed conspiracies about election funding, and faces Democratic incumbent Doug LaFolette, who is seeking an eleventh term.

Wyoming

Chuck Gray is the only candidate running for secretary of state, making him the only election denier who is already virtually guaranteed to win in November

Boosted by Trump’s endorsement, Gray prevailed in a competitive GOP primary over fellow lawmaker Tara Nethercott in August, and no Democrat or independent filed to run against him in November. And while Wyoming may be the least populous state in the union, his primary opponent warns to not disregard the effects that Gray’s rhetoric may have. “What happens here is certainly an example to the rest of the nation for where the country is going, and how we get caught up in perceived fears that aren’t relevant to our own communities,” Nethercott told Bolts in August. “That kind of rhetoric just continues to serve to undermine the integrity of our elections, and therefore undermines democracy.”

What about the remaining states?

Three states have no secretary of state at all (Alaska, Hawaii, and Utah). Three will elect their secretary of state in 2023 (Kentucky, Louisiana, and Mississippi). Five will elect their secretary of state in 2024 (Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, Oregon, West Virginia). Two will elect governors or lawmakers in 2024 who will then select a secretary of state (Delaware and Tennessee, as well as Puerto Rico). And two will elect governors in 2025 who could then select a secretary of state (New Jersey and Virginia).

The post Your Guide to All 35 States Deciding Their Next Secretary of State appeared first on Bolts.

Instead Arizona’s ballot will feature a trio of measures that would significantly undercut direct democracy and future initiatives. All were referred to voters by the GOP-run legislature.

The coalition behind the voting rights initiative, Arizona for Fair Elections, cried foul over the elimination of its measure while the three others got to proceed. “Certain politicians have been intentionally trying to attack the ballot measure process for over a decade to prevent voters from being able to make decisions about Arizona’s future at the ballot box,” it said in a statement.

Hundreds of miles away, progressives in Arkansas face similar heartburn. Voters there raised the minimum wage and legalized cannabis for medical use in 2016 and 2018; this year, they will weigh on cannabis for recreational use.  But here, too, GOP lawmakers have placed a measure on the ballot, Issue 2, that would make it harder for voters to circumvent them in the future. 

“You have people who are supposed to be public servants who are trying to prevent people from expressing their will at the ballot box,” David McAvoy, a progressive advocate and founder of the Arkansas-based group Protect AR Voices, told Bolts. “This is an attempt to weaken people’s votes.”

McAvoy believes that, with Issue 2, Republican lawmakers are retaliating against the minimum wage and marijuana measures approved by Arkansans. That dynamic is also operative in Arizona, where residents have used the initiative process in recent cycles to adopt policies that their GOP-run state legislature wouldn’t. Since 2016, they too have raised the minimum wage and legalized cannabis; they also increased taxes on the wealthy to raise teachers’ salaries and required employers to provide paid sick time to their employees. This remarkable streak angered Arizona Republicans, who have set out to shut the door on future efforts this year.

Kelly Hall, executive director of the Fairness Project, a national organization that supported the successful initiatives to increase the minimum wage in both Arizona in 2016 and Arkansas in 2018, is now fighting the latest ballot measures in each state. “If passed, these restrictions would further entrench minority rule in our political system and likely block popular policies from passing,” she told Bolts. “It’s absolutely essential that we protect the ballot measure tool so that people can continue to make progress when their elected officials will not.”

Ballot measures have come under assault nationwide, as Republican leaders have made parallel moves in many states to trip up voter-initiated referendums. The Ballot Initiative Strategy Center has tracked the introduction of dozens of bills in recent years, many of which have become law. Some of the more onerous restrictions imposed new geographic distribution requirements for petition-gathering, which tends to reduce the power of cities, or they made petition gathering far more impractical.

Republican leaders have also responded to successful ballot measures initiated by residents by undermining them. In 2018, Utah voters approved statutes that expanded Medicaid, legalized cannabis for medical uses, and created a nonpartisan redistricting process. But in 2019, the state legislature repealed all of them, though it then re-enacted a narrower version of Medicaid expansion. Maine’s former Republican governor ignored a successful ballot initiative to expand Medicaid for years. And last year, Mississippi’s conservative supreme court struck down the entire initiative process.

Arizona’s state constitution contains strong protections that prevent some of this gamesmanship. Most significantly, it severely constrains the state legislature’s power to repeal or amend statutes initiated and approved by voters. Lawmakers are prohibited from modifying any voter-initiated statute unless their change “furthers the purpose” of the statute itself; this shield was included in the Voter Protection Act, a voter-initiated constitutional amendment that passed in 1998. In addition, and unlike many states, Arizona has no requirement that initiatives be limited to a “single subject,” which opens the door for ballot measures that propose sweeping changes.

But the three constitutional amendments that state Republicans are proposing would upend this system. The first, Proposition 128, would amend Arizona’s constitution to widen the circumstances under which lawmakers may repeal or amend a ballot measure—even after it has already gained the electorate’s support.

The proposition would enable the legislature to change a ballot measure when courts strike down any part over it. Proponents say lawmakers’ hands are currently tied when it comes to fixing an initiative when that happens. Opponents answer that the proposition would give politicians wide latitude to intervene as they could amend any section of a text if one part is struck down. Athena Salman, a Democratic state Representative, called it that the change is “a very sneaky way to undermine the Voter Protection Act without actually having to repeal the Voter Protection Act.”

The second, Proposition 129, would impose a “single subject” requirement for all voter-initiated measures; it would impose no such requirement on amendments proposed by the legislature. Many state courts have applied similar requirements harshly—the South Dakota supreme court last year struck down an initiative that legalized marijuana on this basis—which may provide Arizona’s high court, which the GOP has packed in recent years, with another tool to invalidate voter initiatives. The third, Proposition 132, would raise the approval threshold from 50 percent to a supermajority of 60 percent for voter-initiated measures that would raise taxes.

Arkansas’s Issue 2 would also impose a supermajority requirement, and it would go further than Arizona’s proposal by raising the threshold to 60 percent for all ballot measures. 

“It is entirely too easy to amend our state constitution,” said state Representative David Ray, the Republican lawmaker who drafted the measure. Ray, much like Republicans in Arizona, has complained that out-of-state money is championing organizing around referendums in the state. (Lawmakers voted largely on party lines when they placed Issue 2 on the ballot.) 

Arkansas Republicans already tried to limit their state’s ballot initiative process two years ago with a more sweeping constitutional amendment, known as Issue 3, that appeared on the ballot in November 2020. But Arkansas voters rejected that measure 56 to 44 percent. 

That same year, the state supreme court had struck down two measures over organizers’ alleged failure to conduct criminal background checks on petition gatherers; Arkansas statutes require organizers to certify that each canvasser has never been convicted of a broad array of offenses, including low-level charges like trespass (the high court said organizers took insufficient steps to ensure this). One of these measures would have created an independent redistricting commission. Instead, Republican lawmakers got to draw new maps in 2021 that solidified their party’s hold on power.

Earlier this year, South Dakotans rejected a similar effort to demand a supermajority. Republican lawmakers put an amendment on the June ballot that would have raised the threshold for some referendums to pass; the GOP rushed that measure to change the rules in time to thwart an effort to expand Medicaid. But the measure lost 67 to 33 percent in June, which has kept alive the possibility that South Dakotans expand Medicaid in November; the measure now only needs 50 percent of the vote—a goal that similar initiatives have crossed in many red states in recent years. (Arkansas and Arizona expanded Medicaid legislatively a decade ago.)

“Sometimes, when you take issues away from, ‘Is it Democrat or Republican,’ and just let the people speak, you find that people may come at it with very different views than the political party that they’re otherwise drawn to,” McAvoy told Bolts.

McAvoy said some Arkansas conservatives allied with progressives in 2020 to defeat the measure proposed that year to limit citizen-led ballot initiatives. “This cuts both ways in terms of the detrimental effect on democracy,” he said.

“While it’s definitely in this case the Republicans in power who are trying to stop things they don’t want,” he added, “I think across the board we all need to be concerned about what it means for our democracy and for our abilities to be heard on any issue, regardless of where we stand on the specifics.”

The post Four Ballot Measures Threaten to Undercut Direct Democracy in Arizona and Arkansas appeared first on Bolts.

Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb walked out to standing applause at Donald Trump’s July 22 rally in Prescott, Arizona, wearing his usual cowboy hat-and-blue jeans getup and flashing a blindingly white smile. He waved and pumped a fist as he stepped to the podium, asking that everyone doff their hats and remain standing for a brief moment of silence in honor of a sheriff’s deputy shot and killed the previous month around Prescott, before quickly pivoting to the former president. 

“I can see that you guys love the rule of law and law enforcement, and we appreciate that,” Lamb told the crowd. “Do you know who else loves the rule of law? Donald Trump,” he said without irony, urging them to support a slate of Trump-endorsed candidates for state office who echo the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him. The sheriff also touted his new effort to monitor elections with True the Vote, a far-right group peddling unfounded voter fraud conspiracies that have overtaken the Arizona GOP.

“We’re gonna make sure that we have election integrity this year,” Lamb declared. “Sheriffs are going to enforce the law. This is about the rule of law. It is against the law to violate elections laws—and that’s a novel idea, we’re going to hold you accountable for that. We will not let happen what happened in 2020.” 

Big Lie messengers have looked to far-right sheriffs for a veneer of credibility as both Democratic and Republican election officials, prosecutors, judges and state attorneys general across the country reject every baseless lawsuit blaming Trump’s loss on voter fraud. True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht—who, as Reveal has reported, helped turn election conspiracies into a lucrative enterprise for conservative activists and lawyers—has said she turned to sheriffs for help after federal and state law enforcement dismissed her group’s claims. 

True the Vote’s partnership with Lamb and a coalition of right-wing sheriffs he leads and helped found called Protect America Now—which includes sheriffs from states as politically diverse as California, New Mexico, Indiana, Massachusetts, and Florida—is part of a nationwide attempt to police elections by emboldening sheriffs to surveil ballot drop boxes and chase down tips from anonymous hotlines that will report alleged fraud. 

Last month, Engelbrecht also announced that her group would partner with the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA), a group of so-called constitutional sheriffs who believe that their office is uniquely endowed with the power to enforce only those laws they deem constitutional and who have promoted the Big Lie in rallies and training sessions. Sheriffs affiliated with the CSPOA have promised to monitor future elections and hunt down lingering claims of fraud from the 2020 presidential election.

These partnerships highlight the uniquely aggressive role of sheriffs in efforts to police the vote leading up to the 2022 and 2024 elections. Politicians with badges and guns, sheriffs have extensive powers to launch criminal investigations, seize evidence and even threaten violence or jail to force compliance, making them uniquely potent as compared to judges or prosecutors or legislators. 

As they perpetuate conspiracies about fraud that have inspired increased threats against election administrators and volunteers, the True the Vote sheriffs are also in a unique position to widen their reach, using the environment they helped create as justification for more policing. The prospect of increased involvement of armed officers recalls the days of voter intimidation in the Jim Crow South (and beyond), and could also help encourage extremist vigilante violence by perpetuating baseless rumors of fraud, often against Black and Latinx communities. 

Devin Burghart, who analyzes far-right social movements with the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, called True the Vote’s partnership with right-wing sheriffs “old-school voter intimidation.” 

“The specter of law enforcement at the polls is already enough to discourage people from going to the polls,” Burghart told Bolts. “Moreover, the threat of surveillance of polling places and drop boxes proposed by groups like True the Vote is meant to intimidate voters, particularly people of color, and deter them from casting ballots.” 

Since announcing his partnership with election deniers, Lamb has pushed for police surveillance of ballot drop boxes in Pinal County and vowed to investigate ballot “mules”—a reference to the Dinesh D’Souza movie “2000 Mules,” which uncritically documents True the Vote’s bungling and widely debunked efforts to prove massive fraud by arguing that unnamed nonprofit groups are abusing ballot drop boxes and in violation of state laws. As Lamb said at a recent True the Vote-sponsored meeting in Arizona, “​​We are gonna make sure people did not come in and put more ballots in the boxes than they should. I think that’s a simple thing the sheriff can oversee.” 

As he continues to blur the line between right-wing celebrity and local lawman, Lamb’s hometown critics say he is antagonizing people who oppose his political affiliations. Those tensions started to boil over in the fallout from a series of errors with ballots in Pinal County during Arizona’s Aug. 2 primary elections—mistakes that appear to stem from high turnover and a staffing crunch in the local elections department, as Votebeat has reported. 

Dozens of people from both political parties flocked to the Pinal County Board of Supervisors’ meeting held the day after this month’s primary to express their waning trust in local elections. Some also accused Lamb, who did not grant an interview or respond to questions for this story, of exacerbating the issue with baseless fear mongering over fraud, including Roberto Reveles, a long-time civil rights activist in the state. 

Reveles said that Lamb is increasingly antagonistic against people who criticize his political affiliations on the far right or his baseless rhetoric about voter fraud. “I recently was subjected to the intimidation referred to by a previous speaker,” he told the county board during the same meeting. “Sheriff Mark Lamb walked up to me and pointed at me … and said, ‘You and your fellow Democrats are destroying our country.’”

The current wave of sheriffs announcing their involvement in policing elections started when Engelbrecht trumpeted True the Vote’s partnership with the CSPOA during a press conference and training event at a Las Vegas hotel on July 12, held to coincide with “FreedomFest,” a libertarian-style conference. CSPOA was founded in 2011 by Richard Mack, the ex-sheriff of a small Arizona county and a former board member of the Oath Keepers, a militia group with members charged with playing a central role in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Mack has for years been steadfast in promoting the conspiracy theory of massive voter fraud.

Mack joined Engelbrecht during the press conference, and later participated in a “FreedomFest” panel with other sheriffs, which they titled “2000 Mules: ‘Law Enforcement Has to Step in at This Point!’—Will Sheriff’s [sic] Investigate?” Engelbrecht has called True the Vote’s budding relationship with right-wing sheriffs a divinely-inspired stroke of luck after federal and state law enforcement dismissed her group’s claims of widespread fraud. 

“Once we had been burned by both the Federal Bureau of Investigation and state-level law enforcement, we realized we’ve got to take this more local,” Engelbrecht said during the CSPOA’s Las Vegas press conference. “As God would have it, at about the same time, both Sheriff Mark Lamb of Pinal County, Arizona and Sheriff Mack reached out … All of a sudden, it’s like the lights went on—it’s the sheriffs, that’s who can do these investigations, that’s who we can trust.”

Engelbrecht was flanked by at least two other sheriffs who have launched investigations into local election officials back home in attempts to bolster right-wing voter fraud conspiracies. One of the first sheriffs to target election workers following Trump’s 2020 loss, Dar Leaf of Barry County, Michigan, sent a private investigator to interrogate long-time election workers and urged other sheriffs in the state to seize voting machines; no charges were filed, and the local prosecutor later said “​​we do not have any police reports or requests for charges” of any crimes. 

Also in attendance during the panel was Christopher Schmaling, sheriff of Racine County, Wisconsin, who investigated nursing home residents who voted in 2020 and accused state election commissioners of breaking the law; officials there also declined to bring any charges. 

What sheriffs like Leaf and Schmaling plan to do with the assistance of True the Vote isn’t entirely clear. Engelbrecht and Lamb set up a website promoting a “National Election Integrity Voter Hotline” that promises to connect concerned citizens to sheriffs “for quick evaluation of incoming information”; as of this week, the hotline connects callers to a voice message saying that operators are overwhelmed and encouraging people to file complaints with True the Vote’s website. In a promotional video posted to the website, Lamb wears a tactical vest while sitting next to Englebrecht and says their partnership is aimed at “bringing citizens and sheriffs together around the country to help preserve our vote.” 

Naturally, Engelbrecht also encourages people to hit the website’s big red “donate” button. 

Many of the claims made by True the Vote sheriffs appear to be embellished and are causing friction with other local officials and their constituents. 

A week before he appeared in Las Vegas, Sheriff Calvin Hayden of Johnson County, Kansas, met with local election officials to push for the elimination of ballot drop boxes. According to a memo from Johnson County’s chief legal counsel Peg Trent, which was obtained by public radio station KCUR, the sheriff also asked that deputies be permitted to monitor vote counting and to transport ballots in unmarked vehicles—despite state law delegating the running and counting of elections to citizens who are elected and appointed to a range of local offices and boards to oversee those processes, not law enforcement. 

Trent wrote back to the sheriff, “my concern is that these requests give the appearance that the Sheriff’s office is attempting to interfere with an election and to direct a duly authorized election official as to how an election will be conducted.” 

“During this meeting, you inquired of County staff about prior elections, challenged the integrity of elections in Johnson County, and requested that local law enforcement participate in the current election procedures,” Trent wrote. The ACLU of Kansas later responded to Hayden’s demands with a statement saying the sheriff “continues to engage in conduct that borders on intimidation of election officials, and his comments undermine confidence in Kansas elections.”

Hayden, who did not respond to a request for comment, has doubled down and said in a statement to local news that he “shares their (the ACLU and Trent’s) concerns about fair and transparent elections.” At the July CSPOA event, Hayden claimed the bipartisan pushback he’s faced at home is itself a sign of suspicion. “Both the president of the Republican Party and the Democrat Party have asked me to resign for looking at this, so I know I’m getting close,” he said. “They always say when you get close to the target, you start catching flack.”

Administrative problems that marred the Aug. 2 primary elections in Pinal County gave Lamb a golden opportunity to expand his rhetoric on voter fraud back home.

The elections department printed and sent ballots without all relevant contests to thousands of voters, some of whom cast those ballots without realizing the oversight. Those errors were compounded on election day, when more than a dozen polling places ran out of ballots because elections officials failed to print enough ballots. Later that week, the Pinal County Board of Supervisors fired their elections administrator—who had only been hired in March, and was the third person to hold the job in the past two years. 

In a video Lamb posted to the sheriff’s office official Facebook page after the election, he assured citizens that he was on top of the problem, even though there was no hint of fraud. “As far as the sheriff’s office goes, we are committed to making sure that we look into this matter completely to make sure that it was nothing more than a terrible accident or mistake,” he said. “We want to make sure that that is where it stops.” 

While problems in the Aug. 2 primaries stemmed from the failure to print correct and a sufficient number of ballots, Lamb’s focus drifted elsewhere. 

“We will also be offering our services to help look at the voter rolls,” Lamb continued, repeating various True the Vote sound bites. “We’re committed to making sure that we will secure those ballot boxes. We will be watching videos to make sure that nobody’s breaking the laws. We’re going to do everything we can from the sheriff’s office to help regain your trust.” Lamb’s language was more forceful in a later appearance in front of a crowd of election deniers, claiming, “I got with our county recorder and I said, ‘We want access to the videos of all the boxes, we want to ensure that there is video in all the boxes, and we will monitor those videos.’”

Much of that appears to be bluster, at least for now. A representative for Virginia Ross, whom the board of supervisors recently appointed to be Pinal County’s new elections director, told Bolts in an email that the office has had no discussions with Lamb about monitoring voter rolls or ballot drop boxes. Officials have also asked the former elections director of another Arizona county to conduct an independent review of the ballot mishaps. 

In public, at least, officials have given somewhat mixed messages about how much they want Lamb’s help policing elections. At one board of supervisors meeting this month, County Attorney Kent Volkmer cautioned against using the sheriff’s office to look into the problems during the recent primary, saying, “We really don’t want law enforcement doing [the administrative review]. It’s not that they are not skilled. It’s not that they are not talented. But when a uniformed cop sits down and asks you questions, people tend to get very, very nervous, and they tend to not want to answer any questions.” At another meeting later that month, Volkmer struck a different tone after mentioning his office had been flooded with unspecified complaints of election crimes, saying, “I also have a sheriff, who I believe is here, who sits ready, willing, and able to investigate any of these illegal actions.” 

Lamb’s critics in Pinal County worry that the ballot mishaps in the recent primary have emboldened the sheriff and his rhetoric about voter fraud. Ralph Atchue, president of the Democrats of Casa Grande and a one-time candidate for Arizona Senate, told Bolts that some residents fear that they could soon see Lamb and his deputies patrolling polling places. “I hear from everybody that the line is being crossed,” Atchue said. “Completely blurred.”

It doesn’t seem to be an empty concern given Lamb’s comments since announcing his partnership with True the Vote. Lamb has insisted he’s only involved in “criminal matters” related to elections, of which there were none during the Aug. 2 primary—save for a single person arrested on election day for harassing election workers over the lack of ballots. Lamb has cited the arrest to argue for more policing of the midterm election. 

“We will probably have more deputies roaming around,” Lamb said at the last board of supervisors meeting. “We want to have a minimal presence… but at the same time we will have a little stronger presence roaming around.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, Lamb sounded more combative talking about the issue in an interview with Newsmax earlier that week. “Last week in the board meeting I had probably 8 to 10 Democrats show up and absolutely blast me because I believe in the ‘Big Lie,’” Lamb sneered, flanked by two American flags and, this time, wearing a flak vest. 

“It clearly shows that these folks don’t care about election integrity,” Lamb said before diving into a divisive rant on presidential politics. “They’re happy that their guy is in power, and right now they should care more than ever because this guy in office, Joe Biden and his administration, is absolutely destroying America and freedom and they’re turning this into a country that we just don’t recognize.” 

“And so I would think that they would want election integrity,” the sheriff said, circling back to the issue. “It shouldn’t matter about your party, but unfortunately it does matter to them and they have taken exception with me on it, but you know that’s not going to stop me from continuing to push for election integrity.”

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This guide walks you through how concretely the 2022 midterms will shape abortion access. 

We identify nine questions that touch on reproductive rights that state and local elections will decide, and the critical battles that will help answer them. The guide successively covers the meaning of state constitutions, the viability of new laws, and matters of law enforcement.

This guide is just one small slice. The elections mentioned, which cover 21 states, are by no means exhaustive: There are many other races playing out along similar lines for offices that will wield power over these issues for years to come. Still, we hope to give you a taste of the enormous range of powers held by state and local officials, and some of the ways that candidates on all sides are getting creative in how they’d use these in the wake of the Dobbs decision.

What are the candidates running for prosecutor saying in your county, if there’s an election? What about those running for sheriff and attorney general, governor and judge? The very need to ask these questions underscores the magnitude of the loss of federal protections, though local and state conflicts over the issue are by no means new; and that means many candidates already have long histories and some ideas when it comes to how they will approach abortion access.

1. Will voters affirm or reject state constitutional protections for abortion access?

Never have there been more referendums on abortion than this year. In six states, voters will weigh in directly on the issue, and more indirectly in a seventh, and the results could establish new bulwarks against the right’s efforts—or else open the door to new restrictions.

These stakes are clear in: Kansas’s August referendum… 

In a landmark ruling that’s now styming Kansas conservatives, the Kansas Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that the state constitution’s equal protection clause protects access to abortion. But voters will soon decide whether to adopt a constitutional amendment, championed by Republicans, that would overturn that ruling and lift its protections; the election is scheduled for the lower-turnout August primary. 

… and a likely Michigan referendum in November.

Pro-choice organizers in Michigan this week submitted more than 700,000 signatures on behalf of a constitutional amendment that would enshrine abortion rights, far more than the amount needed to get the measure on November’s ballot. If enough signatures are verified, voters will decide the fate of the state’s pre-Roe abortion ban. A progressive win here would be one of Election Night’s defining stories since it would protect access to abortion in a populous swing state, one where governance has long been out of reach for Democrats due to GOP gerrymanders. (That may change this year too.)

Also keep an eye on:

California and Vermont already enable access to abortions, but this fall they could become the first states to explicitly codify the right to abortion and contraception in their state constitutions. 

Inversely, Kentucky conservatives are championing an amendment that would say that the state constitution provides no protections for abortion. Kentucky courts have not affirmed such a right, so this referendum would not overturn existing protections. Still, pro-choice groups have asked judges to do so; that door would all but close if the amendment passed. In Montana, voters may decide that a fetus born alive counts as a legal person. Finally, and more indirectly, Alaska holds a referendum, as it does every ten years, on whether to hold a constitutional convention that may change the state constitution; this matters because the Alaska Supreme Court has ruled that the state constitution’s privacy clause protects abortion access, and some conservatives who favor an abortion ban in Alaska hope for a ‘yes’ win to overturn that precedent.

2. Will new state judges affirm abortion rights, or strike down abortion protections?

State supreme courts are critical battlegrounds for reproductive rights. Nearly a dozen have established that their state constitutions recognize abortion rights. But that landscape is in flux as progressive and conservative litigators aim for new rulings. Upcoming judicial elections will tip the scales in many states; most states elect supreme court justices this year.

These stakes are clear in: Michigan’s supreme court elections…

Governor Gretchen Whitmer and pro-choice organizations want Michigan courts to strike down the state’s pre-Roe ban and find a right to access abortions in the state constitution; the state’s supreme court has yet to rule, and its makeup is a question mark. Democrats enjoy a 4-3 majority on the court, but one justice from each party (Richard Bernstein, a Democrat, and Brian Zahra, a Republican) is up for re-election. Republicans must carry both seats to flip the court.

… and a supreme court election in Montana.

Montana’s supreme court, unlike Michigan’s, has already affirmed that the state constitution protects abortion. But conservatives are asking the high court to overturn that ruling—at the same time as they’re working to push the bench further right. In a heated judicial election this fall, they are backing Jim Brown, a former counsel for the state’s Republican Party, over Justice Ingrid Gayle Gustafson, an incumbent who was appointed by a Democratic governor. 

Also keep an eye on:

The partisan majority of supreme courts is on the line in three other states—Illinois, North Carolina, and Ohio—with a combined seven elections between them. These races may be decisive in future cases that touch on abortion rights. Of the three, North Carolina stands out: Abortion remains legal there but the situation could rapidly shift if the GOP makes further gains (see below), making it critical for Democrats to maintain their supreme court majority.

In Kentucky, pro-choice advocates hope to get courts to affirm a right to abortion in the state constitution but a fervently anti-abortion lawmaker is running for a seat on the supreme court. Similarly, conservatives hope to oust a moderate supreme court justice in Arkansas. Finally, eleven justices face retention elections (meaning a yes-or-no vote on whether they should stay in office) in Florida and Kansas, where state jurisprudence is especially fragile right now.

See also: Your State-By-State Guide to the 2022 Supreme Court Elections

3. Will states elect governors who will veto new abortion restrictions?

In some places where abortion remains legal, all that’s standing between virulently anti-abortion legislatures and new restrictions is the veto pen of a pro-choice governor. But for how long?

The stakes are clear in: Pennsylvania’s governor race.

Abortion rights have survived in this state despite Roe’s fall because the GOP legislature has to deal with the veto power of Governor Tom Wolf, a Democrat who supports abortion rights. But this status-quo is precarious: Wolf is term-limited and Republicans have nominated far-right lawmaker Doug Mastriano, who has long fought access to abortion, to replace him. The contrast is stark between Mastriano and the Democratic nominee, Attorney General Josh Shapiro, who has opposed new abortion restrictions for decades.

Also keep an eye on:

The Democratic governors of Kansas and Michigan, Laura Kelly and Whitmer, have each used their veto pen to block anti-abortion bills passed by GOP lawmakers. But that shield could soon disappear: Each is up for re-election this fall. That said, each state’s situation is complex: Michigan already has a ban on the books, but Governor Gretchen Whitmer wants state courts to strike it down; in Kansas, the right to an abortion is protected by a court ruling that voters may overturn this summer.

Inversely, Democrats could break the GOP’s control of Arizona and Iowa by flipping these state’s governorships. Arizona’s legal landscape on abortion is in flux, while Iowa’s high court overturned abortion protections in June, opening the door to new restrictions. In New York, where Republican Lee Zeldin would be the first governor opposed to abortion rights in at least 50 years, access would remain broadly protected but Zeldin has signaled he’ll look for ways to chip away.

4. Will states elect legislatures that want to restrict or protect abortion?

Governors are only one part of the puzzle when it comes to new laws; legislative control is just as fundamental. Simply put, will each chamber be favorable or hostile to abortion rights—and if they disagree with their governor, will lawmakers have the votes to override a veto?

These stakes are clear in: North Carolina’s legislative elections.

North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper, a Democrat who supports abortion rights, is sure to be in office through 2024. At the moment Republicans, who control the legislature but lack veto-proof majorities, cannot get restrictions past him. Will that change this fall? If November is very rough for Democrats, the GOP could make enough gains to sideline Cooper.

Also keep an eye on: 

Republicans have failed to override Kansas Governor Laura Kelly’s veto of anti-abortion bills, but even if Kelly wins a second term, they may have an easier time next year if they grow their legislative majorities. Republicans also have outside shots at seizing control of Nevada, New Mexico, and Minnesota state governments if they manage to flip both the governorship and legislature. In the first two states, abortion is currently legal but not protected by state courts; in the third, a court ruling protects abortion but the GOP may still push for some new restrictions.

Inversely, legislative gains by Democrats could protect abortion in Pennsylvania and Michigan, where the party has a stronger shot than it has in decades thanks to fairer maps. Finally, keep an eye on Democratic primaries in Maryland and Rhode Island, where progressive groups like Pro-Choice Maryland are targeting Democrats who oppose abortion. This can matter even where Democrats have supermajorities (as in Maryland) if they need to override a Republican governor’s veto.

5. Will cities and counties empower law enforcement to enforce bans or investigate pregnancy outcomes?

Besides changing state constitutions and laws, proponents of reproductive rights face a vast host of challenges having to do with how to mitigate the harms of existing bans, and that includes the threat of arrest, prosecution, and incarceration. First up are the sheriffs and police chiefs in charge of arresting and investigating people. A few police chiefs and sheriffs in blue-leaning areas like New Orleans have said they would not enforce abortion bans. How might this play out in the midterms? Police chiefs are typically appointed by city governments (which often have more leeway to direct police practices than they utilize), while sheriffs are directly elected.

The stakes are clear in: Wisconsin’s sheriff elections.

The sheriff of Dane County (Madison) put the question of abortion enforcement at the center of Wisconsin’s sheriff elections when he said he would not enforce the state’s 1849 ban on abortion. “Our sheriff’s office has a very strict budget with regards to our time and where we decide to put things,” Kalvin Barrett, a Democrat, told Bolts. He is now running for re-election against Republican Anthony Hamilton, who did not respond to Bolts‘s questions about his position on the issue. Bolts reached out to other candidates running for sheriff in the state. In Milwaukee, the state’s most populous county, all three candidates echoed Barrett’s stance and said they would not use the department’s resources to investigate abortion cases. (All are Democrats.)

In Eau Claire County, where three candidates are running, only Democrat Kevin Otto told Bolts that he would follow Barrett’s footsteps. “I would not enforce the laws on abortion because of the lack of resources and interference into a person’s health matters,” he said. Otto’s Democratic opponent David Riewestahl said it was too early to definitively answer the question, while Republican candidate Don Henning replied he would “investigate complaints as they arise.” 

Also keep an eye on:

Many cities in states with severe abortion restrictions (or that risk having them soon) will elect their municipal governments this year, and the role that their local police departments play in enforcing abortion bans should be central issues. Those cities include Little Rock, Arkansas, Tallahassee, Florida, and Lexington and Louisville, Kentucky.

6. Will counties elect prosecutors who have pledged not to charge abortion cases?

Prosecutors have historically enjoyed vast discretion over what cases to charge, which has made them a highly visible line of defense against the criminal consequences of bans. Already, dozens of prosecutors have said they won’t press charges in cases that involve abortions. As a result, reproductive rights are a major fault line in a host of upcoming elections that pit candidates who say they would enforce restrictions—and candidates who say they’ll decline cases. 

These issues were already present before Dobbs, as zealous prosecutors investigated pregnancy outcomes, as Bolts reported in June. Just last month, a conservative California district attorney lost his re-election bid after prosecuting two women who had experienced stillbirths.

The stakes are clear in: Maricopa County’s prosecutor race (Phoenix)…

Four years after questioning Christine Blasey Ford during Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Rachel Mitchell is now the chief prosecutor of Maricopa County in Arizona, home to 4.5 million people. If courts greenlight the state’s new restrictions on abortion, Mitchell has said she would enforce them. But Maricopa is holding a special election this year, which adds further uncertainty since presumptive Democratic Julie Gunnigle has ruled out pressing criminal charges, as Bolts reported in May in partnership with The Appeal. “As Maricopa County attorney I will never prosecute a patient, a provider, or a family for choosing to have an abortion or any other reproductive decision,” Gunnigle said. “Not now, not ever.”

… and in the prosecutor’s race in Florida’s Pasco-Pinellas (St. Petersburg) counties… 

Florida’s Pasco and Pinellas counties, which share a state attorney, have not had a contested election for prosecutor in 30 years despite being home to a combined 1.5 million residents. And what a time to have one: Their judicial district hosts a special election, much like Maricopa, and the two contenders are at odds on whether to enforce the state’s existing ban on abortions after 15-weeks. (Florida laws may soon get harsher still.) Democrat Allison Miller, a local public defender, says she will not prosecute people providing or obtaining an abortion, unlike Republican incumbent Bruce Bartlett, appointed to the job by Governor Ron DeSantis.

… and in the Texas DA elections.

A group of Texas DAs issued a joint statement this spring vowing to not prosecute abortion. And though just a portion of Texas counties vote for a DA this year, November’s elections will shape whether that group grows or shrinks. Democratic DAs who signed that statement are running for re-election in Bexar and Dallas counties. And in two populous counties that have trended bluer, Democrats are hoping to flip the DA offices. “I will not allow the persecution of our neighbors by cynical politicians bent on establishing a theocracy in Texas,” Kelly Higgins, the Democratic nominee in Hays County, wrote on Facebook after the Dobbs decision. In Tarrant County, where a staunchly punitive incumbent is retiring and former President Trump has gotten involved on behalf of the GOP nominee, Democratic nominee Tiffany Burks told Bolts she “does not have any plan to prosecute women or anyone who facilitates an abortion, doctors or whomever.”

Importantly, the discretion of Texas DAs may be strongly tested by conservatives going forward, as lawmakers and the attorney general are working out ways to kneecap these local officials.

Also keep a eye on:

Iowa’s most populous county (Polk, home to Des Moines) is sure to have a new prosecutor come next year, and Democratic nominee Kimberly Graham told Bolts in June she would not prosecute cases linked to abortion; the state supreme court in Iowa struck down abortion protections in June, plunging reproductive rights in the state in greater vulnerability. In Shelby County (Memphis), one of the few staunchly blue counties in Tennessee, Republican DA Amy Weirich has pointedly rejected the idea of issuing a blanket policy on not enforcing abortion ban; Steve Mulroy, her Democratic opponent in the August election, has said prosecutions “should be extremely low priorities” and he has assailed Weirich for lobbying for a harsher law.

See also: Which Counties Elect Their Prosecutors in 2022?

7. Will states elect attorneys general who want to interfere with local prosecutors?

Prosecutors are imperfect bulwarks since any policy they set is at the mercy of the next election, but also because conservatives have mechanisms at their disposal to supersede DAs—and they are plotting to set up more. Chief among them: Attorneys general. In some states, they have the authority to bring criminal charges on their own, and if not to bury providers under civil lawsuits. 

But this authority can cut both ways. Pro-choice candidates are signaling how they too would try to use the powers of this office for the opposite end, namely to stop the prosecution of abortions. When the conservative DA of California’s Kings County prosecuted two women over stillbirths, for instance, Attorney General Roy Bonta blew up the cases through media appearances and convinced a judge to reopen a case.

The stakes are clear in: Michigan’s attorney general election…

While a series of Michigan prosecutors have ruled out prosecuting abortion, they face a major obstacle: The Michigan attorney general’s latitude to step in is greater than in many other states. Democratic incumbent Dana Nessel has ruled out doing so, but she’s up for re-election and her likely general election opponent, Matt DePerno, has indicated he is in favor of enforcing bans.

… and the Arizona attorney general election.

Kris Mayes, Democrats’ likely nominee for Arizona attorney general, wants to go a step further: She is not just ruling out prosecuting people herself, but she also proposes stopping others from doing so. She says she would use her office’s supervisory authority over all local prosecutors, an authority that is broader in Arizona than elsewhere, to direct all of Arizona’s county attorneys to not enforce bans on abortion. But the Republican candidates in this race largely oppose abortion rights; were they to win, they may flex their power and try to supercede Democratic prosecutors who are refusing to bring criminal charges. Either way, legal questions about the extent of the attorney general’s authority will remain, likely leading to more clashes.

Also keep an eye on: 

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, is among the country’s most militant officials in restricting abortion and has vowed to help local prosecutors enforce the state’s harsh laws; he may also bring ruinous civil lawsuits against providers. His opponent Rochelle Garza could not be more different. She has worked on defending access to abortion as an attorney and says she would set up a reproductive rights unit in the office if she wins, which is always a tough proposition for a Texas Democrat—though Paxton’s own criminal indictments may give her an additional opening. In Georgia and Ohio, two states that are looking to implement severe restrictions, Democratic nominees Jen Jordan and Jeffrey Crossman are also speaking on the issue; Jordan says she would issue legal opinions to undercut local prosecutors who are bringing criminal charges, for instance, and Crossman refuses to defend the law in court. Their Republican opponents, Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr and Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost (who responded skeptically to a 10 year-old rape victim who sought an abortion), are currently defending abortion restrictions in court.

8. Will states elect governors who promise clemency?

In states that have already banned or severely restricted abortion, a pro-choice governor, on their own, won’t shield people from arrest and prosecution. But some governors may at least have the authority—by themselves or through appointees to a board, depending on state rules—to issue clemencies for people who are convicted of violating criminal codes.

The stakes are clear in: Wisconsin’s governor race.

Democratic Governor Tony Evers has said he would grant clemency to anyone convicted under the state’s 1847 ban on abortions. But Evers is up for re-election this fall, and his GOP opponents have made it clear they support enforcing the ban. 

Also keep an eye on: 

Wisconsin governors have broader discretion than most to grant clemency; many other states dilute that power considerably. 

Still, at least one other state is electing a governor who will have somewhat direct authority to issue pardons: Ohio. Republican Governor Mike DeWine faces Nan Whaley, Dayton’s Democratic mayor, who is an abortion rights supporter and says she would veto new restrictions. She did not respond to a request for comment on clemency powers. The issue has also come up in Arizona, where the governor shares power with a clemency board. Democrat Marco Lopez has said he would support pardoning people convicted over abortions; Katie Hobbs, the other Democrat in the race, supports abortion rights but did not reply to a request for comment on clemency. 

Kentucky’s Democratic governor, who has broad authority over pardons and is only up for re-election in 2023, has not said how he would use his own clemency powers.

9. Will new judges bless gerrymanders that would lock in anti-abortion majorities?

Before overturning Roe v. Wade, this conservative U.S. Supreme Court also refused to rein in partisan gerrymandering. And there’s a direct connection to abortion rights: The GOP in many states has drawn maps that lock in legislative control, making it extraordinarily difficult for pro-choice majorities to emerge even if most residents vote for them. A few state courts have guarded against this dynamic—but their judgements are now on the line.

The stakes are clear in: North Carolina and Ohio’s supreme court elections.

These two states’ supreme courts have each struck down GOP gerrymanders, though Ohio lawmakers have for now circumvented those rulings. But new court majorities may emerge in November—five justices will be elected across the two states—and re-open the floodgates of gerrymandering, as Bolts reported in March. Friendlier courts could enable the GOP to draw maps that last the full decade and enshrine anti-abortion majorities. (Note that, while North Carolina is sure to have new congressional maps by 2024, it will be tricky for Republicans to justify drawing new legislative maps before the end of the decade due to legal idiosyncrasies, but they may try if they think they’ve secured a high court would rubber stamp their maneuver.)

And there will be no rest for the weary. Virginia Governor Glenn Younkin indicated that he may push for severe restrictions if the legislature were favorable to it, which has already marked the state’s elections for the state Assembly and Senate in the fall of 2023 as critical for abortion.

The post Your Guide to Local Elections Where Abortion Is on the Line This Year appeared first on Bolts.

Rachel Mitchell, the prosecutor famed for her role in Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, may soon be prosecuting abortions. Four years after questioning Christine Blasey Ford on behalf of Senate Republicans, Mitchell is now the chief prosecutor for the nation’s fourth most populous county—and Kavanaugh could soon hand her the power to criminalize reproductive rights.

According to a leaked opinion, the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority is poised to overturn Roe v. Wade in the coming weeks. Arizona is one of many states with a “trigger” law that would criminalize abortion if Roe falls. As interim Maricopa County attorney, Mitchell is in charge of prosecutions in a county that is home to Phoenix and 4.5 million residents, putting her on the front lines of enforcement. She has said she will bring criminal charges under the state’s anti-abortion statutes if the Court greenlights them.

But a special election later this year may cut Mitchell’s tenure short and shift the local policies on abortion in a county that is home to the majority of Arizona’s population. 

Julie Gunnigle, the only Democrat running in this prosecutor’s race, has promised not to prosecute abortion cases if she is elected in November. “As Maricopa County attorney I will never prosecute a patient, a provider, or a family for choosing to have an abortion or any other reproductive decision,” she told The Appeal and Bolts. “Not now, not ever.”

This is a stance Gunnigle also took in the 2020 race for Maricopa County attorney, which she very narrowly lost to Republican incumbent Allister Adel. But Adel resigned earlier this year, amid a series of scandals, and the county government appointed Mitchell to replace her. Adel’s resignation has triggered the special election to fill the remaining two years of her term. To get to the general election, Mitchell must first win an August primary against Gina Godbehere, who shares Mitchell’s views on abortion.

Arizona has passed plenty of anti-abortion laws in recent years. Earlier this year, the state adopted a ban on abortions after 15 weeks that is similar to a Mississippi law currently under review by the U.S. Supreme Court. Even if the Court does not overturn Roe v. Wade, it may still affirm the Mississippi law—a somewhat narrower step reportedly favored by Chief Justice John Roberts that would still amount to a drastic new restriction on access to abortion in Arizona.

Such a decision would open the door to Mitchell and other Arizona prosecutors bringing cases against abortion providers. Arizona’s 15-week ban, which goes into effect in September, states that any doctor who performs an abortion after 15 weeks can be prosecuted for committing a Class 6 felony and can have their medical license suspended or revoked. People who obtain abortions would not be prosecuted under this law, which makes no exceptions for rape or incest. 

In 2020, physicians in Arizona performed 636 abortions after 15 weeks, according to a report from the state’s Department of Health Services. 

If Roe falls entirely, a complicated patchwork of laws and court rulings will take effect. For one, the state has a full abortion ban on the books that dates back to 1864 and could trigger into effect if Roe is overturned. That one-sentence law stipulates that anyone who provides an abortion can be sentenced to two to five years in prison (except in cases of medical emergencies). 

However, there is some uncertainty over how promptly that ban would apply if the court overturns Roe v. Wade. 

“While Arizona has pre-Roe criminal laws on its books, they are currently enjoined and therefore would not immediately take effect if Roe v. Wade is overturned,” Brittany Fonteno, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of Arizona, told The Appeal and Bolts via email. “A court would have to issue an order lifting the injunction on these laws.”

Perhaps most aggressively, Arizona adopted a sweeping anti-abortion law in 2021 that, among other clauses, established so-called “fetal personhood.” That provision grants “an unborn child at every stage of development all rights, privileges, and immunities available to other persons, citizens, and residents” of Arizona. If Roe falls, abortion-rights organizitations have warned that “fetal personhood” clauses could give prosecutors the ability to charge abortions as anything from civil-rights violations to homicides, given that a fetus at any stage of development in Arizona is now legally considered a “person.”

Arizona Republicans, who control the legislature and governor’s office, may also take new steps to further criminalize abortion. 

“If Roe is overturned, we expect that anti-abortion politicians will continue working to make abortion inaccessible in Arizona,” Fonteno said.

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The impending U.S. Supreme Court decision has significantly raised the stakes in the race for top prosecutor in Arizona’s most populous county.

“Having these people elected and holding this much power over perpetuating harm to our communities is really scary,” said Eloisa Lopez, executive director of the Abortion Fund of Arizona. 

She stressed, for instance, that many people who seek abortion care are already parents. “We are looking at a future of criminalizing parents, putting them in prison, stripping them away from their existing families, and those people will probably be funneled into child protective services.” 

Lopez added that it would make a difference if county attorneys instructed their staff to hold off on prosecuting abortion. “These prosecutors are one of those few lines of defense against the criminalization of pregnancy outcomes,” she said.

In Arizona’s second largest county, Pima County Attorney Laura Conover has already drawn such a line in the sand. She tweeted earlier this month that her office will “do everything in our power to ensure that no person seeking or assisting in an abortion will spend a night in jail.”

Another Arizona prosecutor, Coconino County Attorney Bill Ring, told The Appeal and Bolts that he thinks the state’s 15-week ban is too “vague and illusory” to be enforceable, though he only said he was “unlikely” to actively prosecute under it.

Two of Arizona’s nine abortion clinics are in Pima County. One is in Coconino. The other six are in Maricopa. 

Mitchell, Maricopa’s new prosecutor, has worked in the county attorney’s office for almost 30 years. A self-proclaimed “pro-life” conservative who supports the death penalty, Mitchell is known nationally for her role in Kavanaugh’s 2018 confirmation hearing, when Republican lawmakers tapped her to question both Kavanaugh and Ford on their behalf. Many former prosecutors admonished Mitchell for getting involved in a partisan political process and making misleading and disingenuous statements after the hearing.

Asked whether she would prosecute people who provide or obtain abortions if the Supreme Court allows it, Mitchell confirmed to The Appeal and Bolts that she would, reiterating a stance she has taken elsewhere. 

“As County Attorney, I follow the law,” she said in a written statement. She added that she may use her discretion to not prosecute cases that involve incest. “I’ve sat across from a young girl who became pregnant through incest,” she said. “I will not treat victims as criminals, and I will ensure that cases prosecuted by my office meet the charging standard of a likelihood of conviction at trial.”

The only other Republican in the race, Godbehere, did not respond to a request for comment. But Godbehere, who has also spent the better part of her career working for the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office and is running with the endorsement of several police unions, has largely echoed Mitchell’s views on the issue.  

Speaking on a local radio show last month, Godbehere said that Gunnigle’s stance on abortion prosecutions should disqualify her from the office and that prosecutors cannot “disregard a whole category of offenses because you believe that your opinion is better than the legislature’s or the voters’ of our community.” Mitchell mirrored that language in her statement to The Appeal and Bolts. “Anyone who refuses to uphold the law based on their personal beliefs is unfit to hold office and a danger to democracy,” she said.

Gunnigle contends that Mitchell and Godbehere are denying the discretion that they already exercise as prosecutors. “It’s clear that my opponents don’t understand the role that they’re applying for,” Gunnigle said. “Every single day the role of the county attorney is to go in and decide which cases to prosecute.” She added, “I find statements like that to be incredibly disingenuous, particularly when the office right now only charges about half of the cases, and the county attorney right now is picking which cases to prosecute.”

Defenders of Gunnigle’s take on prosecutorial discretion point out that there are crimes that even conservative prosecutors choose not to prosecute. Eli Savit, a prosecutor in Michigan, recently told Bolts that adultery is still a criminal offense in his state, but “not a single prosecutor is spending any time and any resources prosecuting people for cheating on their spouses.” Adultery is also a criminal offense in Arizona.

Complicating matters further in Arizona is that the state’s attorney general may try to override county attorneys who choose not to prosecute abortion. Some states, like Michigan, allow the attorney general to prosecute criminal cases. 

Arizona law outlines several specific criminal offenses attorney generals may prosecute. Abortion is not one of them. But it is possible that an attorney general could use a creative interpretation that stretches the meaning of other criminal offenses, as prosecutors are wont to do, in order to go after abortion providers. 

“I think there’s definitely the possibility of a legal showdown and asking the court to interpret what this really means,” Gunnigle said about the attorney general’s role. “I will fight tooth and nail to make sure the integrity of this office isn’t sacrificed and doesn’t become beholden to the attorney general’s office.”

Arizona voters will elect a new attorney general this year, and abortion access has already emerged as a major fault line in that race. Kris Mayes, the sole Democratic candidate, has said she would encourage state courts to block new anti-abortion rules, and she has ruled out prosecuting abortion cases if elected. 

But several of the Republican candidates have expressed elation at the thought of Roe being overturned, and some, like Rodney Glassman, have said they will “vigorously” defend anti-abortion laws as attorney general. Another Republican candidate, former prosecutor Abraham Hamadeh, called abortion “murder” and said he is running for attorney general to “stand up for the most vulnerable.” All six Republican candidates in the race are anti-abortion.

Regardless of who’s in office, a ruling against abortion by the U.S. Supreme Court in the coming weeks, coupled with the state’s laws, would create rapid legal and criminal liabilities for people across Arizona.

“These bans won’t stop abortion,” said Lopez, of the Abortion Fund of Arizona. “They will just make it dangerous and unsafe for people. We’re going to see maternal mortality increase, infant mortality increase. There will be more abuse of children. Pregnant people will be criminalized. There will be more family separation. There will be many long-term harms in our community.”

The post Abortion Prosecutions May Hang in the Balance in Maricopa County Election appeared first on Bolts.

On Nov. 3, voters in Arizona, Montana, New Jersey, and South Dakota approved ballot initiatives to legalize cannabis for recreational use.

“Americans across the country have embraced the idea that marijuana legalization is the policy decision that best serves the interests of public health, public safety, and, most importantly, justice,” said Matthew Schweich, deputy director of the Marijuana Policy Project, which advocated for the measures.

The results are a clean sweep for marijuana legalization, and a dramatic acceleration for a movement whose first wins came in Colorado and Washington in 2012. Many other states have since followed suit. 

With Tuesday’s four successes, there are now 15 states, alongside Washington, D.C., that have opted to legalize the recreational possession and sale of marijuana.

In addition, voters in Mississippi and South Dakota approved initiatives that enable the use of marijuana for therapeutic purposes; voters in Oregon legalized psilocybin therapy and decriminalized drugs; and partial returns showed voters in Washington, D.C. opting to largely decriminalize psilocybin mushrooms, though that result is not yet final.

Marijuana legalization will make for a stark change in Arizona because the state has had harsh marijuana laws. Possession of even a small amount of cannabis is a felony punishable by up to two years in prison. Since incarceration can become a barrier to employment, education, housing, and even the right to vote, one marijuana conviction can upend people’s lives—especially people from marginalized communities.

Arizona’s Proposition 207 will now set up a system of marijuana sales in the state.

With legalization, Arizona, alongside Montana, New Jersey, and South Dakota, will have an opportunity to reverse the effects of the war on drugs on marginalized communities. 

And advocates say that racial justice should be central to legalization efforts.

“People of color are arrested at far higher rates for marijuana possession than white people,” Jared Moffat, campaigns coordinator at the Marijuana Policy Project, told The Appeal: Political Report in October, “and that’s not due to any difference in usage. That’s just due to a racist policy.”

In South Dakota, for instance, Black people are five times more likely than white people to be arrested for marijuana possession.

But when it comes to making amends for racial injustice, this year’s four legalization measures vary. 

Only Arizona’s initiative includes provisions to ensure that communities harmed by drug criminalization benefit financially from legalized cannabis.

It allows people with past cannabis convictions to apply to have their records expunged. Everyone who applies would be presumed qualified unless proved otherwise, according to Stacy Pearson, a spokesperson for Smart and Safe Arizona, the campaign promoting Proposition 207. 

Its cannabis initiative would place a 16 percent tax on marijuana sales, which would fund social services as well as a social equity ownership program to help those with past marijuana convictions get licenses to produce and sell their own cannabis.

But the majority of early priority licenses for recreational cannabis would go to existing medical dispensaries. Only 26 out of 160 licenses would be reserved for social equity applicants and rural counties without a dispensary, according to Pearson.

Advocates have pointed out similar shortcomings in other states. Illinois is considered to have the most robust social equity program, but people who qualify still struggle to secure enough capital to start a business. 

New Jersey’s initiative doesn’t specify regulations beyond tax limits. Now that it has passed, other details will need to be worked out by the state’s Cannabis Regulatory Commission. Advocates plan to push for social equity provisions in that process. 

Provisions that are specifically meant to advance social equity are also absent from the initiatives in Montana and South Dakota.

In recent years, other states have legalized marijuana without provisions to repair the harms of criminalization, but later made reforms to address that issue. Michigan voters approved an initiative to legalize marijuana in 2018, and in October of this year the state adopted a law that enables the expungement of past convictions.

This article is adapted from an October story previewing these four referendums. Daniel Nichanian updated it with the incoming results.

The post Four States Just Legalized Marijuana appeared first on Bolts.

The criminal legal system is closely entangled with schools and education policy. This article is the second in a three-part series, in the run-up to Nov. 3, about local elections where education issues are at stake. You can read the first story in the series here.

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When Ivan Penich cast an early ballot this fall, he voted to send President Trump back to the White House for a second term. Then the Mesa, Arizona, resident gave a thumbs-up to a ballot measure that would raise taxes for the state’s wealthiest residents to increase funding to public schools. Penich, a 69-year-old Army veteran and the operator of a dental lab, says his rationale was straightforward. “My grandchildren deserve a good education like my daughter had.”

According to recent polling, a commanding number of voters share Penich’s sentiments. Proposition 208, which would levy a 3.5 percent tax on Arizonans earning more than $250,000 to pay teachers more and hire more of them, is supported by 60 percent of registered voters, including one-third of Republicans.

That taxing the rich to pay for schools would emerge as a cause with bipartisan support in 2020 is not a complete surprise. More Arizonans now identify education, not immigration, as the top priority facing the state, reflecting mounting concern with schools that are notoriously underfunded, teachers who are poorly paid, and a teacher shortage crisis so severe that 28 percent of the state’s classrooms lack a permanent teacher.

Education has become a potent political issue since #RedforEd protests shone a harsh light on the condition of Arizona’s schools in 2018. After a historic teacher strike, educators doubled down on electoral organizing. Democrats gained four seats in the state House of Representatives that year. Now they’re poised to tip the House and possibly the Senate in their favor. If they succeed, voter dissatisfaction with the GOP’s embrace of controversial policies aimed at dismantling, defunding, and privatizing education will be a major reason.

A similar pattern is playing out in other key battleground states, including Michigan and Texas. In these states and others, the gulf between voters who believe in taxpayer-funded public education and GOP candidates who are hostile to it has created an opening for Democrats.

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For decades, Arizona has been a petri dish for free market education experiments. Charter schools, publicly funded private schools, education savings accounts that allow parents to spend taxpayer funds on a dizzying array of education “options” with little state oversight or accountability—the Grand Canyon State has them all. The latest innovation to take off, “micro schools” managed by a for-profit company called Prenda, replaces teachers with untrained and unlicensed “guides” who oversee five to 10 students within their own homes. The company, which denies that it is a school, is raking in millions of dollars through Arizona’s expansive school choice programs.

As school choice offerings in the state have ballooned, they have increasingly competed for funding with traditional public schools. “It all comes out of the same funding bucket, and the bucket wasn’t that big to begin with,” said Sharon Kirsch, research director for the grassroots public education advocacy group Save Our Schools Arizona. 

The push for free-market education reforms has typically been justified in terms of greater academic achievement. Proponents of charter school expansion, for example, point to test score gains in math and English among students attending urban charters. Critics cite the downsides of the free-market experiment, including greater segregation and charter schools’ track record of harsh disciplinary practices that fuel the school-to-prison pipeline, disproportionately affecting nonwhite students and those with disabilities. But Arizona’s school choice debate has been far less focused on results. The lack of oversight and accountability that are a feature of the state’s school voucher program have made it virtually impossible to answer basic questions about how students are faring academically, or even which private schools are benefiting from taxpayer funds. 

That hands-off, regulation-free vision is precisely what an array of deep-pocketed interest groups in Arizona are pushing. Organizations like the Americans for Prosperity, funded by Charles Koch and the American Federation for Children, founded by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, are a major presence in the state. More recent arrivals to the school choice lobbying space include Yes Every Kid, which is another Koch project, and Love Your School, an offshoot of the right-wing Center for Arizona Policy.

Said Kirsch: “I’m not sure most people have any idea that these groups are essentially running education policy in Arizona.”

Americans for Prosperity and the American Federation for Children were behind a 2018 ballot measure, which Arizonans trounced, that would have made every student in the state eligible for a private school voucher. Yet despite clear antipathy—one Arizona Republic columnist wrote that voters “stoned the thing, then they tossed it into the street and ran over it”—Republicans have forged ahead with efforts to grow the voucher program. This year, they enacted controversial legislation to allow a handful of students from the Navajo Nation to attend a private religious school in New Mexico at the expense of Arizona taxpayers.

Kate Brophy McGee, Republican state senator for Arizona’s 28th District, opposed previous voucher expansion efforts, but she was a key “yes” vote this time around. She characterized the bill as a necessary effort to help the Navajo students. But public school advocates—including the legislative Indigenous Peoples Caucus—saw something more ominous: the latest in a long-running effort by the GOP to defund, dismantle and privatize the state’s public schools.

“You have a used-to-be moderate candidate in a moderate district taking more extreme positions on education because of pressure from the party,” said Charles Siler, a former lobbyist for the pro-voucher Goldwater Institute who now works with Save Our Schools Arizona. “The party has shifted its platform to be more antagonistic towards public schools while the voter base hasn’t shifted, at least not to the same extent… That’s created a big opportunity for Democrats.”

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When Christine Porter Marsh ran against McGee in 2018, she came within 267 votes of unseating the GOP incumbent. This year, the former Arizona teacher of the year is challenging McGee again in one of the state’s most-watched races, and she’s confident that she’ll emerge victorious.

Marsh, who teaches English at a Scottsdale middle school has good reason to feel optimistic. The suburban Phoenix district where she grew up and now aspires to represent is in the throes of a demographic transition. The district’s affluent enclaves—and longtime GOP strongholds—including Arcadia, Biltmore, and Paradise Valley, are trending bluer as new residents move in. In the last six years, voter rolls in this part of Maricopa County have swelled by 17,000, three quarters of whom are Democrats.

Marsh says that frustration with the GOP’s complete abdication of funding public education is fueling a political realignment in the district and across the state. “People are fed up and they’re beginning to see that that systemic disinvestment is not an accident,” Marsh said.

The Arizona GOP is also in the throes of a Trump-era transformation that has played out in the education arena. A recent Arizona Republic investigation documented the outsize influence of the far-right Patriot Movement on the state’s Republican Party. In just a few years, the group has evolved from a handful of loud online voices falsely warning of an imminent Muslim invasion to an influential force on state policy, including successfully pressuring Governor Doug Ducey to declare the state reopened for business even as the COVID-19 pandemic rages.

When thousands of teachers walked out of schools in 2018 under the banner of #RedforEd, their call for higher teacher pay and more funding for Arizona schools won strong public support. But the monthlong protests also spurred a countermovement: Purple for Parents, an offshoot of the Patriot Movement. The parent activists have targeted school district diversity and equity initiatives, which they say are marginalizing white people. They’ve also led a backlash against comprehensive sex education in K-12 schools, painting it as a conspiracy to push kids to identify as lesbian, gay, or transgender.

“They’ve been going around to all of the school boards pushing for no sex education, no equity, diversity and inclusion,” said Chandler school board member Lindsay Love. Chandler, a suburb southeast of Phoenix, is in District 17, where voters elected their first Democratic state representative in 2018, and where Democrats are heavily investing to flip a state Senate seat. Love, who ran for school board in 2018 as a progressive underdog and became the first Black woman to win a seat, says the Purple for Parents protests are fueled by more than objection to district policies. “Our Tea Party Republican groups are having this last grand stand against changes that are taking place in Arizona.”

The activists’ extreme rhetoric on schools is pushing away a subset of Republican voters who send their children to public schools. “People see what happens in their schools, they know their teachers. They hear this extreme rhetoric about kids being groomed for sex trafficking or Shariah marriage and they know that it’s not true,” said Siler. “Republicans can’t win when their rhetoric is so contrary to what people experience in their own lives.”

That dynamic is shaping a state representative race in nearby District 23, a heavily Republican district that includes most of Scottsdale and all of Fountain Hills. Two years ago Democrat Eric Kurland came within three percentage points of winning the seat. Today, the former elementary school teacher is convinced that victory is within his grasp. 

Kurland is aided by the GOP’s sharp shift to the right. One of his previous opponents, Jay Lawrence, whose penchant for outrageous comments drew the attention of John Oliver’s HBO show “Last Week Tonight,” lost to a primary challenger who ran to his right. Kurland will now face off against businessman Joseph Chaplik, whose campaign platform includes opposition to comprehensive sex education in schools, and John Kavanaugh, a Republican incumbent, in race for two seats.

Demographic changes in this suburban district are also a factor. “Our demographic mimics what has happened around the country where voters have flipped,” said Kurland, adding that District 23 has had an influx of voters who are highly involved in their local public schools.

To voters who are drawn to eastern Maricopa County in part because of its top-rated schools, the GOP’s hostility to public schools offers little. Kurland says the embrace of his “Time for a Teacher” message by voters in the district is also a sign of exhaustion with two decades of GOP dominance in Arizona that has pushed schools and teachers to the brink.

After polling this fall showed Kurland as the favorite to win the district, an Arizona political news site fired off a warning to Republicans: “If LD [Legislative District] 23 is in play, everywhere is in play.”

“I really feel like this is a moment from my fifth-grade science curriculum where you’re talking about for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction. We’ve been under the thumb of one-party rule in Arizona for so long,” said Kurland.

The post How an Education Crisis Is Spurring a Seismic Shift in Arizona Politics appeared first on Bolts.