In this guide, Bolts introduces you to ten elections that are coming up this month that will impact how local officials administer future elections, and how easily people can exercise their voting rights. 

Voters this month will select the secretaries of state of Kentucky, Louisiana, and Mississippi, who’ll each be the chief elections officials within their state. They will choose a new supreme court justice in Pennsylvania, a swing state with looming election law battles, and dozens of county officials who’ll decide how easy it is to vote in Pennsylvania and Washington state next year. And some ballot measures may change election law in Maine and Michigan.

All these elections are scheduled for Nov. 7, except for Louisiana’s runoff on Nov. 18. 

As we cover the places where democracy is on the ballot, our staff is also keeping an eye on the other side of the coin—the people who are excluded from having a say in their democracy: Three of the eight states featured on this page have among the nation’s harshest laws barring people with criminal convictions from the polls, and our three-part series highlights their stories. And beyond the stakes for voting rights, our cheat sheet to the 2023 elections also lays out dozens of other local elections this November that will shape criminal justice, abortion access, education, and other issues. 

Kentucky | Secretary of state

Michael Adams, the Republican secretary of state of Kentucky, has vocally pushed back against the false conspiracies surrounding the 2020 election, and he has touted his efforts to facilitate mail and early voting during the pandemic. He survived the GOP primary this spring by beating back election deniers who wanted to replace him as the state’s chief election administrator.

Buddy Wheatley, Adams’ Democratic challenger and a former lawmaker, says the state should go much further in expanding ballot access. The Cincinnati Enquirer reports that the candidates disagree on whether the state should institute same-day registration and set-up an independent redistricting commission, two proposals of Wheatley’s that Adams opposes. 

The election is unfolding in the shadow of the governor’s race, in which Democratic incumbent Andy Beshear is running for reelection four years after restoring the voting rights of hundreds of thousands of people who had been barred from voting for life. (Adams and Wheatley have both said they support the executive order.) Voting rights advocates regret that the order still leaves hundreds of thousands Kentuckians shut out from voting and that the state hasn’t done enough to notify newly-enfranchised residents; Bolts reports that a coalition led by formerly incarcerated activists has stepped into that void to register people.

Louisiana | Secretary of state 

In trying to appease election deniers since the 2020 presidential election, Republican Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin weakened Louisiana’s voting system and gave a platform to election conspiracists. His successor will be decided in a Nov. 18 runoff between Republican Nancy Landry, who currently serves as his deputy, and Gwen Collins-Greenup, a Democratic attorney. Each received 19 percent of the vote in the all-party primary on Oct. 14, but Landry is favored in the Nov. 18 runoff since much of the remainder of the vote went to other Republican contenders.

Not unlike Ardoin, Landry has resisted election deniers’ most radical proposals but she has also echoed unfounded suspicions of voter fraud and election irregularities, Cameron Joseph reported in Bolts. The next secretary of state will have to deal with continued pressure from the far-right, Joseph writes, while making critical decisions regarding the state’s outdated voting equipment: The state’s efforts to replace the equipment have stalled in recent years amid unfounded election conspiracies about the role of machines in skewing election results.

Maine | Question 8

Since its drafting two centuries ago, Maine’s constitution has barred people who are under guardianship from voting in state and local elections. Then, in 2001, a federal court declared the provision to be invalid in response to a lawsuit filed by an organization that protects the rights of disabled residents.

Mainers may scrub this exclusionary language from its state constitution on Nov. 7, S.E. Smith explains in Bolts: Question 8 would “remove a provision prohibiting a person under guardianship for reasons of mental illness from voting.” While Mainers under guardianship can already vote irrespective of this constitutional amendment due to the 2001 court ruling, Smith reports that the referendum could spark momentum for other states with exclusionary rules to revise who can cast ballots and shake up what is now a complicated patchwork of eligibility rules nationwide. 

Michigan | Municipal referendums on ranked choice voting

Three Michigan cities will each decide whether to switch to ranked-choice voting—a system in which voters rank the different candidates on the ballot rather than only opting for one—for their local elections. If the initiatives pass, residents in East Lansing, Kalamazoo, and Royal Oak would join Ann Arbor, which approved a similar measure in 2021.

But there’s a catch: Even if voters approve ranked choice voting, it will not be implemented until the state of Michigan first adopts a bill authorizing the method statewide. The legislation to do so has stalled in the legislature so far.

Many cities have newly adopted ranked-choice voting in recent years, and some will use the method for the first time this November; they include Boulder, Colorado, and several Utah cities such as Salt Lake. Other municipalities this fall will also consider changing local rules: Rockville, Maryland, in the suburbs of D.C., holds two advisory referendums on whether their city should lower the voting age to 16 and enable noncitizens to vote in local elections.

Mississippi | Secretary of state

Republican Michael Watson spent his first term as secretary of state defending restrictions on ballot access. He stated he worries about more college students voting, rejected expanding mail voting during the COVID-19 pandemic, and championed a law that banned assisting people in casting an absentee ballot (the law was blocked by a court this summer). He is currently fighting  a lawsuit against the state’s practice of permanently disenfranchising people with some felony convictions.

Watson is now seeking a second term against Democrat Ty Pinkins, an attorney who only jumped into the race in September after the prior Democratic nominee withdrew for health reasons. Pinkins has taken Watson to task for backing these restrictions, and he says he is running to expand opportunities to vote, such as setting up online and same-day voter registration. Pinkins this fall also teamed up with Greta Kemp Martin—the Democrat challenging Attorney General Lynn Fitch, who is currently representing Watson in the lawsuit against felony disenfranchisement—to say that the state should expand rights restoration for people with felony convictions.

Pennsylvania | Supreme court justice

Pennsylvanians will fill a vacant seat on their state’s high court, where Democrats currently enjoy a majority. The outcome cannot change partisan control but it will still shape election law in this swing state, Bolts’ Alex Burness reports. For one, a GOP win would make it easier for the party to flip the court in 2025, affecting redistricting. It may also make it easier for the GOP to win election lawsuits next year: Voting cases haven’t always been party-line for this court, especially ones that revolve around how permissive the state should be toward mail ballots. Recent rulings made it more likely that mail ballots with clerical mistakes get tossed, an issue that now looms over the 2024 election.

Burness reports that Republican nominee Carolyn Carluccio has echoed Trump’s attacks against mail voting, implying an unfounded connection to election fraud, and she appeared to invite a new legal challenge to a state law that expanded ballot access in 2019. Dan McCaffery, her Democratic opponent, has defended state efforts to make voting more convenient, telling Bolts, “If we’re going to err, we should always err on the side of including votes.”

Pennsylvania | Bucks County commission

Pennsylvanians are electing the local officials who’ll run the 2024 elections, and the results will shape how easy it is for millions of people to vote next year in the nation’s biggest swing state. Daniel Nichanian reports in Bolts that counties have a great deal of discretion when it comes to the modalities of voting by mail, and local voting rights attorneys warn that if more counties adopt tighter rules, tens of thousands of additional ballots may be rejected.

Bucks County stands as the clearest jurisdiction to watch, Nichanian writes. Democrats gained control of the commission in 2019, part of a firewall against Trump’s efforts to game the following year’s election. The county commissioners made it easier to vote by mail, attracting legal challenges from Trump.  Now, they’re now running for reelection, but the Republican Party is hoping to gain control of this swing county’s commission. 

Also keep an eye on the Democratic efforts to retain majorities in the other Pennsylvania counties they gained in 2019, often for the first time in decades: Delaware, Chester, Lehigh, and Monroe. The GOP would also gain control of the board of elections in Allegheny County, home to Pittsburgh, if it scores an upset in the county executive race. Sam DeMarco, who signed up as a fake Trump elector in 2020, is already certain to sit on Allegheny County’s board of elections.

Pennsylvania | Berks County commission

Will any Pennsylvania county try to stall the certification of elections next year, in a repeat of Trump’s strategy in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential race? The results of next week’s elections will determine which are susceptible to try out such a strategy, Daniel Nichanian reports in Bolts. Election attorneys told him that this would be a dereliction of duties on the part of county commissioners but that it may still cause some legal and political upheaval. Already in 2022, the Republican commissioners in three counties resisted certifying results because they insisted on rejecting valid mail ballots; they’re now all seeking reelection.

The Democratic challengers running in Berks County—the most politically competitive of these three counties—say this is a key issue in their race. “The most important thing is that we have a board of commissioners that endorses the winner of a campaign,” one of them told Bolts. But they’re also running on a platform of easing mail voting by installing more accessible ballot drop boxes, and instituting new policies to notify residents if their ballots have a clerical error. Also keep an eye on Fayette and Lancaster, the other counties that tried to not certify the 2022 results, and in the many red jurisdictions where candidates with ties to election deniers made it past the Republican primaries.

Virginia | Legislative control

Since Virginia Republicans gained the governorship and state House in 2021, they have passed bills through the lower chamber to repeal same-day voter registration and get rid of ballot drop boxes, among other restrictive measures. Until now, these bills have died in the Democratic-run Senate. But will that change after Nov. 7, when Virginians elect all lawmakers?

The GOP is hoping to gain control of the Senate while defending its majority in the House, Bolts reports, a combination that would hand them full control of the state government and open the floodgates for the party’s conservative agenda on how the commonwealth should run elections. Inversely, if Democrats have a great night—flipping the House and keeping the Senate—they may have more oversight over Governor Glenn Youngkin’s dramatic curtailment of rights restoration and over his administration’s wrongful voter purges; still, those matters are decided within the executive branch, and the governor’s office is not on the ballot until 2025.

Washington | King County director of elections

Only one county in the entire state of Washington is electing its chief administrator. It just so happens to be King County, home to Seattle and more than 2 million residents—in a race that features a staunch election denier, no less. Doug Basler has sowed doubts about Washington state’s election system since the 2020 election, alongside others on the far-right, and he has helped a lawsuit against its mail voting system.

Basler is a heavy underdog on Nov. 7 in his challenge against Julie Wise, the Director of King County Elections. This is a heavily Democratic county, though there will be no partisan label on the ballot, potentially blunting the effect of Basler’s Republican affiliation. Still, Cameron Joseph reports in Bolts that the spread of false election conspiracies—even when they are defeated at the ballot box—is fueling a threatening climate. “It’s a very scary time to be an election administrator,” Wise told Bolts.

The post 10 Local Elections This Month That Matter to Voting Rights appeared first on Bolts.

A boon for the GOP, the results will have stark consequences for state policy, easing the way for new legislation that would target LGBTQ+ residents, and empowering politicians who have championed draconian anti-crime measures and attacks on public education. They will likely set up more clashes between the conservative state government and the city of New Orleans. 

The results also signaled that election conspiracies continue to resonate with the GOP base, as several campaigns emerged triumphant after fueling false allegations of fraud during a critical juncture for the state’s voting systems. Jeff Landry, the incoming governor, tried to help Donald Trump overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election as attorney general, and he doubled down on his alliance with the former president during his campaign this year.

Bolts covered the elections in the lead-up to Oct. 14, with an eye to its ramifications for criminal justice and voting rights. Below are seven takeaways on the results. 

1. Landry’s win hands the GOP a new trifecta

Jeff Landry, the state’s arch-conservative attorney general, easily prevailed in the governor’s race on Saturday, receiving 52 percent in a 16-person field. He will replace John Bel Edwards, a Democrat who was barred from seeking reelection due to term limits. 

Landry’s victory hands Republicans full control of the state government for the first time since 2015, since his party also defended its large majorities in the state House and Senate.

The result will free conservative policy ambitions, which were held back over the last eight years by Edwards’ veto power. Even when the GOP gained a supermajority capable of overriding Edwards’ vetoes earlier this year, it remained frequently unable to do so. This summer, for instance, the GOP failed to muster the votes to override Edwards on a bill that would have prevented discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in schools. 

Landry is sure to bring an entirely different outlook on such issues. Throughout his career, he has pushed Louisiana to restrict LGBTQ+ rights and block teaching of such issues in education, including at the collegiate level. Last year, Landry created a new tool for people to file complaints against teachers and libraries. He has also worked for the state to obtain information about Louisiana residents who travel out of state to obtain gender-affirming care or abortions.

Landry has fiercely fought local and state reforms meant to reduce the state’s near-record incarceration rate, Bolts reported in a profile of the attorney general in August. This year alone, he ran ads lambasting “woke DAs,” fought efforts by Louisianans on death row to seek clemency, and championed a measure, which ultimately did not pass, that would have opened the criminal records of children as young as 13 to the public—but only in three predominantly Black parishes. 

2. Things are about to get more complicated for New Orleans

Republican-run states commonly preempt liberal policies adopted in their cities, so just the fact that the GOP gained a trifecta in Louisiana would put New Orleans in a tough spot. But beyond that, Landry has been particularly aggressive in undercutting his state’s most populous city. As attorney general, he retaliated against New Orleans officials when they crafted policies to protect immigrants and to shield residents from anti-abortion laws, proposing to withhold flood protection funds. He has also undermined efforts to reform New Orleans police while also setting up a short-lived state task force with the authority to make arrests in the city. 

And Landry has made it clear he would double down as governor, telling Tucker Carlson last year that the governor’s office in Louisiana “has the ability to bend that city to his will,” and that “we will.”

New Orleans voters on Saturday signaled their appetite for a very different politics. Landry received less than 10 percent of the vote in the city, far behind Democrat Shawn Wilson who drew 71 percent. A former public defender with some progressive support, Leon Roché, also defeated a former prosecutor for a position as criminal court judge in the parish. And one of Louisiana’s most left-leaning lawmakers, Mandie Landry (no relationship to Jeff Landry), defeated more centrist challengers in a heated state House race for an uptown district.

On Sunday, even as she celebrated her own win, Mandie Landry said she was preparing for a “sobering” stretch for her city. “I think there is going to be more of a push from Baton Rouge to interfere in New Orleans than usual,” she told Bolts. “I am not under any delusions.”

3. This was a low-turnout election

For an election that will deeply affect Louisiana, engagement was very low: just 36 percent of registered voters turned out on Saturday.

Turnout fell sharply in the state’s two most populous urban regions, which vote very Democratic. Compared to the 2020 presidential election, the number of voters who cast a ballot fell by 60 percent in New Orleans and by 52 percent in East Baton Rouge Parish. In the rest of the state, it only fell by 49 percent. 

Mandie Landry, the New Orleans lawmaker, faults the state Democratic Party for doing little outreach to her city’s voters. Compared to the “huge efforts to get out the vote” she witnessed in 2015 and 2019, “there was none of that this time,” she told Bolts. “I didn’t see any get out the vote effort.” The state Democratic Party, which scarcely spent money in the run-up to the primary, did not respond to a request for comment. 

4. Secretary of state race heads to a runoff, but a new frontrunner emerges

Republican Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin has tried to appease election conspiracists since 2020, for instance quitting a multi-state consortium that monitors voter registration after false claims that it was tied to George Soros. With Ardoin retiring this year, the big question on Saturday was which of the many Republican candidates would advance to a runoff. 

Ardoin’s deputy Nancy Landry (no relation to Jeff Landry or Mandie Landry) barely edged out her rivals, coming in first with 19 percent. Bolts reported earlier this month that, much like her boss, Landry has resisted election deniers’ most radical proposals while also echoing unfounded suspicions of voter fraud and election irregularities. 

Mike Francis, the Republican who most firmly rejected election conspiracies, very narrowly lost out on a runoff spot, coming in third with 18 percent. Brandon Trosclair, a little-known businessman who ran as a hardline election denier and called for fully hand-counting ballots, got 6 percent.

Landry will now face Democrat Gwen Collins-Greenup, an attorney who snatched the second runoff spot. Collins-Greenup got 19 percent as well, but Landry will be the clear front-runner since all Republican candidates combined for 68 percent of the vote cast on Saturday. The state is at a crossroads on election administration since it has to soon replace its outdated voting equipment, an issue around which the far-right has mobilized.

5. In first referendum inspired by “Zuckerbucks,” voters ban private election grants 

Voters overwhelmingly approved Amendment 1, a measure that will block Louisiana’s election offices from receiving private grants from outside organizations. 

A non-profit with ties to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg donated hundreds of millions of dollars in 2020 to local election offices nationwide, in order to help them run elections during the early pandemic. The right quickly dubbed these grants “Zuckerbucks,” fueling conspiracies about election interference, and many GOP-run states proceeded to pass laws to ban such grants. To circumvent the Democratic governor’s veto, Republican lawmakers in Louisiana placed such a ban directly on the ballot for the first time.

Some elections experts critical of such bans share the reservations about private money flowing into elections, but they also stress that public funding is woefully inadequate, and that the bans risk further starving cash-strapped offices, threatening election security rather than protecting it. 

“Nobody’s got money to pay election officials what they’re worth (particularly in this new environment), to invest in new systems, to make improvements to back-end security,” Justin Levitt, a voting expert who now teaches at Loyola Law School, told Bolts on Sunday. “If the state actually responded by funding the elections we deserve, banning private money wouldn’t be the worst outcome. Private donations were only ever there to stop the bridge from collapsing entirely. They never should have been necessary. Yet they were.”

He added, “I think we can all hope that we’re not dealing with that kind of 10-alarm fire in 2024.”

6. In sheriff’s races, a sea of white men—again

Sixty-three parishes held sheriff elections, and only three even featured women running for the office. All lost on Saturday. 

This means that all 63 parishes have elected a man, or are sure to do so after the Nov. 18 runoffs. This dynamic is nothing new: All of these parishes already have a male sheriff. 

Nearly all incoming sheriffs will also be white. Across these 63 parishes, only three elected a Black sheriff on Saturday, with Black candidates advancing to a runoff in three additional parishes. By contrast, 57 of these 63 parishes elected a white sheriff on Saturday or will do so after the runoff. Louisiana’s population is 30 percent Black. 

This pattern is symptomatic of the societal biases regarding what law enforcement should look like, though breaking it up would not in itself change brutal conditions and treatment inside the state’s jails. And here again, New Orleans stands out from the rest of the state.

Its sheriff, Susan Hutson, is a Black woman who took office in 2022 (New Orleans holds its elections on a different cycle than all other parishes, and so Hudson was not on the ballot this fall). “As a woman and as a Black woman, I go through additional types of microaggressions in the job,” Hutson told Verite News last year. “So just having somebody else there who might be experiencing something similar with me, it’s good—it’s good to see someone like you.”

7. East Baton Rouge sheriff secures another four years 

The jail in Louisiana’s most populous parish is notorious for an alarming death rate and for the brutal treatment of people detained there. But, as Bolts reported in August, organizers and civil rights lawyers have run into Sheriff Sid Gautreaux, who has overseen the facility for 15-plus years, boosted by campaign contributions from people and groups that benefit from more jail spending. 

Gautreaux won reelection with 86 percent of the vote on Saturday. He is a Republican in a heavily blue jurisdiction but he faced no Democrat; two opponents were kicked off the ballot over the summer, though neither was expected to mount a serious challenge to the entrenched sheriff.

Reverend Alexis Anderson, co-founder of the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison Reform Coalition, a local organization that has pushed back against the sheriff’s practices, told Bolts on Sunday that she would continue to demand accountability regardless of these results. “I stand committed to working towards independent investigations of each and every death that has occurred in that facility under the Gautreaux administration,” she said. “We will continue engaging our community on the development of real public safety tools.”

Anderson added, “There are too many lives at stake to become discouraged.”

Piper French contributed reporting for this article.

The post Louisiana Takes a Hard Swing to the Right appeared first on Bolts.

Louisiana’s leading Republican candidates for secretary of state have largely rejected calls from election conspiracists to upend the state’s voting system, but they’re still courting GOP base voters who continue to believe Donald Trump’s lies that he won the 2020 election.

Some of the main contenders in next week’s election are playing rhetorical footsie with the hard right in the campaign to replace retiring Republican incumbent Kyle Ardoin, whose own efforts to appease election deniers weakened Louisiana’s voting system without saving his political career.

Whoever replaces him as the state’s next chief election administrator will have to deal with continued pressure from conspiracists while making decisions about everything from administering the 2024 presidential election to replacing Louisiana’s aging voting equipment. 

Louisiana uses touchscreen electronic voting machines that are almost two decades old and prone to error, and do not include a paper ballot printout, making results impossible to audit. State officials have been mulling how to replace the equipment for years now to address these concerns but their efforts have repeatedly stalled, and far-right conspiracists have jumped into the fray to push for a radical reboot of the election system.

Brandon Trosclair, the most hardline candidate in the race, wants to switch to hand-counting elections, mirroring an approach some far right politicians have pushed around the nation that experts warn would produce inaccurate counts.

Local political observers doubt Trosclair has a real shot at winning the race, and most of the front-running candidates strongly oppose his calls for such a dramatic overhaul while supporting plans to acquire new voting machines with a paper trail. 

But two of the top candidates, Ardoin’s lieutenant Nancy Landry and state Speaker Clay Schexnayder, have also hedged their responses to false concerns of widespread fraud in a seeming attempt to appeal to the Republican voters in the state who still believe the game is rigged, a sign that they could fall into the same appeasement trap that Ardoin did in office. On top of that, Jeff Landry, the Louisiana Attorney General who joined Texas’ attempts to overturn the 2020 election in four swing states won by President Biden, is favored to win Louisiana’s governorship this fall, which would hand him more power to pressure the eventual secretary of state on how to run elections.

Schexnayder, Trosclair, and Nancy Landry (no relationship to Jeff Landry) are running in the Oct. 14 primary alongside five other candidates, including Public Service Commissioner Mike Francis, the Republican who is most direct about rejecting election conspiracies. Democrats Gwen Collins-Greenup, an attorney who received 41 percent of the vote in the 2019 runoff for secretary of state, and Arthur Morrell, a former court clerk in New Orleans, will be on the ballot as well.

The top two in the all-party primary will advance to a mid-November runoff regardless of party. 

Francis, Landry, and Schexnayder have raised the most money and are the only candidates currently running statewide TV ads, according to local Republicans tracking ad buys. With early voting already underway, at least one of those three Republicans is expected to advance to the runoff, where they would be favored since this is a deep red state. There’s a possibility that the Democratic candidates split their party’s vote and two Republicans advance.

Pearson Cross, a political science professor and associate dean at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, said the leading Republicans’ message on widespread voter fraud has been “that they’re concerned about it, but it’s not an issue here.”

This attempt to walk a tightrope—defending their own state’s election system while nodding to more general worries about the 2020 elections—was also attempted by other state officials.

Ardoin, the outgoing secretary of state, spent years trying to appease the state’s far right who claimed that Louisiana’s elections were rife with fraud. Ardoin allowed MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, a leading proponent of disproven election fraud theories, to air his views at an official hearing of the Louisiana Voting Systems Commission. 

Ardoin also pulled his state out of the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), a bipartisan, multi-state collaborative effort that monitors whether people illegally vote in multiple states. 

More than 30 states run by both Democrats and Republicans were part of ERIC with little controversy until it became a target on the far right when the Gateway Pundit website falsely claimed that it was secretly a “left-wing voter registration drive” bankrolled by liberal billionaire George Soros. Ardoin announced he would quit the program shortly thereafter, at an event hosted by a group of election-denying conservative activists in early 2022. Seven other GOP-controlled states have since followed suit, with Texas officially planning to withdraw later this month.

Every state that leaves ERIC not only limits its own ability to detect voter fraud but hurts the entire endeavor, because it relies on states communicating with each other to identify if a voter casts their ballot in multiple states.

But Ardoin’s actions were not enough for conspiracy theorists, and they continued to hound him throughout his tenure. He decided this spring not to run for reelection, triggering Louisiana’s first secretary of state race without an incumbent since 1987—and slammed them in a statement.

“I hope that Louisianans of all political persuasions will stand against the pervasive lies that have eroded trust in our elections by using conspiracies so far-fetched that they belong in a work of fiction,” Ardoin said. “The vast majority of Louisiana’s voters know that our elections are secure and accurate, and it is shameful and outright dangerous that a small minority of vocal individuals have chosen to denigrate the hard work of our election staff and spread unproven falsehoods.”

Ardoin’s decision to quit ERIC hasn’t come up much at all on the campaign trail, but Francis, one of the leading Republican candidates, told Bolts he planned to rejoin the organization so long as new information didn’t come to light during his technical review. “I plan to go back to that unless something surfaces,”he said. 

It’s unclear where Landry and Schexnayder stand—neither has mentioned it on the campaign trail and their campaigns didn’t respond to questions from Bolts about the program. 

Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams, a Republican who defeated primary challenges from election deniers in May, told Bolts at the time that he wished public officials did not bow to such pressure. Referring to Louisiana, Adams said Ardoin “dropped out of ERIC and did the things that he thought he had to do to survive, and it didn’t work, he got run out of his race.”   

“I’ve seen my colleagues in the same job in other states try to feed the tiger,” Adams said. “I’ve seen them make decisions that I think were probably not good for their voters to try to survive a primary and all it does is just validate the conspiracy theories.”

In Louisiana, the secretary of state candidate most invested in these conspiracy theories hasn’t gotten much traction.

As of Oct. 4, Trosclair’s campaign website included a countdown clock to the Nov. 18 runoff, not the October 14 all-candidate election. He’d raised less than $100,000 for the race as of early September campaign finance reports, and has made no ad buys.

“It’s very difficult if you have no money and are trying to sell a narrative that people in this state don’t believe and a system that they don’t want,” Schexnayder adviser Lionel Rainey III said about Trosclair.

One prominent local Republican is helping Trosclair. When Bolts reached out to Trosclair with an interview request, Lenar Whitney, a former state lawmaker and current national committeewoman for the Republican Party of Louisiana with a long history of circulating conspiracies, called back and said that she was working on his campaign. Trosclair never called back. 

Trosclair has made clear his lack of faith in the state’s elections in no uncertain terms. 

“Safe and secure? I don’t think so,” he said of Louisiana’s system at a candidate forum on Sept. 21. “I don’t trust it at all.”

But some of the other GOP candidates are also courting election deniers, even as they defend their own state’s system. 

Nancy Landry’s campaign announcement video criticized election procedures in other states like Arizona and Pennsylvania. And she has hedged when asked if Joe Biden had legitimately won the 2020 election. 

“I do think that President Biden is the legitimate president, but I do think there were some very troubling allegations of irregularities in many states,” she said at the same Sept. 21 forum, before adding that Louisiana has “safe, fair and accurate elections.”

“I understand people’s concerns and their lack of confidence in elections. I think most of it is based on what they’ve heard that happened in other states,” she said later. 

She has also echoed a conspiracy spread by the far right since the 2020 election, attacking Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for donating funds to help struggling local election offices at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. “We must also continue efforts to prohibit private funding of elections from California leftists like Mark Zuckerberg,” she said in her announcement video. 

Louisiana did not receive any of the Zuckerberg funding in 2020 after Jeff Landry, the attorney general, stepped in to prohibit it. But Louisiana could be on its way to ban any future private elections funding if an amendment question put on the Oct. 14 ballot passes. 

Schexnayder won his speakership because of Democratic support and while his relationship with some legislative Democrats soured in recent years, he’s seen as more of a moderate than Landry. But he, too, has taken the tack that Louisiana’s elections are safe while stoking concerns about how other states and the feds handle elections, saying in an August TV interview that he wanted to ensure “we don’t have any overreach from the federal government to come in and manipulate elections.”

He has promised to create a board to “investigate all and any allegations made towards election irregularities”—a move that would mirror the creation of new investigative bodies in other red states, spurred by unfounded concerns of widespread fraud. 

Francis, a wealthy oilman and former state party chairman, has expressed significantly more skepticism of voting fraud theories than the other candidates.

“I voted for Trump. I’m very conservative,” he told Bolts. “I don’t agree that the election was stolen from him, because there’s no proof of that. I’ve been watching the news and all of the conspiracy theorists. Give me the proof that it was stolen.”

He still plans to give these theories air time, saying that as secretary of state he would organize a “technical conference” to test “all these accusations about the wrongdoing.” But he said he hopes that the conference might help convince them that “we have good solid elections.”

One reason that Louisians who are spreading lies about the 2020 election are so fired up is because Louisiana’s machines are leased from Dominion Voting Systems, which Trump and his allies have falsely claimed were involved in rigging the elections. 

For Trosclair and his allies, the solution is switching to an all-paper system with hand-marked and hand-counted ballots. That idea has been promoted by Trump allies like Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow, but elections experts say it would be much more prone to error.

The leading candidates have distanced themselves from proposals for hand-counting: They say they want to replace the old machines with new ones that will provide a paper backup in case anything goes wrong with the count and to audit the system.

But they’ve also acknowledged that voting machines may be unpopular with the GOP base.

“Don’t boo me, but we do have Dominion machines,” Schexnayder joked at a recent event, before explaining that they were secure. He promised that the updated machines would follow a similar model, while also creating an auditable paper trail.

Landry and Francis have similarly said they’d acquire new machines with an auditable paper trail, as has Collins-Greenup.

At a recent candidate forum, Trosclair declared “If you live in Louisiana and you think our elections are just fine there are seven other candidates that are going to change very little or nothing about the process.”

He may be right—but his opponents’ rhetoric during the campaign shows how powerful his movement remains in Louisiana politics.

The post Election Conspiracies Loom Over Louisiana’s Secretary of State Race appeared first on Bolts.

Still, all six commissioners secured the Republican nominations on Tuesday in their bids to serve another four years in these offices.

Should they prevail again in November’s general election—and these are all red-leaning counties—they’ll retain control of local election administration during the 2024 presidential cycle. 

Duncan Hopkins, a local organizer with the group Lancaster Stands Up who confronted Lancaster County GOP commissioners Ray D’Agostino and Josh Parsons at a public meeting last fall about their ties to election deniers, is alarmed by this landscape.

“We are looking at elected officials—at the highest levels, I’m thinking of former President Trump, all the way down to county election board officials—and we are seeing that they will work very hard to find a way to take votes away from people, even from people who voted for them, just to prove that it’s something that they can do legally,” Hopkins told Bolts on Wednesday. “It’s distressing.”

In most of Pennsylvania, county commissioners double as local boards of elections, with duties ranging from supervising voter registration to tabulating ballots. Their role in certifying election results has emerged as a critical lynchpin in Trump allies’ efforts to take over election administration. “Sometimes the vote counter is more important than the candidate,” Trump told Pennsylvania Republicans last year. But these county officials have broad effects on voting rights beyond the count since they shape people’s access to different ways of voting.

D’Agostino and Parsons last year voted to remove Lancaster County’s only drop box for mail-in ballots, for instance, and Hopkins is concerned by local commissioners’ crusade against mail voting, which is central to Trump’s own lies about fraud. “There are a fair number of people who in the Republican Party have tried to make voting more difficult by taking away ballot drop boxes, making it more difficult to vote by mail,” he said.

D’Agostino and Parsons faced no opponent in Lancaster’s Republican primary on Tuesday. In Berks County, incumbents Christian Leinbach and Michael Rivera prevailed against three challengers, while Fayette County incumbents Scott Dunn and Dave Lohr won against two. 

Similar results played out throughout the state. Local GOP officials have attempted to block election certification in a handful of other counties since 2020. And in an extensive investigation of public statements made by county commissioner candidates, Votebeat and Spotlight PA identified additional Republicans who have amplified false conspiracies about voter fraud. 

In total, 20 incumbent commissioners were on the ballot this week after supporting the Big Lie in either word—repeating denialist rhetoric in public statements—or else in deed, by refusing to certify a recent election. Eighteen of them won their Republican primaries, most of them in contested races. 

In Allegheny County, home to Pittsburgh, Councilmember Samuel DeMarco was unopposed for the GOP nomination on Tuesday, three years after voting to not certify the local presidential results and even signing up as a fake Trump elector. 

DeMarco, in fact, is a very rare elected official anywhere in the country who agreed to add his name to alternate elector lists willing to declare their state’s electoral votes for Trump despite the Republican’s loss in their state. DeMarco was interviewed by the FBI last year as part of an investigation into these schemes; he defended himself, saying that the list was only meant to be used in case the courts overturned the results. “When we did not win in court, the matter ended,” he told TribLive last year.

The Trump campaign’s lawsuits themselves were on flimsy grounds, and numerous judges in 2020 expressed alarm that they were being asked to disenfranchise millions of voters. DeMarco, who is also the chair of the local Republican Party in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania’s second most populous county, did not return a request for comment. 

Joe Gale, a commissioner in Montgomery County, is one of the two exceptions. Gale voted against certifying election results in 2020, though as the sole Republican on his county board he was not able to block them. “There is no way to verify the authenticity of one half of the votes cast this year,” he said at the time, mirroring lies spread by Trump allies about the results. He doubled down, later opposing certifying the 2022 elections as well. Gale was ousted on Tuesday, finishing third in the Republican primary when only the first two vote-getters move forward to the general election.

But even that vote was not a complete repudiation of election denialism; the Republican who got the most votes in Montgomery, Thomas DiBello, has himself repeatedly amplified false allegations of widespread voter fraud, as uncovered by Spotlight PA and Votebeat.

Another election-denying commissioner who lost on Tuesday is Stuart Ulsh of Fulton County, a small and rural jurisdiction. Fulton was Pennsylvania’s only known county whose commissioners agreed to let a private group, connected with Trump lawyer Sydney Powell, conduct a so-called audit of voting equipment. State officials then decertified the county’s voting equipment, saying they could no longer be sure it was secure since a third-party had toyed with the machines. 

Ulsh, who later testified in the legislature in defense of this scheme, was eliminated on Tuesday. But his colleague Randy Bunch, who approved that audit alongside Ulsh, came in first in the Republican primary and will move to the general election alongside another Republican. 

Other counties that feature incumbent commissioners who amplified false fraud conspiracies include Beaver, Butler, Juniata, Lackawanna, Schuylkill, Washington, and Wyoming. 

In the night’s biggest loss for an election denier, state judge Patricia McCullough fell short in her bid to join the state supreme court, losing in the GOP primary by seven percentage points.

McCullough gave Trump one of his brightest legal wins in late 2020 when she blocked the certification of state results, only to be quickly disavowed by the supreme court. “I was the only judge in the entire country to enter an order to halt the certification of the 2020 presidential election results,” she later said, boasting of her boost to “Stop the Steal” efforts.

Carolyn Carluccio, the Republican who defeated McCullough on Tuesday, has herself amplified false allegations of widespread voter fraud, telling a Republican audience that a bipartisan law that expanded mail-in voting in the state had undermined the integrity of elections. Carluccio did not answer a Bolts request for comment, and she also dodged a question on what she meant by the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Throughout the state, Tuesday’s elections were marked by relatively low turnout, as is typical for off-year elections. Roughly 820,000 Republicans voted in the judicial primary on Tuesday, which is just 60 percent of the electorate that participated in the GOP primaries 12 months ago. 

Carluccio will face Democratic nominee Daniel McCaffrey in November. The winner will sit on Pennsylvania’s supreme court and hear potential election cases during the 2024 cycle. Democrats will retain a majority on the court no matter the outcome, though a loss would narrow their edge to 4-3. This general election is expected to be highly competitive. 

But in the counties where GOP commissioners tried to block certification in recent years, most of the incumbents who won their primaries yesterday are likely to have a clear edge in November. Trump carried Berks, Fayette, and Lancaster counties by large margins in 2020. 

Still, there is recent history to suggest that Pennsylvania Democrats can be competitive in red-leaning territory when facing a far-right candidate; Berks swung blue last year in the governor’s race, which featured election denier Doug Mastriano as the Republican nominee. In each of these counties, the two Democratic and two Republican nominees will run on one ballot, and the top three vote-getters will become commissioners.

DeMarco, the fake Trump elector running for re-election in Allegheny County, is also highly likely to return for another term. Under Allegheny’s complex rules, Democrats and Republicans each nominate only one candidate to complete for two at-large council seats in the general election, so they’re each sure to win unless an independent also enters the race. Local election observers told Bolts that they are not aware of an independent running at this time, though the deadline for one to file is Aug. 1.

“Since it is these local officials who are responsible for administering our elections and certifying the results, it’s critical for Pennsylvanians to not only be aware of this dangerous trend spreading through their cities and counties, but to know who the officials are who could potentially be a threat to democracy,” says Jenna Lowenstein, executive director of Informing Democracy, an organization that released its own report on local officials in Pennsylvania and elsewhere who have amplified the Big Lie.

The results in Pennsylvania’s Republican primaries on Tuesday stood in marked contrast with those in Kentucky, the only other state with statewide elections this week.

Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams easily won the Republican primary, defeating two election deniers who’d spread false election conspiracies with 64 percent of the vote. Over his tenure, Adams partnered with Democratic Governor Andy Beshear to support election changes that made it easier for Kentuckians to vote early and to vote by mail.

“I’m really proud that Kentucky Republicans ratified the things that we’ve done to make voting easier at a time that other red states have gone backwards,” Adams told Bolts on Wednesday after his victory. “I’ve got hundreds of thousands of Republicans that use those mechanisms to their satisfaction, and I just didn’t think that they were going to punish me for that.”

Adams will face Buddy Wheatley, a former Democratic lawmaker who promises to champion reforms to increase turnout, in the general election.

In the run-up to the Republican primary, Adams denounced the spread of conspiracies about the 2020 elections and he himself framed this race as a referendum on election denialism. 

“I’ve seen my colleagues in the same job in other states try to feed the tiger,” he told Bolts. “I’ve seen them make decisions that I think were probably not good for their voters to try to survive a primary and all it does is just validate the conspiracy theories. You can’t cave.” He defended his decision to keep Kentucky in ERIC, a national consortium to clean voting rolls that a wave of GOP-led states have quit since the start of the year. 

Adams acknowledges that it may be easier to push back against the Big Lie in a state where Republicans already dominate, compared to a place like Pennsylvania where ”the stakes are higher.” But he cast election denialism as a national crisis, pointing to threats in places that aren’t as competitive in presidential elections such as Tennessee or New Mexico, where some GOP officials tried to block local certifications last year. 

“This is not a six state problem, it is a 50-state problem now,” he said.

The post Pennsylvania GOP Doubles Down on Election Deniers, Including a Fake Trump Elector appeared first on Bolts.

“It’s not just people questioning you at work. It’s at the grocery store, or at your niece’s birthday party,” she said. Her county covers an area almost as big as New Jersey but has a population of just over 6,700 people.

“I pretty much know everyone,” added Donaldson, a Democrat starting her fourth term in a county then-President Donald Trump won by 51 points in 2020. “They don’t trust us. We’re letting them watch the process, but you can’t really argue with those people that have believed misinformation. It doesn’t matter how long they’ve known you. They’ll say, we know you’re doing it the right way, but the county next door isn’t. Well, that doesn’t make you feel any better about your job.”

This relatively new stressor is part of the long tail of election denialism that was kicked off by Trump during the 2020 presidential election. It remains as an animating belief among some on the right that entire electoral systems—and the people who run them—are irredeemably untrustworthy.  

The constant harassment has been enough to force many in Donaldson’s field out of the profession. A 2021 Brennan Center national survey of election workers found that a third had been made to feel unsafe because of their work, while about one in six said they’d been outright threatened during the past election cycle.

In Nevada, it’s been felt acutely. The clerk of Washoe County (Reno), the second most populous county in the state, stepped down last year amid threats to herself and her office. The clerk of rural, deep-red Nye County also stepped down, because commissioners there voted to conduct ballot-counting by hand, and was replaced by a new clerk who has promoted election conspiracies. Clerks in tiny Lander and Mineral counties both resigned in late 2021.

Amid that turmoil last year, Nevada became a focal point for far-right efforts to overtake election administration. Jim Marchant, a Trump-endorsed election denier who echoed Nye County officials’ conspiracies against voting machines, ran for secretary of state in Nevada, while also taking a lead in coordinating a national slate of election deniers to run for the position in critical battleground states. Most lost in November, including Marchant. 

Despite Marchant’s loss, these pressures have still left election administration in Nevada in a challenging position. Now, about 40 percent of county clerks in the state are either brand new to their offices or, having taken over mid-term for a departed clerk, are serving their first complete terms. Some have never worked in elections before. 

The man who beat Marchant, Democratic Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, has also never worked in elections. In an interview with Bolts last week, he indicated that he was getting up to speed on important questions about voting access for Native communities; engagement of eligible voters newly released from prison; and potential improvements to the state’s automatic voter registration system.

“The biggest challenge” Nevada faces, Aguilar said, is building and preserving a robust, institutionally knowledgeable elections workforce. 

“Making sure we have people wanting to work in election departments, people wanting to work at the polls,” he said. “If we don’t take care of the human component, these elections are going to be nowhere near where we want them to be or expect them to be, and that’s only going to deteriorate the credibility of elections overall.”

Nevada, like other states, has three major elections—presidential primary, general election primary and general election—in 2024.

“If people don’t feel safe going to work, they’re not going to work in these departments or on the polling sites,” Aguilar added.

Nonpartisan national elections experts generally rate Nevada’s voting systems above those of other states. It has in recent years distinguished itself from most of the rest of the country by offering universal, automatic mail voting; by implementing a modernized version of automatic voter registration; and by allowing same-day registration—among other policies.  

But workforce problems this state faces present a different type of challenge to election integrity that can’t be solved with voting procedure innovations alone. 

Aguilar is working to implement—ideally in time for 2024 elections, he said—a program that will take substantial administrative burden off of local election officials by centralizing the state’s voter registration information in a single database his office would maintain. At present, county offices must maintain their own databases and report up to the state, an arrangement which Donaldson, president of the Nevada Association of County Clerks and Election Officials said “we all have issues with.” Aguilar asked the legislature for $30 million to do this. So far the new governor, Republican Joe Lombardo, has supported the ask, Aguilar says.

The new secretary of state is also backing at least two new proposed laws this legislative session meant to protect election workers. One, Assembly Bill 59, would allow state election officials to shield their home addresses from public records; the other, expected but not yet filed, would make it a felony to threaten, harass or intimidate election workers. 

These proposals roughly mirror policies to discourage and punish harassment of election workers in other states, including Washington, Maine, and Colorado. These new laws have passed with bipartisan support, though advocates against mass criminalization have cautioned against the suggestion that new or harsher criminal penalties are appropriate solutions.

States Newsroom reported last year that in Washington, for example, the ACLU opposed a new law calling for up to five years of prison time in some cases, on the grounds that the state’s criminal code already allows for punishment of harassment—regardless of whether a victim is an election worker. And in Maine, criminal defense attorneys pointed to the fact that existing criminal penalties often do not actually deter criminal behavior.

Kerry Durmick, Nevada state director for the nonprofit voting rights group All Voting is Local, said they are skeptical of the proposal to increase criminal penalties.

“I’m not going to come out on this particular bill until we see the language,” Durmick said. “We don’t want it to go too far and have the effect of intimidating voters, or have a negative effect on criminal justice by creating a new felony. But we do want to protect election workers.”

Aguilar is convinced his policies are on target because, he said, similar ones in Colorado and other states are working. Matt Crane, who directs Colorado’s association of county clerks, said it’s not yet clear whether that is true. His state’s law only went into effect in June.

“I think it gives people some comfort knowing they’re protected. I think it’s too early to say how much,” he told Bolts. He added that the pressures on election officials that inspired the Colorado and Nevada legislation have died down a bit lately, but “there’s no question, with [Arizona’s losing gubernatorial candidate] Kari Lake running around with her absurdity, with Trump running for president, this stuff isn’t going to go away.”

Donaldson said she and other clerks in the state are on board with Aguilar’s agenda, and especially the new statewide registration database, but that she’s not sure legislation alone can cure what ails her profession. After all, she noted, no statehouse bill would extinguish misinformation, or seek to regulate the freedom of her constituents to bark at her in the grocery store.

“I don’t have that answer,” Donaldson added. “It’s hard because we try, with the help from the secretary of state’s office, to put out the correct information, but how do you make people believe it? I don’t know how we could do better at those kinds of things.”

She worries this trend will be especially taxing in rural communities, where misinformation and harassment are less often abstract or faceless because they come straight from neighbors. Her county, Pershing, is the type where multiple generations have been taught by the same local school teachers.

“It’s easier to ignore when you don’t know them,” Donaldson said. “But it’s every day now. It becomes a lot.”

The post “They Don’t Trust Us”: Nevada Election Workers Still Face Pressure and Harassment 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.

But Commissioner Couy Griffin was adamant. As the founder of Cowboys For Trump, he was steeped in election conspiracy theories that sprung up after Trump’s loss in 2020. At an August 11 meeting Griffin pushed for their county to eliminate election ballot drop boxes and voting machines, which he argued could be tools for voter fraud. He also wanted to sue Democratic Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver, who months earlier had gone to court to force them to certify primary election results that Griffin didn’t trust. 

The other two commissioners, also Republicans, weren’t buying it. As their county lawyer RB Nichols made clear, the use of voting machines and drop boxes is dictated by state law. “It won’t matter what we vote, we have no authority to do anything,” said Gerald Matherly. Fellow Commissioner Vickie Marquardt agreed, saying “this is out of our purview.”

Hours later, after a raucous community meeting that included shouting, allegations of fraud, and calls for resignations, Griffin prevailed. The commission voted 2-1 to do away with drop boxes and voting machines, as well as to sue the secretary of state. 

These moves kicked off an intra-party showdown between Republican elected officials following the rule of law and others who are trying to overturn the system as they pursue election conspiracies in a county that voted 62 percent for Trump in 2020. 

They offer a preview for the types of fights that could ensue as more election deniers seek positions of electoral power in New Mexico. So far those on the side of following the law are winning, but that is only true as long as key positions are filled by people willing to resist pressure from constituents who have bought into Trump’s Big Lie conspiracies. 

Otero County Clerk Robyn Holmes, also a Republican, is refusing to comply with the commission’s directive. Holmes says she has the power to decide how local elections are run and the voting machines and drop boxes will stay.

“They cannot create laws. I took an oath of office to follow the law and that’s what I’m going to do,” Holmes told Bolts. 

Holmes has the benefit of knowing that in her showdown with the commission, she has Toulouse Oliver backing her up. Back in June the Otero Commission refused to certify primary election results—despite one commissioner, Matherly, being on the ballot and needing his own candidacy to be certified. The commission had no discretion to refuse to certify results under state law, and Toulouse Oliver went to court to force the commission to reverse course. The state supreme court stepped in and sided with her.

Asked if having an election denier as secretary of state would change the dynamic and make her job more difficult, Holmes said “I think absolutely it would.” 

New Mexico is one of several states this fall where an election denier is vying to take over the secretary of state position. The Republican challenger to Toulouse Oliver is Audrey Trujillo, a pro-Trump candidate who rejected the results of the 2020 presidential election and called Biden’s victory a “coup.”

Trujillo has endorsed various conspiracy theories and claimed that school shootings were conducted by “the deep state” in order “to push an agenda” to take away guns. She is campaigning heavily on conspiracies about election security, saying that current New Mexico leaders weaponized voter laws and the Covid-19 pandemic to “secure their elections for at least 100 years.” Similar to the movement in Otero County, she claims voting machines manipulated election results and has called for hand counting ballots. In June, Trujillo publicly urged the state’s county commissioners to not certify their primary election results without a hand recount and encouraged them to stop using voting machines from Dominion Voting Systems.

“I just want to improve the system we have in place; I’m not here to recreate the wheel,” Trujillo told the Las Cruces Sun News in September. “But if there are questions on those machines, we’re going to do our damnedest to do our research and see how we can do it a better way and an easier way.”

A secretary of state sympathetic to conspiracy theorists could embolden controversies that are already bubbling at the local level, either by sitting back and doing nothing when local officials refuse to certify results or, more dramatically, themself refusing to certify the lists of candidates running for state office. They could also disrupt other key roles that the office plays in overseeing elections, with responsibilities ranging from producing election rules to investigating complaints of lawbreaking. 

New Mexicans are also voting on two supreme court elections this year. The high court is sure to remain in Democratic hands, but Republicans could narrow their deficit and at least one of the GOP candidates has echoed conspiracies about election administration. 

County commission meetings across the state are regularly beset by residents expressing unfounded conspiracy theories about how drop boxes and voting machines are tied to election fraud. Occasionally commissioners take their side. 

“It’s the overall system that comes into question,”one exasperated county commissioner told the AP. “So how do you challenge that, how do you get your answers?”

The source of many of these theories is a husband and wife couple, David and Erin Clements, who have traveled all across the country to evangelize their brand of election denialism. They happen to be from New Mexico, one county over from Otero. In their home state they have dubbed themselves the New Mexico Audit Force and released an extensive report full of voter fraud allegations that fall apart under scrutiny.

Neither have a background in elections. Erin Clements was a civil engineer. David Clements was a business professor at New Mexico State University who was fired after refusing to comply with the school’s Covid safety policies on masking or vaccinations. He amassed a large following online and raised over $300,000 from a crowdfunding campaign.

The couple travels from state to state urging people to show up at their local government meetings to demand voting machines and drop boxes be removed. They have been particularly active in New Mexico—and it’s working. County clerks have been receiving steady pressure to dismantle the machinery of elections. 

“It’s consistent, it is unrelenting, it is sometimes aggressive. I’ve had to report a couple of threats to the FBI,” said Doña Ana County clerk Amanda López Askin. “I hate to say it but it’s part of the job at this point, sadly.”

She counted 141 Freedom of Information Act requests from election deniers, including requests for in-person tours to audit election machinery. “They have really weaponized public records requests. If I let them they would incapacitate my office to the point where we would not be able to run an election,” said López Askin.

In Otero County, this dynamic exploded into a chaotic community meeting the evening of August 11.

The Clementses were welcomed onstage to discuss their report. When County Attorney RB Nichols reiterated that the commission had no legal authority to do away with voting machines or ballot drop boxes, David Clements lambasted the local officials for cowardice. 

“It’s tyranny. And you don’t help them. You don’t help us. You don’t fight. You just do whatever the secretary of state tells you to,” he said.

Supporters in the public gallery cheered along. Nichols was insistent, saying he would not go along with the Clementses demands that the county sue the secretary of state. “I’m not going to file a frivolous lawsuit, David. I have to have a good-faith basis.”

When an audience member called for following the law, Clements said that Nazis under the direction of Hitler were also following the law. When commissioner Matherly discussed downgrading the motion to a request so that they would not risk going to jail, Clements shamed him. “And why are you scared of going to jail?”

The Clementses, along with commissioner Griffin, waged a steady pressure campaign. Griffin argued that the commission should sue Toulouse Oliver for forcing them to certify primary results that he claimed were later proven to be fraudulent.

The basis for Griffin’s fraud claim is that a hand recount changed the results of one primary race by three votes. Clerk Holmes explained that three people filled out their ballot incorrectly and that the machine would have notified them of their mistake and directed them to get a new ballot, but sometimes people do not want to start over and submit it anyway. She said during the hand recount election workers determined that voter intention of those three ballots were clear enough to be counted.

Despite this explanation, Griffin continued to insist that the discrepancy was proof of voter fraud. 

“If there were three votes that weren’t counted in that race, how many other races were the same?” he said. “And how does that affect the big picture, OK? Again, I’m just fighting for the truth up here and I see it pretty clearly right now.”

David Clements jumped up to a microphone to shout down Holmes. “You need to resign,” he said. “Disgusting how you fight the people.”

Griffin and the Clementses won the day, convincing commissioner Marquardt to vote for removing drop boxes and voting machines, as well as for suing the secretary of state. 

Returning to hand counting ballots would turn the clock back on decades of advances in voting infrastructure. In modern times, hand counting is generally only performed in small jurisdictions dealing with a few hundred votes. In Otero County, which has 67,000 people, a full hand count would be enormously time consuming and could delay election results by weeks. 

While many people see voting machines as mysterious and consider hand-counting ballots to be the gold standard, research has consistently shown that machines are more accurate than people. One 2012 study on post-election audits published in the Election Law Journal found that when humans hand count complex paper ballots they can easily count ballots multiple times, skip over ballots, or misread a voter’s intent. 

“Hand counting indisputably takes more time, more money and is less accurate,” said Victoria Bassetti, senior advisor to the States United Democracy Center.

America’s fervor for democracy has created a democratic system not suited to be tallied by humans. Ballots in other developed nations may feature a single question. American ballots can run multiple pages as people vote on governors, secretaries of state, judges, sheriffs, comptrollers and so on. That leads to a lot of tedious counting, a lot of concentration required, and a lot of opportunity for slip-ups.

“Reading ballots is a repetitive and boring task and humans lose focus. They just do,” said Bassetti. 

When using voting machines, states build in a series of checks and balances to ensure accuracy. The specifics vary by jurisdiction but typically include pre-election certification and accuracy testing, post-election statistical and risk-limiting audits, plus optional or automatic recounts in close races. 

The machines have limitations—they can’t interpret someone changing their vote by crossing out a box or writing in the margins—but they can tally in hours what would take humans days or weeks to count. 

In Otero County, the August 11 meeting would prove to be the high water mark of the rebellion. Griffin would end up being removed from office. He had attended the January 6 riots at the Capitol and was later convicted of breaching restricted Capitol grounds. In September, he became the first elected official in over 150 years to be disqualified from office under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which bars anyone involved in an insurrection against the United States from serving in public office.

Holmes has ignored the commission’s directives. Early voting has already started for this fall’s elections, with voting machines and secure ballot drop boxes currently set to be part of the system.

So far no lawsuit has been filed by RB Nichols, the county attorney who publicly declared he would not file a lawsuit he knew to be in bad faith.

The most recent polling shows incumbent secretary of state Toulouse Oliver with a healthy lead over challenger Trujillo. Since Griffin was removed as a commissioner, the drop box and voting machine issues he was crusading for have not made it back into discussion. Instead, commission meetings have returned to focusing on typical local governance issues.

But the election conspiracies have not died down. In rural Torrance County, county commissioners approved a hand recount of primary election results and recently tried to oust the county clerk over her handling of voting machine certification.

López Askin, the Doña Ana County clerk, is one of the most vocal clerks in the state in responding to election conspiracy theories, which she finds are regularly brought up at community meetings. She recalled one resident at a meeting shaking with anger and demanding officials look into fraud as she held up the Clementses self-described audit.

López Askin said that she and her colleagues try to explain the multiple levels of security built into the system—certification of machines, accuracy tests, recounts in close races, post-election audits of results—but ultimately she fears people will opt out of the democratic process because they believe the people telling them it’s a sham.

“These folks get up there and they are fully angry and emotional. They believe it. I don’t know if there’s anything I could say at this point that could continue otherwise,” she said. “So I actually feel mostly compassion for them.”

The post A New Mexico County Went To War With Voting Machines. It May Gain a Powerful Ally in November. 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.

For decades, over 1,600 local offices have combined to run Michigan elections in a sort of harmony. Arguably the most decentralized voting system in the country is held together by the secretary of state, who ensures that votes are counted with enough synchronicity that the public trusts the results.

This delicate network could soon be thrown into upheaval if the office is occupied by the Republican candidate for secretary of state after the 2022 midterms. Kristina Karamo, the challenger to Democratic incumbent Jocelyn Benson, has echoed former President Donald Trump’s lies that he won the 2020 election against Joe Biden. She has attacked Democrats, the media, and even members of her own party that acknowledged Joe Biden’s win as traitors, calling them “evil and wicked people.” And now she is running on making sweeping changes to the system—some of which she legally would not even have the power to enact.

Karamo, who works as an educator and served as a poll observer in 2020, is part of a slate of election deniers aligned with Trump who are now trying to win crucial positions that will oversee future races. In other states where election deniers may take over the secretary of state’s office, concerns have zeroed in on certification, the process by which officials tally and approve election results. In places like Arizona and Pennsylvania, the next secretaries of state could weaponize this typically administrative task and refuse to certify election results. 

But when it comes to elections, Michigan is not like most states. The secretary of state does not certify results; that task is in the hands of a board of canvassers, which election deniers are also working to seize. Instead, observers are warning of another constellation of threats to Michigan elections if Karamo sits at their head. 

In Michigan, every tiny village and township has a clerk who runs the local polls for state and federal races. There are 1,520 of them in total, plus another 83 at the county level that print ballots and perform canvassing. And tens of thousands of people serve as poll workers.

This year’s secretary of state race in Michigan, then, presents an unprecedented question—what happens when an election denier takes over the job of holding a scattered election system together?

Having this many election officials raises the likelihood that some of the people in these roles are themselves election deniers. Michigan has already seen Republican politicians instructing poll workers to break the rules to catch their opponents committing fraud in the primary election this year. At least one county clerk is training poll workers that a threat of sabotage could come from the inside.

Election staffers know they are going to be feeling pressure. What they don’t yet know is whether they’ll be reporting up to someone who will defend them following the rules, or who is on the side of people claiming fraud. 

“As a local election official, if you don’t feel like you have support from the top it makes it very difficult to do your job,” said David Levine, elections integrity fellow at the non-profit Alliance for Securing Democracy and a former election official himself. 

Just under the surface of election denialism is the potential threat of political violence. In April of 2020 armed protesters stormed Michigan’s State Capitol in Lansing to protest pandemic lockdown measures. In October of that year, two-dozen people affiliated with local militias were charged in a plot to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer. The 2020 election count proceeded peacefully but chaos broke out at one polling station in Detroit after the room reached capacity and officials turned away dozens of people trying to oversee ballot counting. A crowd of people then banged on windows chanting “let us in” and “stop the count.”

Having the person in charge of election integrity claiming fraud would have an enormous impact on the public’s trust in the system. But the impact on poll workers, and the decisions they make in trying to uphold election law could be just as important.

“It’s one thing to be feeling that heat from the outside,” said Levine. “If the arsonist is inside the firehouse you’ve got a whole different problem.”

Karamo has repeatedly alleged the 2020 presidential election was beset by rampant voter fraud. She argued a crime was conducted by the Democratic party, which is “taken over by a Satanic agenda,” and covered up by the media, which she called “the biggest enemy of the American people” who “need to be destroyed.” She accused Benson, the Democratic secretary of state, of being in on the scheme. She has often made sweeping claims of fraud without specifying exactly what she believes happened, though she did sign an affidavit after the 2020 election claiming she witnessed poll workers inputting false names and birthdays to validate ballots. 

“Our election cycle has been a robbery. It is an absolute robbery. We must stand up and fight back,” Karamo said in the days following Trump’s defeat to Biden. Her campaign did not respond to a request for comment. 

Fraud claims like Karamo’s have been comprehensively debunked. A string of legal challenges from the Trump campaign and its allies, including one Karamo swore an affidavit for, were shot down by the courts. The most famous example was the “Kraken” lawsuit from Sidney Powell and other pro Trump lawyers, named after the mythical creature due to its purported overwhelming force of evidence that would prove voter fraud in Michigan and across the country. The lawsuit turned out to be hundreds of pages of unfounded conspiracy theories and debunked fraud claims. The Republican-controlled state Senate spent months investigating the 2020 election and determined it was properly decided. The race also was not particularly close—Biden won by about 154,000 votes, almost fifteen times the margin by which Trump won the state in 2016.

“We have to recognize how divorced from reality those statements are,” said David Becker, founder of the Center for Election Innovation & Research and co-author of the book “The Big Truth.” Becker’s book argues that the 2020 election was the greatest success in the history of American democracy, handling the largest turnout and delivering verifiably accurate results during a global pandemic. 

“The election deniers have had multiple opportunities to support their claims in court, to submit their evidence to law enforcement, even to show the evidence to the targets of their grift… they have failed at every opportunity,” he told Bolts. 

Karamo’s campaign is nonetheless heavily centered on election security and investigating fraud claims. She is promising to halt the use of voting machines unless companies turn over their entire source code to the state, and beef up ballot security with technologies like infra-red, watermarks, fluorescent ink, and magnets. 

It is a sweeping platform with one major problem: Michigan law does not allow for the secretary of state to unilaterally make such changes. Shutting down voting machines, for example, would require an act of the legislature. 

Still, if elected Karamo would have the authority to order post-election audits, which she could use to target election workers at Democratic-heavy polling stations. Her investigation powers are limited to the administration of elections, though, and she could not prosecute. If she claims to unearth fraud, she would have to pass the matter on to the attorney general or a prosecutor, who would then choose whether to file charges. But Karamo is running alongside other election deniers who may complement her approach: Matthew DePerno, the current Republican candidate who is also a Trump-endorsed election denier who sued to overturn a county’s election results in 2020. And other subscribers to the Big Lie already hold key positions in local Michigan law enforcement. 

The prospect of large-scale coordination between an ecosystem of election deniers—the GOP nominee for governor has also said the last presidential race was stolen—would loom large over Michigan’s 2024 election and its aftermath.

Karamo would also have another major path to enact her platform: issuing directives to local clerks. Past secretaries have guided this power towards keeping the system uniform. A secretary who sees the system as corrupt could demand major changes that, intentionally or not, create wide variance in how votes are counted from county to county and town to town.

For example, a secretary, citing security concerns, could instruct clerks to apply strict new criteria to verifying identities. Voters with minor differences from their ID—say, having a beard in their driver’s license photo but not in person, or vice versa—could be ordered to cast a provisional ballot instead.

The law is silent on whether someone’s address on their ID needs to match with the current address on file. Many student IDs do not include addresses at all. A strict interpretation of the rules could mean many students or people who moved could be forced to cast provisional ballots. 

People who cast these ballots can show up days later with more ID to verify their identity, but this rarely actually happens according to Chris Thomas, who spent 36 years as Michigan’s director of elections working under both Democratic and Republican secretaries of state. “Of course nobody ever shows up. Who is going to trudge downtown to a clerk’s office?” he said.

The secretary is supposed to be a steady hand that enforces uniformity, said Thomas. But one who does not trust the system and tries to get thousands of poll workers to follow dramatic new instructions would likely result in variation and would almost certainly result in litigation. 

In 2021, a Republican small-town clerk broke with convention and refused to allow maintenance or perform required accuracy tests on voting machines. She said she did not trust the machines and wanted to preserve their data in case it showed voter fraud in the 2020 election. In that case, Benson took action and had the clerk removed from her duties. It is not hard to imagine Karamo going the other direction and siding with a local official refusing to follow the rules. 

“I would expect some very strange instructions to come out to election officials that are going to depart dramatically from how they do their business today. Then things get contentious, they get confusing,” said Thomas of an election-denier taking the reins. 

While Michigan’s election system is decentralized, one of its greatest strengths is that it is tied together by a top-down voter database run by the secretary of state. Unlike in most other states, this database is linked to the department of motor vehicles, meaning that when someone changes the address on their driver’s license it is automatically updated on voter rolls. This has resulted in a database that experts say is one of the cleanest and most accurate in all the country.

Karamo and others have argued the opposite, alleging that the Michigan voter rolls are littered with dead people. This is inaccurate, as death records are regularly run against the database to keep it up to date. If Karamo were to make some change to shake up the system, any changes that impact voter rolls would also affect the people who fill DMV offices daily for routine matters.

That, more than any high minded concerns about preserving democracy, may be the ultimate deterrent.

“You can piss people off a lot faster with what you do with the DMV compared to what you do with elections,” said Thomas.

The post Kristina Karamo Has Plans to Unwind Michigan Elections appeared first on Bolts.

Joel Miller, the Democratic nominee for secretary of state, has a unique vantage point on the challenges to election administration from his current role as auditor of Linn County, Iowa’s second-largest county by population. He opposed these changes in 2021, and was joined not only by his fellow Democratic county auditors, but also many Republican auditors who argued the GOP was needlessly making voting harder in Iowa.

Conspicuously absent from the crowd of Republican election officials decrying these changes was Paul Pate, the incumbent secretary of state and Miller’s opponent in November. He told The Cedar Rapids Gazette at the time that he would enforce election laws but not weigh in during their crafting. 

Miller told Bolts in an interview this week that the office demands a leader who will disavow voter restrictions.

Bolts also spoke with Miller about voting rights for incarcerated people, intimidation of election officials and whether telling the truth alone is enough to combat those who spread lies about democracy. Worried that election denialism is roiling Iowa, Miller says his office has seen an unusual spike in the number of challenges it receives to people’s voter registrations, much like local election offices in Georgia.

You say you want to “make voting easy again.” Was there a time when you felt it was easier to vote in Iowa than it is today?

When I talk about making voting easy again, I’m talking about the estimated 900,000 Iowans who have not yet voted since 2020, and they are going to find it’s not as easy to vote in 2022 as it was in November of 2020.

It used to be much easier in 2016 for people to vote by mail and also to vote in person. We had 40 days of early voting in 2016 and it moved to 29 days in 2017 and now we’re down to 20 days. I think we went from having the third-longest period of early voting in 2016 to now being somewhere in the middle of the pack. We also can’t mail ballots until the 20th day out from the election, where it used to be 29 days before 2021, and 40 days before 2017.

Another deadline that was moved up is the last day that we (county elections offices) can receive a request for an absentee ballot. That went from three days before the election in 2016 to 10 days, and then to 15 days after the 2021 law. In the June 22 primary in Iowa, in my county, 101 people missed that three day deadline, and 51 of them did not vote. The result of that is people cannot procrastinate anywhere in the process. The timelines are just too short, and that also puts a strain on the auditor’s office.

All these deadlines result in people getting disenfranchised. Another way to put it is that voting was made to be very inconvenient if you tend to vote early or you tend to vote by mail.

Which people, or what interests, stand to benefit from a system with these obstacles?

There’s a stereotype that exists among Iowans, and you can see it in the numbers as well, that Republicans tend to vote on election day. Since 2000, the Democratic Party has pushed the idea of voting by mail and voting early. That advantage, or disadvantage, was wiped out during the pandemic, when over two-thirds of voters, regardless of party, decided to vote early or vote by mail in the November 2020 general election, thus resulting in a record turnout. But with the return to normalcy, I expect that Republicans will once again choose to vote on election day. 

So you’re saying these rules can be used to make voting easier for people, to meet them where they’re at, or weaponized to preserve Republican power.

I believe that’s happening, to preserve Republican power. They don’t like that the demographics of Iowa are changing. They don’t like that people immigrating into the state are going to be more pro-Democratic than pro-Republican. So this is an attempt by them to hold onto power for 10 more years by stacking the deck. 

Keep in mind that 68 auditors (in the Iowa State Association of County Auditors) are Republicans: Our organization was unified in its opposition to the laws passed in 2021 to restrict voting. But the current secretary of state was not there to back us up.

After the November 2020 election, he said it was the best election we’d ever had, the most secure, the highest integrity. He was praising us for a job well done, and national figures were praising Iowa for the job we did. So it was a complete surprise, after coming off all the kudos we received in November 2020, that this election legislation was introduced in the spring of 2021. Not only introduced but debated and basically on the governor’s desk in a 7-10-day timeframe.

As secretary of state, I would have used the bully pulpit to talk every day about what was wrong with that bill, about how it was going to make voting more inconvenient and decrease voter turnout and end up disenfranchising people.

Have you seen any impact of Big Lie politics on the ground in Iowa? How has it affected your job as county auditor?

Let me tell you a factual impact: About ten days ago I received 119 voter registration challenges in Linn County. There’s a news report that a neighboring county received about 570 challenges. To put this in perspective, in my previous 15 years as auditor, I received three. 

County clerks and election administrators all around the country have reported increased threats and intimidation since the 2020 election. What would you do to support people who work in election administration?

Well, for example, the former Scott County auditor resigned because of threats. The 99 county auditors are forced to be the ones responsible for responding to this. We should have a unified message as to what’s going on here, and it starts with disavowing the people that have created this havoc. This isn’t supposed to be about someone keeping a job. It’s about doing what’s right for the public, what’s right for the voters, regardless of the consequences to us as individual elected officials. 

According to The Sentencing Project, there are some 34,000 people in Iowa who are disenfranchised either because they’re in prison, on probation or on parole. Do you believe they should have voting rights in Iowa?

I believe everyone should have voting rights, every eligible US citizen. That includes if you’re in prison. I’ve worked for 15 years trying to get everyone to vote, and it would include those people as well. I want everyone engaged in the voting process, because I think there’s a better chance the supporters of the loser will accept the result if we have a high voter turnout. So, why not have a high voter turnout so that it’s really a democratic result?

Isn’t that wishful thinking, given the demonstrated willingness of so many people in positions of power, up to and including the former president, to say that if they don’t win, an election was rigged?

It takes good people that are being silenced to stand up to the election deniers. Educated people who should know right and wrong are standing on the sidelines and not saying anything. So, is it wishful thinking? Well, a wish is just a goal without a timeline. We need to put a deadline on these things. That’s why I’m running. I cannot stand on the sideline and not say something about what’s happening to our elections in Iowa.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The post Iowa Secretary of State Candidate Vows to Fight New Barriers to Voting appeared first on Bolts.