What if Brad Raffensperger had followed Donald Trump’s orders? As his bid to hang onto power following his election loss last year grew desperate, Trump urged the Georgia secretary of state to “find” enough votes to edge out Joe Biden. Raffensperger, a Republican, refused. Even so, Trump managed to bring democracy to the brink, eroding trust in the process with lies about “fraud” in Georgia and other swing states and instigating an attack on the United States Capitol. It’s hard to say how much worse the crisis may have been had Raffensperger and other election officials gone along with him. But we could soon find out.
On ballots across the country next year, Big Lie proponents are vying to take control of their state election systems—including in Arizona, where the GOP-led Senate authorized a bogus “audit” of the 2020 results that Trump not-so-secretly saw as a springboard for his return to office. In five battleground states where Biden defeated Trump, 15 Republicans have officially declared their candidacy for secretary of state. Of those, according to a Reuters analysis Wednesday, only two acknowledge that Biden won last November’s election. Ten, meanwhile, have either parroted Trump’s claim that Biden stole the election or called for the results in their state to be invalidated. The candidates are not only looking back at the 2020 vote; they’re seeking to build on the lies and conspiracy theories to usher in anti-democratic changes to how their states run elections. In short, they’re using false claims of a “rigged” election to try to rig elections. “That is ‘code red’ for democracy,” Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, chair of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, told Reuters.
Raffensperger, the only incumbent of the bunch, deserves credit for doing his job in spite of pressure from Trump and his allies. His refusal to cave has resulted in death threats to him and his family and political attacks from the MAGA world that once supported him. In the grand scheme of things, however, Raffensperger is more part of the problem than he is part of the solution. Last week, following a derisory written request from Trump that he be declared the “true winner” of the 2020 election, Raffensperger defended changes to the voting system that Republicans have ushered in on the basis of Trump’s conspiracies, telling MSNBC’s Chris Hayes that such laws address the “lack of confidence” that has been sowed in the democratic process. As Hayes replied, though, “The confidence was taken away by lies.”
“You can’t point to the misinformation and rebuilding confidence as a justification for substantive changes if those were lies being told that eroded the confidence,” Hayes continued.
A quieter, more polite threat to ballot access is still a threat. But most of the other Republicans campaigning for secretary of state posts are even worse. Virtually all of them share the same complaints about mail-in ballots, drop boxes, and other measures that make it easier to vote. Some are more or less running on an anti-democracy platform: Arizona State Representative Shawnna Bolick, a candidate to replace Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, called on Congress to throw out her state’s election results and award its 11 electoral college votes to Trump; when that failed, she introduced a law that would allow the state legislature to reject election results before an inauguration (that bill also failed). Bolick isn’t even the most extreme secretary of state aspirant in Arizona. That title goes to Mark Finchem, who was endorsed by Trump this month. A state representative, Finchem is a QAnon adherent with involvement in several far-right extremist groups, including the Oath Keepers anti-government militia group, and was present at the January 6 storming of the Capitol—an attack he later said was the fault of the left. Trump praised the fringe lawmaker for his “incredibly powerful stance on the Voter Fraud that took place in the 2020 Presidential Election Scam.”
Finchem is not an outlier. In Georgia, Congressman Jody Hice is running a primary campaign for secretary of state against Raffensperger. Hice spoke at the rally that preceded the January 6 riot, voted against certifying the election results following the siege, and continues to promote Trump’s baseless conspiracies. Unsurprisingly, Trump has endorsed his bid to replace Raffensperger, calling Hice “one of our most outstanding Congressmen.” “Unlike the current Georgia Secretary of State, Jody leads out front with integrity,” Trump said in a statement earlier this year. “Jody will stop the Fraud and get honesty into our Elections!”
The focus on these positions, particularly in the battlegrounds of Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Wisconsin, and Michigan, is perhaps the most dangerous of the Trump GOP’s various, intersecting election schemes. It may be possible for Democrats to dodge obstacles to the ballot box, but what happens if the person in charge of the process is a hyper-partisan Trump loyalist who has publicly supported efforts to nullify legitimate votes? This is not merely a thought experiment, though the political media has sometimes treated it as such. John Eastman, one of the lawyers who sought to overturn the election for Trump, directly laid out a plan in his “January 6 scenario” memo to overthrow the democratic process by having seven states toss their results and Mike Pence declare Trump the winner based on the tally of the remaining 43. The idea was apparently taken seriously by some of the most powerful people in the country; perhaps all they needed was more willing participants among those overseeing the process.
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