One leading candidate seeking to become Georgia’s chief elections official, Republican Jody Hice, is a congressman who voted to overturn democrat Joe Biden's 2020 presidential win in the hours after the January 6th riots at the US Capitol. Hice had posted on social media earlier that day: “This is our 1776 moment,” referencing the American Revolution.
In Arizona, the contenders for the elections-chief office, secretary of state, include Republican state lawmaker Mark Finchem, who attended the ‘Stop the Steal’ rally before the deadly insurrection and spoke at a similar gathering the previous day. In Nevada, one strong Republican candidate for elections chief is Jim Marchant, who unsuccessfully sued to have his own defeat in a 2020 congressional race reversed based on unfounded voter-fraud claims.
The three candidates are part of a wider group of Republican secretary-of-state contenders in America’s swing states who have embraced former president Donald Trump's false claims that he lost a “rigged” election. Their candidacies have alarmed Democrats and voting-rights groups, who fear that the politicians who tried hardest to undermine Americans’ faith in elections last year may soon be the ones running them - or deciding them, in future contested votes.
Secretary-of-state candidates face primary elections next spring and summer and general elections on November 8th 2022, along with the midterm congressional contests.
2020 election claims
Reuters interviewed nine of the 15 declared Republican candidates for secretary of state in five battleground states - Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada - and reviewed public statements by all the candidates. Ten of the 15 have either declared that the 2020 election was stolen or called for their state’s results to be invalidated or further investigated.
Only two of the nine candidates Reuters interviewed said that Biden won the election.
The group of 15 includes Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state and the only incumbent Republican in the five battleground states who is seeking re-election. Raffensperger has consistently rejected Trump’s stolen-election allegations in the face of intense pressure from many fellow Republicans to overturn Biden’s win in the state.
Nearly all the Republican contenders have stressed a need to curb mail-in voting, to limit ballot drop boxes and to take other steps to curtail ballot access. A majority said they backed a Republican push for more audits or other investigations of the 2020 vote, despite dozens of audits, recounts and court rulings that confirmed Biden’s victory.
Democrats and nonpartisan election experts say it appears that Trump allies - having been foiled in their attempt to reverse Biden’s victory - are now trying to make it easier to overturn future results.
The Republican secretary-of-state candidates are part of a much larger party effort to exert more control over election administration following Trump’s false fraud claims. At least 18 Republican-led states have passed voting restrictions they say are intended to ensure election integrity. Democrats argue such measures are intended to suppress voting because Republicans fare better in low-turnout elections.
Campaign donations pour in
Secretaries of state oversee elections in most US states and have significant power over how votes are cast, counted and certified. They typically approve vote tallies in individual counties and the overall presidential results.
In normal times, most voters might struggle to name their secretary of state or detail their election-oversight duties. But these once-overlooked races are drawing far more attention and money this year from both parties, according to interviews with party officials and a Reuters review of political fundraising records.
Campaign finance reports from Georgia and Michigan show donors from both parties piling aggressively into their races early in the cycle. Georgia candidates raised $1.8 million (€1.5 million) between February and June - nearly four times what was raised in the same period of 2017 ahead of the last Georgia secretary-of-state election in 2018, according to campaign finance disclosures.
Democrats say they are just as energised to win secretary-of-state races. The party’s fundraising arm for those campaigns, chaired by Griswold, has raised $1.1 million in the first six months of 2021, according to filings with the US Treasury Department. Griswold said they aim to raise at least $10 million before the election.
Trump endorsements
Trump last week endorsed Mark Finchem for Arizona secretary of state, praising his “powerful stance on the massive voter fraud". The state lawmaker is now seen as a favourite in the Republican primary. Finchem declined an interview request.
In addition to promoting voter-fraud claims and calling for Arizona to decertify Biden’s win, Finchem has expressed views linked to the QAnon conspiracy theory, which casts Trump as a saviour figure and elite Democrats as a cabal of Satan-worshipping paedophiles and cannibals.
In Nevada, Jim Marchant said he expects to get Trump’s endorsement. Trump endorsed Marchant when he ran unsuccessfully last year for Congress. If elected secretary of state, Marchant said, he would seek to end all early voting and ban the use of voting machines temporarily while the devices are examined for evidence of election-rigging.
Marchant could not provide evidence of fraud in Nevada when asked for it in an interview.
In Wisconsin, businessman and secretary of state candidate Jay Schroeder is considered the frontrunner for the Republican nomination. He said in an interview that "there is lots of reasonable doubt" as to whether Biden won the election.
The secretary of state in Wisconsin, unlike most other states, does not oversee elections. Schroeder is campaigning to change that: He advocates for stripping election oversight power from the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission and giving it back to the secretary of state, which controlled elections until a decade ago.
Georgia races to test Trump's clout
Georgia is shaping up to be a key 2022 battleground, with competitive Senate, governor and secretary-of-state races next year. These elections will be a major test of whether Republicans who crossed Trump can survive primaries - and whether those who backed his election-fraud falsehoods can win general elections against Democrats.
With Trump's support, Hice is seen as the front-runner in Georgia's Republican nominating contest. Hice has raised $580,000 between February and June, more than doubling Raffensperger's haul of $249,000, according to campaign finance disclosures.
It’s highly unusual for a former US president to endorse secretary-of-state candidates. “President Trump is proud to endorse candidates who fight for election integrity,” said Liz Harrington, a Trump spokeswoman.
Hice has been among the most strident backers of Trump’s baseless stolen-election claims. In the hours after the January 6th riots, Hice was among 147 Republican members of Congress who voted against certifying Biden’s election win in at least one of two states that came up for a vote.
Multiple recounts and audits have confirmed Biden won Georgia by about 12,000 votes. Raffensperger has repeatedly described the November election as secure and told Reuters in a recent interview that Trump’s surrogates don’t have the facts to support their allegations.
Since the vote, Raffensperger and his family have been inundated with threats of violence, causing them to go into hiding at one point and to take other precautions, including starting their car remotely to guard against bombs, the Reuters investigations revealed. - Reuters
