Kira Lerner, Michigan Advance

SAN LUIS, ARIZONA – The small city of San Luis is tucked away in the far corner of Arizona, closer to Mexico than to any major U.S. city. The community is nearly 95% Latino and tight-knit — the type of place where you know your neighbors and their parents and cousins.

It’s not uncommon here for residents to frequently cross the border into Mexico to go shopping or see a dentist, as the vast majority of residents are U.S. citizens who can go back and forth freely. And they do not take their right to vote in the U.S. for granted. Election Days in San Luis were typically joyous occasions, with music and celebrations in the streets.

Luis Marquez, the president of the local school district and a community leader in San Luis, said they felt “like a state fair.”

“Everybody would get involved, people would have their carne asada and music and it was just something very active,” he said.

But election celebrations have stopped here in recent years. A 2016 law pushed by state Republicans made it a felony punishable by prison time to collect a voter’s ballot unless the collector is their relative, household member, or caregiver. Since then, the excitement and joy surrounding voting have been replaced with fear. “Now, it’s been really quiet,” Marquez said. “There’s no action.”

In some states, there’s no prohibition on collecting ballots from other community members, a common occurrence in places where residents have limited access to polls. But Arizona is one of more than 30 states that restrict or ban the practice.

The law was signed in 2016 and upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2021 after it was challenged in the lower courts. Since then, the Arizona attorney general’s office has prosecuted four community members, including the city’s former mayor, Guillermina Fuentes, who was jailed for 30 days, for alleged unlawful ballot collection.

Allies of former President Donald Trump say these arrests are indicative of the type of voter fraud that cost him the 2020 election. But democracy advocates say prosecuting these cases suppresses the right to vote.

“This is what opponents of the ballot collection law always feared – the arbitrary enforcement of the law against people of color, women of color, without any kind of evidence of any type of fraud or intent to do wrongdoing,” said Darrell Hill, policy director for the ACLU of Arizona. “These are people who are just helping their neighbors, helping their community, and are now facing serious charges.”

On Oct. 13, Fuentes, a 66-year-old grandmother, former farmworker, school board member, and local Democratic leader, was sentenced to one month in jail and two years of probation for collecting four completed mail ballots that belonged to community members during the August 2020 primary. Fuentes and her neighbor, Alma Juarez, were the first people prosecuted under the state’s ballot collection law.

Her prosecution by the office of former Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, who was running for U.S. Senate throughout much of the legal proceeding, became fodder for conspiracy theorists and the right-wing elections group True The Vote, which publicized the case nationally.

In an interview after she was released from jail, Fuentes described the initial shock of her indictment. At the time of her offense, Brnovich’s office had petitioned the Supreme Court to hear a case focused on the law, and there were legal questions about whether it was constitutional.

“When I was about to go to jail, I was so sad and frustrated, and I couldn’t believe that I was going, because I see it like a witch hunt,” she said. Brnovich, who is no longer in office, could not be reached for comment and Todd Lawson, the prosecutor with the attorney general’s office who worked on the case, did not respond to a request for comment.

On Oct. 19, Brnovich announced two more indictments against women in the Democratic-leaning town within a county that voted for Trump by 6 points in 2020. The attorney general’s office alleges that the women collected eight ballots between them.

Fuentes’ daughter, Lizette Esparza, said she wakes up each morning in fear of how conspiracy theorists will talk about her family on social media.

“We’re living in a nightmare right now,” said Esparza, who serves as the superintendent of the local elementary school district. She also worries about how her mom’s ordeal will affect the community. “They’re not going to want to go to vote, especially now because now they’re scared.”

Casting ballots in San Luis

Like a town square, the San Luis post office is a major hub of this border community. During business hours, cars steadily stream through the parking lot as residents, on their way to or from work or school pick-up, run inside to check their P.O. boxes.

San Luis doesn’t have home mail delivery. The city spans roughly 34 square miles, and it’s not uncommon for people to pick up mail for friends and neighbors, who may share P.O. boxes. The community is poor, with an average per capita income of just over $15,000. Many residents don’t have their own vehicles and there’s very limited public transportation.

Casting a ballot in-person can be difficult for people in San Luis. Like Fuentes, who dropped out of high school after 10th grade to join her parents and siblings planting and harvesting lettuce crops in Arizona and California, many San Luis residents are farmworkers who speak little English and spend long hours in the fields.

“They leave at 5 in the morning and come back at 7 or 8 at night,” Esparza explained. “When in the day are they going to have to go and vote?”

Arizona has permitted no-excuse voting by mail for more than 30 years. And before the ballot collection law was passed, it was not uncommon for residents of San Luis to rely on friends, neighbors, or volunteers to help bring their ballots to the post office or to help return them to a voting center or dropbox.

San Luis residents interviewed explained that they consider many in the community who are not blood relatives, like neighbors and close friends, their family. Limiting ballot collection to just family members, household members, and caregivers doesn’t make sense, they said.

“People who enacted this law are people who don’t want people in San Luis and Native communities to vote,” said Anne Chapman, Fuentes’ attorney. “That’s what this is about.”

GOP restrictions on voting

The Republican Party’s effort to restrict certain groups of people from voting has taken many forms over the last decade since the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act.

One of them is placing limits on ballot collection, or as Republican lawmakers pejoratively call it, “ballot harvesting.” Republican officials justify the laws by claiming that an individual or organization could pressure a voter to vote in a certain way if they return a ballot on their behalf.

“The intent behind the bill is to make sure that we have integrity in our electoral process, that there is a chain of custody when it comes to mail-in ballots,” said then-state Sen. Michelle Ugenti-Rita, who sponsored Arizona’s law when she was a state representative. Ballot collection, she said, “is ripe for a lot of things to go wrong.”

Arizona’s law, passed by the legislature in 2016, faced a lengthy legal challenge. Democratic groups sued, and in 2018, a federal district court sided with Arizona after a trial. But Democrats appealed to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which struck the law down, finding that it violates the Voting Rights Act by discriminating against minority voters.

Republican lawmakers, the court found, passed it with the intention of suppressing the votes of Native American, Hispanic and Black voters, who often face issues with mail service and access to transportation and who are more likely to rely on the assistance of third parties to return their ballots.

Brnovich appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which upheld the law in a 6-3 ruling in July 2021 that had major implications for voting rights across the country. In a dissent, Justice Elena Kagan lamented how the majority opinion further weakens the Voting Rights Act.

“What is tragic here is that the Court has (yet again) rewritten — in order to weaken — a statute that stands as a monument to America’s greatness, and protects against its basest impulses,” she wrote. “What is tragic is that the Court has damaged a statute designed to bring about ‘the end of discrimination in voting.’”

On Aug. 4, 2020, the day of Arizona’s primary election, the law was still relatively new and was still being litigated in the courts. Fuentes was stationed outside a local cultural center to support city council candidates and hand out campaign literature. At one point during the day, Fuentes’ neighbor, Juarez, approached her and handed her a ballot.

What Fuentes didn’t realize was that Gary Snyder, a local Republican, was recording cell phone video outside the polling place. In the 2020 primary, Snyder was running for city council as a write-in candidate and in 2022 he would run for state Senate. Both attempts were unsuccessful.

He shared the footage with David Lara, another local Republican who had unsuccessfully run for office numerous times in San Luis. In an interview, Lara and Snyder said the footage showed the type of voter fraud that has swung elections in San Luis for decades.

“If there would have been 10 Gary Snyders with cameras, we would have caught many people doing the same thing all throughout the day,” Lara said.

“Out of 10 elections in San Luis, eight or nine have been won because of fraud,” he added.

In the video recorded by Snyder, Fuentes appears to write something on the ballot and then hands Juarez a stack of ballots to bring into the polling place. The interaction was the type of voter assistance Fuentes had provided for countless other community members. Yuma County officials later verified that the voters signed their own ballot envelopes, and the ballots were counted.

The Yuma County Sheriff’s Office and the state attorney general’s office eventually learned of the footage, and Brnovich’s Election Integrity Unit launched an investigation. People in San Luis reported that uniformed sheriff’s deputies knocked on their doors early in the morning to ask about their voting history, which alarmed many residents, according to a brief filed by Arizona voting rights groups in the Supreme Court case.

Prosecutors charged Fuentes with conspiracy, forgery, and two counts of ballot abuse. In court documents, the state said Fuentes “appears to have been caught on video running a modern-day political machine seeking to influence the outcome of the municipal election in San Luis, collecting votes through illegal methods, and then using another person to bring the ballots the last few yards into the ballot box.” She pleaded guilty to one count of ballot abuse, a felony, and the state dropped the more serious charges.

Lara and Snyder said that Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips, the leaders of True the Vote — a far-right group that has promoted conspiracy theories about voter fraud — reached out to them. The claims of ballot harvesting in San Luis became a crucial component of “2000 Mules,” a documentary directed by right-wing filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza in May 2022 which falsely claimed that voter fraud, specifically a significant amount of ballot harvesting by so-called “ballot mules,” swung the results of the 2020 election.

“They’re the ones that actually helped us to make this problem national,” Lara said in an interview.

But many in San Luis said they don’t trust Lara and Snyder, whom they described as disgruntled former candidates for office who are trying to discredit Democrats. Yuma County Supervisor Lynne Pancrazi said she is upset by the national reputation they’ve attached to San Luis. They “are giving such a bad name to this community,” she said.

Fuentes jailed, held in isolation

Across San Luis in mid-October, people who know Fuentes appeared shocked that their friend and former mayor was two dozen miles away in Yuma, Arizona, jailed and held in isolation for a month either because of her age and health or her position as a public figure. Chapman said the jail has given different explanations for why she was held in a cell alone.

Soaking in the October sun outside the San Luis library, Pancrazi, who served as a character witness at a hearing prior to Fuentes’ sentencing, described Fuentes’ quiet but caring demeanor.

“She’s not a criminal,” Pancrazi said. “She’s someone who was helping her community just like she’s done her entire life.”

Manuel Castro, a pastor at the Gethsemane Baptist Church in San Luis, agreed. “It’s too much punishment for people doing a little mistake,” he said. “In my opinion, it’s a little mistake.”

The harsh sentence will also help conservatives “further the narrative that there is actual fraud in our elections, which there was no evidence of here,” said Andy Gaona, a Phoenix-based election lawyer who represented Fuentes in a special action petition with a state appeals court.

San Luis residents also lamented the inequities in voter fraud prosecution. Brnovich’s office requested a year in prison for Fuentes, and while the judge only sentenced her to a month in jail plus two years’ probation, even that is inconsistent with the sentences others have received for similar crimes.

Chapman commissioned a report from Rich Robertson, a legal investigator and former journalist, to put the state’s recommended sentence into perspective.

Robertson’s report detailed 79 prosecutions for voting crimes in Arizona between 2005 and August 2022. In general, he found that, other than Fuentes, people without a prior criminal history or who are not already imprisoned do not receive jail or prison time for voting crimes.

“Nobody goes to jail or prison for this stuff, unless they’ve already had some kind of priors,” Robertson said. He found two exceptions: One person who received a suspended sentence, and another was also convicted of influencing a witness and not just a voting crime.

In one notable example included in Robertson’s report, Brnovich’s office requested a lighter sentence for Tracey Kay McKee, a 64-year-old Republican white woman in the more affluent city of Scottsdale, Arizona, who pleaded guilty to casting a ballot in her dead mother’s name. She was sentenced in April to two years of probation and no jail time.

Juarez, who carried the voted ballots into the polling place, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and was sentenced to one year of probation and no jail time.

Robertson said he believes there were “a lot of political aspects” to this prosecution and that Fuentes was given a harsher sentence because of the national attention and her prominence as a target in the far-right “Stop the Steal” campaign.

“There was a lot of political pressure being exerted all over the place to make an example out of this particular defendant,” he said. “If it hadn’t been for the national spotlight being on Yuma County and Ms. Fuentes, I don’t think this outcome would have been the same.”

Norm Eisen, a longtime election lawyer who advised the Obama White House on ethics and government reform, called Fuentes’ sentence an “outrageous miscarriage of justice.”

“The relatively narrow conduct that formed the basis of the sentencing should not result in jail time and indeed in the vast majority of the United States, would not do so,” he said.

He called Brnovich’s sentencing request “a tragic and a cruel posture,” especially in “a smaller community where this kind of a sentencing has a chilling effect, even on legal behavior.”

At a hearing in October, Fuentes’ attorneys presented a number of character witnesses who spoke about her childhood, her work growing a business, and her position as a leader in the community. But at Fuentes’ sentencing hearing, Yuma County Superior Court Judge Roger Nelson said he does not believe she accepted responsibility for her crime and that her role as a community leader, although admirable, actually works against her.

“Many of the things that were put forward as mitigating factors, I think they’re also aggravating factors,” he said. “You have been a leader in the San Luis community for a long time. People look up to you, people respect you, and they look to what you do.”

Life after jail

Fuentes was released from jail in November and is now back in the community on probation, coming to terms with having lost her voting rights for the next two years because of her felony conviction. She said she already knows of San Luis residents who have stopped voting after seeing what she went through.

“I say don’t be afraid,” she said, explaining what she tells her friends and neighbors in San Luis. “And they say, because you weren’t afraid, you were in jail, Guilla.”

Fuentes said that the San Luis community stood behind her throughout the legal process, showing up to support her and her family when she was at her lowest. The day she was released from jail, her family and friends gathered at her mom’s house. She walked in and saw the large crowd holding signs and two big pots of menudo, a traditional Mexican soup, that she had requested as her first meal back.

It was just what she needed — to be around friends and a home cooked meal after spending a month in isolation. “I lost 10 pounds in jail and I gained them back the day I left,” she said.

When Brnovich announced indictments of two more women — San Luis City Council Member Gloria Torres and Nadia Lizarraga-Mayorquin — in October for allegedly collecting other people’s ballots, Marquez said he feared that more people would face jail time. A representative for Kris Mayes, Arizona’s newly elected Democratic attorney general, said the office is still undecided on how it will handle their prosecutions, but Mayes has said she will transition the office’s Election Integrity Unit from prosecuting voter fraud to protecting voting rights.

Democrats in the Arizona House introduced a bill this session to repeal the ballot collection ban, but it’s unlikely to move forward given the Republican majority.

“It’s starting again for other people,” Castro said. “It never ends. It’s never finished. It’s so hard for the community, really. It’s so hard.”

Ohio Capital Journal is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David DeWitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com. Follow Ohio Capital Journal on Facebook and Twitter.

This story was produced in partnership with Type Investigations, with support from the Fund for Constitutional Government.

Nebraska Examiner is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Nebraska Examiner maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Cate Folsom for questions: info@nebraskaexaminer.com. Follow Nebraska Examiner on Facebook and Twitter.

Several prominent Republican candidates who denied the results of the 2020 election lost their races on Tuesday, but other critical races featuring election deniers have not been called.

Going into Election Day, election deniers were on the ballot in around half of the races for governor and secretary of state and one-third of the races for attorney general, according to States United for Democracy. All three statewide positions play critical roles in overseeing elections.

While election deniers have so far fared better in races for the U.S. House, aligning with former President Donald Trump and denying election results did not prove to be a good electoral strategy for statewide races to control elections. Election deniers so far have lost races for governor in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania and races for secretary of state in Michigan, Minnesota and New Mexico.

Both Florida and Ohio shifted to the right on Tuesday, and election deniers rode that wave to victory in races for U.S. Senate in Ohio with the election of J.D. Vance and attorney general in both states.

But for the most part, election deniers fared worse than polls predicted, which will likely leave the Republican Party at a juncture where it must decide if aligning with Trump’s claims is an advantageous strategy moving into 2024.

Secretary of state

While two critical races for secretary of state in Nevada and Arizona have not been called as of Wednesday morning, some election-denying candidates for chief election official lost their races on Tuesday.

In Michigan, incumbent Democrat Jocelyn Benson beat Republican Kristina Karamo, a community college professor who worked the polls in 2020 and claimed the election was fraudulent. She alleged without evidence that votes were incorrectly counted for Joe Biden and that “thousands” of ballots were dropped off in the middle of the night.

“In this election, democracy was on the ballot. Our right to vote was on the ballot. And tonight, democracy won here in Michigan,” Benson said in a statement, according to the Michigan Advance. “Michiganders showed the world that Michigan voters will vote for truth over lies. They will vote for facts over conspiracy theories.”

In her statement, Benson also said that “conspiracy theorists and election deniers” aren’t going away but she “will not back down.”

For her part, Karamo shared baseless allegations throughout the night that some Michigan counties were not abiding by state election law and that at least one election official in Ann Arbor was “engaging in mass election crimes.”

Governor

Several prominent election-denying gubernatorial candidates also fared poorly on Tuesday. In Wisconsin, Tim Michels lost to Democratic incumbent Tony Evers after Michels said he would consider legislation to decertify the 2020 election results.

In Michigan, incumbent Gretchen Whitmer declared victory over Republican Tudor Dixon. Dixon has said she believes that Trump legitimately won the 2020 election in Michigan.

And in Pennsylvania, election denier Doug Mastriano also lost his race to Democrat Josh Shapiro. Mastriano was at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 and helped thousands of others come to the event. He had said that his pick for the state’s secretary of state position, which is chosen in Pennsylvania by the governor, would require everyone to “re-register” to vote, a requirement that would violate the National Voter Registration.

Louisiana Illuminator is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Louisiana Illuminator maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Greg LaRose for questions: info@lailluminator.com. Follow Louisiana Illuminator on Facebook and Twitter.

In counties that did experience problems, which were typical of any Election Day, the incidents were largely attributed to faulty technology and human error.

In Maricopa County, Arizona, one of the nation’s largest voting jurisdictions in a critical battleground state, election workers Tuesday morning reported issues with ballot tabulators at about 20 percent of vote centers. Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chairman Bill Gates said at a news conference that the affected machines were rejecting about one ballot out of every five ballots inserted, according to Votebeat.

Officials did not initially know what was causing the issue, but technicians were dispatched to fix it. Around 2 p.m. Mountain time, Maricopa County reported that technicians changed the tabulator printer settings to produce darker markings, which resolved this issue at a number of locations.

Gates stressed that the issue was not a sign of fraud and that nobody was being disenfranchised.

Nonetheless, misinformation proliferated about the tabulator issues online. Blake Masters, GOP candidate for U.S. Senate, hinted at potential fraud on Twitter. “Hard to know if we’re seeing incompetence or something worse,” he wrote. “All we know right now is that the Democrats are hoping you will get discouraged and go home.”

Kelli Ward, the chairwoman of the Arizona Republican Party and a fake elector, wrote on Twitter that the county is “forcing poll workers to coerce voters to put their ballot in a box rather than getting it tabulated on site. Or they’re fired!”

In reality, officials reiterated that voters have a number of options when they encounter a malfunctioning tabulator, including going to another one of the 223 county vote centers or waiting for the functionality to be restored.

In a morning call with reporters, Taylor Moss, the election protection director at the Arizona Democracy Resource Center, said that given the machine glitches, she’s even more concerned that numerous voters have listened to rhetoric from election deniers encouraging them to show up to vote late in the day on Election Day.

“It’s really unfortunate that these bad actors who are spreading lies that mail-in voting isn’t safe and secure have now hurt the people they’ve been speaking to and the people that they have been pushing these lies on,” she said. “A lot of people have come out to vote on Election Day who don’t normally, and now they’re going to have to wait longer because of the higher turnout today intersecting with these ballot tabulation issues.”

Elsewhere, Emily Eby, senior election protection attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project, reported Tuesday morning that some touch screens in Bell County, Texas were also experiencing technical issues, but the issues were resolved by midday. Eby said her group received some reports of intimidation, but couldn’t share details because of confidentiality issues, and the cases were actively being handled Tuesday morning.

Election Protection coalition partners in Florida, Georgia, and Pennsylvania all reported that things were running smoothly and, despite some late polling place openings and other minor issues, nothing was atypical of a midterm Election Day.

In Nebraska, a piece of machinery hit a tree outside a voting site in Otoe County Tuesday morning, causing a power outage that didn’t disrupt voting, according to the Nebraska Examiner. A small number of voters were also given only the first page of a two-page ballot, but otherwise officials reported things were going smoothly.

Early and absentee voting

Heading into Election Day, voting advocates were concerned that in three critical battleground states — Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin — Republican officials and candidates were pushing to disqualify thousands of mail-in ballots.

In Pennsylvania, the state Supreme Court sided with the Republican National Committee and ruled that election officials can’t count ballots if the voter didn’t put a date on the envelope, even if the ballot arrived before Election Day. Democratic U.S. Senate candidate John Fetterman, several voters and Democratic groups filed a federal lawsuit challenging the plan to not count the ballots.

Similarly, in Wisconsin, a court sided with Republicans seeking to block ballots from being counted if they lack a witness address.

But in Michigan, a judge on Monday rejected Republican secretary of state candidate Kristina Karamo’s effort to disqualify absentee voters in Detroit and to force them to vote in person. Karamo claimed, without evidence, that voter fraud compromised the absentee voting process.

“Such harm to the citizens of the city of Detroit, and by extension the citizens of the state of Michigan, is not only unprecedented, it is intolerable,” Wayne County Circuit Court Judge Timothy Kenny wrote in his opinion, according to Michigan Advance.

During early voting, some minor issues were attributed to human error and staffing. In Cobb County, Georgia, over 1,000 voters were not mailed an absentee ballot who should have received them. As a solution, a court agreed to extend the deadline for the receipt of their ballots to Nov. 14, as long as they are postmarked by Election Day.

Cobb County Election Director Janine Eveler said that the ballots were not sent out due to human error, explaining to reporters that 38 percent of the staff are new to their jobs.

“I am sorry that this office let these voters down,” Eveler said in a message to the Board of Elections and Registration. “Many of the absentee staff have been averaging 80 or more hours per week, and they are exhausted. Still, that is no excuse for such a critical error.”

Missouri Independent is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Missouri Independent maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jason Hancock for questions: info@missouriindependent.com. Follow Missouri Independent on Facebook and Twitter.

A close ally of Republican Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano has a plan that she claims will help win him the election and prevent voter fraud: She wants voters to cast their ballots “as late in the day as possible” on Election Day.

Louisiana Illuminator is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Louisiana Illuminator maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Greg LaRose for questions: info@lailluminator.com. Follow Louisiana Illuminator on Facebook and Twitter.

Louisiana Illuminator is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Louisiana Illuminator maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Greg LaRose for questions: info@lailluminator.com. Follow Louisiana Illuminator on Facebook and Twitter.

Nye County, a rural enclave in Nevada, has positioned itself as the epicenter of a Donald Trump-fueled conspiracy about the security of electronic vote tabulators.

The Nye County Commission voted in March to make the county one of the first to act on the false narratives that machines that count votes are rigged. County Clerk Mark Kampf, who has falsely claimed that Trump won the 2020 election, has said that volunteer voters there will hand count the roughly 30,000 ballots expected in the November election.

Across the country, Republicans aligned with Trump have directed ire at electronic voting machines, with Republicans in at least six states introducing legislation this year to ban the use of ballot tabulators (Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, New Hampshire, Washington and West Virginia). Over 90 percent of U.S. election jurisdictions currently use electronic tabulators, with only the smallest counties opting to count votes by hand.

Many of the conspiracies around voting machines after the 2020 election centered on technology from Dominion Voting Systems. Lawyers for Trump claimed with no basis that Dominion employees worked with outside groups, liberal donor George Soros, and Venezuela to steal the presidential contest from Trump. Dominion has filed several defamation lawsuits against those who peddled the conspiracies.

Voting experts say that using hand counting as the default method to count ballots, which requires that all voters cast paper ballots, is incredibly expensive, burdensome, and time-consuming.

“This is totally unnecessary,” said Jonathan Diaz, senior legal counsel with the Campaign Legal Center. “There is no evidence or reason to suggest that ballot tabulators don’t work.”

In fact, research shows that vote tabulators are more accurate than hand counts, which allow for a vast amount of human error, especially when the people counting ballots are overworked and tired around an election.

Tabulators are typically certified by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission and jurisdictions almost always test them before an election to ensure their functionality and accuracy. Jurisdictions often hand count smaller groups of ballots after a tabulator is used to verify the accuracy of results.

Tabulators also allow for accessibility features to assist voters with disabilities who cannot hand mark a paper ballot.

The Bipartisan Policy Center, a think tank that uses ideas from both parties, recommends pairing machine tabulators with an audit of paper ballots. “This balance minimizes the potential for human error during vote counting while maintaining a strong system of manual error-checking to unearth discrepancies that may arise during tabulation,” they write in an explainer.

Diaz said he suspects that those pushing for hand counting aren’t actually concerned with the security of tabulators.

“I don’t think that the push for hand counting paper ballots is really motivated by concerns about accuracy or technology,” he said. “I think it’s actually just an attempt to slow down the process and inject more confusion and make things more difficult for election workers.”

Nye County

To hand count all of its ballots, Nye County plans to have teams of three people look at batches of 50 ballots. Kampf said he has already enlisted 57 volunteers to help with the process, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Kampf did not respond to a request for an interview.

While Nye County will hand count its ballots this year, it’ll also tabulate its votes with electronic machines. Officials have said the goal is to eliminate the use of machines for future elections, but using both methods this year allows the county to avoid new state regulations for counties that only conduct hand counts.

In late August, Nevada’s secretary of state’s office announced temporary regulations to take effect Oct. 1 for the general election, including a requirement for bipartisan counters. Nevada law doesn’t outlaw hand counting and the office wanted to be prepared if more counties decide to switch.

Voting experts said hand counting shouldn’t be permitted, and therefore does not need to be regulated. In testimony submitted to Mark Wlaschin, deputy secretary for elections, the Campaign Legal Center explained why hand counting ballots would help neither accuracy nor speed.

“A hand counting requirement would not only delay the reporting of results, but would also be severely disruptive to county officials’ ability to fulfill their critical responsibility to conduct the election securely and accurately,” attorney Julie Hochsztein wrote.

The Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada filed a lawsuit against the state after the regulations were announced, alleging that they deprive Nevadans of their rights to a uniform, statewide standard for counting votes. The group declined to comment on the pending litigation.

“The temporary regulation threatens to unleash electoral chaos,” the complaint says, noting that “votes cast in different counties, different precincts, or different contests may be counted very differently.”

Current Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske is term-limited. Jim Marchant, an election denier who is the Republican nominee to replace her, has been one of the most vocal forces behind the state’s push to institute hand counting. He has said that if elected, he would ditch electronic vote machines.

Democrat Cisco Aguilar, who is facing Marchant in November, told States Newsroom that he worries about the future of elections in Nevada if Marchant wins.

“What he’s doing is irresponsible and dangerous,” Aguilar said. “He’s not a serious leader but the threat he represents is extremely serious.”

Esmeralda County in Nevada has also switched to hand counting, but the county is the least populous in the state with just 1,030 residents in 2020, according to U.S. Census data. Still, it took the county more than seven hours in the June primary to count 317 ballots.

At that rate, it would have taken Clark County, Nevada’s most populous county, 6,375 hours, or more than 265 days, to hand count the 288,683 ballots cast in its June primary. Larger counties could no doubt devote more staff, volunteers, and resources to counting, but the process would undoubtedly require the county to miss the vote certification deadline.

The longer the public has to wait for election results, the more time candidates have to sow distrust in the results and for false theories and information to spread.

Outside Nevada

In Arizona, Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake and secretary of state candidate Mark Finchem, both of whom have said that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, filed a lawsuit with unfounded allegations about the security of electronic vote tabulators and seeking the hand counting of ballots.

They claimed that the lawsuit wasn’t aimed at invalidating the 2020 election results—Cyber Ninjas, which conducted an audit of the vote in Maricopa County, conducted a hand count and found that Joe Biden actually won by more votes than the official margin—but instead about future elections.

In response to the lawsuit, election administrators testified that hand counting would be extremely expensive and require immense manpower. They also said that electronic voting machines aren’t connected to the internet, and can’t be hacked. A judge dismissed the suit in August, and Lake and Finchem have appealed that ruling.

If Lake and Finchem win in November, they’ll be in a position to change how the state counts its ballots. Arizona law does not require the use of electronic vote counting machines. The secretary of state also has the power to decertify machines, so Finchem could do that and refuse to certify new ones.

In New Hampshire, groups opposed to electronic tabulators figured out a way to force election officials in large counties to hand count some ballots in Sept. 13’s primary, despite the widespread use of AccuVote optical scan machines in the state which are not connected to the internet and cannot be hacked.

Conservative-leaning groups shared posts online urging voters to write in candidate names, even if the candidate was already printed on the ballot. Ballots with write-in candidates are separated for hand counting.

Secretary of State David Scanlan said the effort slowed down the release of results by hours in some counties.

“It really stresses the system when you have poll workers who have been at it for 12 to 16 hours now having to count all these ballots at the end of the night,” Scanlan told a local reporter with the Keene Sentinel. “It probably increases the chances for errors.”

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Finchem has said that if elected the state’s chief election official, he would ban early voting, move away from electronic vote counting, and allow state legislators to be able to reject election results. But he’s offered little rationale or explanation for his extreme proposals.

“He needs to explain himself and he’s not doing it,” Fontes said. “All he does is throw out these crazy theories, these crazy ideas, and nobody is asking him why.”

Much of Fontes’ frustration stems from the fact that he is not running in a typical race for Arizona’s top election official. Finchem isn’t a traditional Republican who might propose restrictions on voting, but would come to the campaign with explanations for why he believes his policies would protect the integrity of elections.

Instead, Fontes is running against someone who has said without evidence that the 2020 election was rigged and who marched on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

Election deniers are running for secretary of state in five critical states across the country, and the Democrats challenging them in November say their campaigns have taken on increased importance.

As Fontes put it, “It’s a great deal of pressure knowing you’re running in a political contest to save the republic.”

The stakes are just as high in Nevada, where Democrat Cisco Aguilar is looking to defeat Jim Marchant, an election denier who has parroted former President Donald Trump’s voter fraud conspiracies. In Michigan, New Mexico, and Minnesota, incumbent Democratic secretaries of state are seeking reelection against GOP candidates who have said that the 2020 election was not legitimate.

Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat who chairs the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, said the Democratic candidates are feeling pressure to defeat “big lie” candidates who support Trump—those who will “suppress the vote, destabilize elections, and push out further lies.”

The association has given unprecedented levels of support to candidates this year, due to the high stakes. Before she became chair in 2019, the group had never had any full-time staff and now it employs six people. It’s also raised close to $20 million so far this cycle compared to a previous all-time high of $1.6 million, according to Griswold.

“We’re doing everything in our power to save democratic institutions,” she said.

“We have Democratic nominees across the country who will stand up for the fundamental right to vote for every eligible Republican, Democratic, and unaffiliated voter, and we’re up against people who are telling us that they will tilt elections away from the American people for their own political, partisan gain.”

Here’s a closer look at how two Democrats are running against election deniers who want to control elections:

Arizona

Fontes, the Maricopa County recorder from 2017 through 2021, won the Democratic primary in August with more than 52 percent of the vote. As county recorder in Arizona’s most populous county, Fontes enacted significant changes to how Maricopa County runs elections, increasing the number of registered voters by almost 500,000 and setting records in 2020 for the number of early ballots cast.

In 2020, nearly 92 percent of Maricopa County voters sent in an early ballot.

Though he lost his bid for reelection, Fontes said he would bring some of the lessons he learned as recorder to the secretary of state’s office.

“I’m just a county election official who knows how to do this stuff and would be best suited to be Arizona’s next secretary of state,” he said.

Fontes said he’s not pleased that Finchem has drawn so much attention to their race by spewing falsehoods about the election system and proposing radical changes to voting procedures.

“Banning ballot by mail when 92 percent of our voters used it in 2020 and 88 percent of primary voters, including almost that many Republican primary voters? It’s a stupid idea,” he said. “I mean these are the people who actually vote, and he wants to force them to stand in line? Come on. That’s just dumb. If that isn’t clear evidence of poor judgment, I don’t know what is.”

Finchem has also called for Fontes’ arrest for rigging the 2020 election, a contest in which Fontes himself lost reelection. “What would the probable cause be?” Fontes asked. “He needs to explain himself.”

Fontes also worries what the future for election administration looks like if those with experience doing the job are pushed away because of threats and harassment and are replaced with people like Finchem who have no experience in elections.

“There’s an active campaign to gut election professionals out of the system by the very people who have no justification for doing it in the first place,” he said. “There’s a systemic brain drain that’s happening all across the United States of America.

Nevada

Cisco Aguilar ran unopposed for the Democratic nomination for Nevada secretary of state and will face Jim Marchant, a former state lawmaker, in November. Aguilar is an attorney who has worked for former Democratic U.S. Sen. Harry Reid and served on the Nevada Athletic Commission.

His first foray into electoral politics has not been an easy one. Aguilar said he lays awake at night worrying about the future of Nevada’s elections, given how much is at stake if he were to lose.

“This is not a campaign where you’re looking at a typical Democratic platform or a Republican platform,” he said. “What you’re looking at is the future of Nevada.”

Marchant, like Finchem, has ties to QAnon and continues to claim that Biden did not legitimately win the 2020 election. He also said he would not have certified the election had he been secretary of state at the time.

Marchant has said that if elected, he would get rid of electronic voting machines, vote by mail, and early voting, and would replace electronic vote tabulators with hand counting of paper ballots.

“What he’s doing is irresponsible and dangerous,” Aguilar said. “He’s not a serious leader but the threat he represents is extremely serious.”

Aguilar takes particular issue with Marchant’s desire to eliminate early voting, given the makeup of Nevada voters.

“We are a 24/7 economy,” he said. “When you ask somebody to try to limit their opportunity to vote to a single Tuesday in November between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m., that’s a working shift for many people.”

Aguilar’s campaign has seen an influx in money from both Nevadans and people outside the state concerned about what could happen if Nevada, likely to be a battleground in 2024, has an elections director who believes Trump’s “big lie” he said.

Despite having no primary challengers, Aguilar raised more than $450,000 during the second quarter of this year and reported having significantly more cash available than Marchant.

“People understand the severity of this campaign,” he said. “We have to make sure our elections are secure because not only could we hurt Nevada, we could potentially impact the entire country.”

“That’s what keeps me up at night,” he added. “We cannot allow somebody to put their finger on the scale for the benefit of him and some other individual at the cost of every citizen in the country.”

Pennsylvania Capital-Star is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Pennsylvania Capital-Star maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor John Micek for questions: info@penncapital-star.com. Follow Pennsylvania Capital-Star on Facebook and Twitter.

In Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, Republican primary voters elected a candidate who has denied the results of the 2020 election and believes that voter fraud influenced the results. GOP voters also nominated an election-denying candidate in Maryland, though he has less chance of winning in a blue state.

Many more Republican gubernatorial candidates have questioned whether the 2020 election was legitimate or refused to say that President Joe Biden was the rightful winner. But these five are more vocal election deniers, who would be willing to call for audits or move to decertify results.

If they win in November, they will have less of a direct impact on elections than the six election deniers who are running for secretary of state, a position that’s the chief election official in most states. But the governors’ impact could still be significant.

They will sign or veto legislation governing the administration of elections, which could affect which voters are able to cast ballots and how much financial support counties get to administer elections. Governors can also issue executive orders concerning election administration in emergency situations. And in Pennsylvania, the governor gets to appoint the secretary of state, giving that governor immense power over elections.

Currently, state law determines whether governors play a part in the certification of electoral votes, but in every state, governors are then supposed to transmit those votes to Congress.

If Congress were to pass a bill to modernize the Electoral Count Act to reform how electoral votes are counted, governors could be empowered to select their state’s presidential electors in a new way.

The current proposal, introduced by a bipartisan group of senators, requires that at least six days before the Electoral College meets, each governor must submit a “certificate of ascertainment” identifying their state’s presidential electors, and that document would be “conclusive.”

The provision is included to prevent states from submitting more than one slate of electors, as seven states did in 2020 when Trump supporters submitted fake electors.

If a rogue, election-denying governor chose to certify the electors with fewer votes, the certification would then go to state and federal courts, who would have the final say.

In suburban Philly campaign stops, Mastriano drags Shapiro, Wolf for pandemic policies

Marc Elias, an elections lawyer who has worked for Democratic campaigns and elected officials, has expressed concerns that the reform bill gives too much power to potentially election-denying governors.

“One would hope that a federal court would overturn the results in a particular state if the ‘Big Lie’ governor, for instance, certified the presidential candidate who received fewer lawful votes than the candidate who actually won,” he wrote for Democracy Docket, a progressive voting advocacy group he started. “But nothing in this law assures that or even expresses that preference over the conclusiveness of the governor’s certification.”

But Rick Pildes, a constitutional law professor at New York University, said that’s a misunderstanding of the bill.

He said currently, governors have too much discretion when it comes to transmitting the document certifying the state’s electors. “The concern there is a governor who comes up with reasons to refuse to send the result that the state has already certified as the proper result of the election,” he said.

Several of the GOP candidates for governor say that in 2020, they would not have transmitted their state’s certified electors.

But the Electoral Count Reform Act would protect against that possibility by adding judicial review. Pildes also said that a simple tweak, making it clear that the results of the judicial review would preempt the governor’s decision, could make that even clearer and has been supported by senators.

Under “the Reform Act bill, Congress is binding itself to the position that it should accept the certificate from the governor unless the federal court orders that certificate to be modified, and in that case, Congress should accept the certificate as it’s required to be modified by the federal court,” Pildes said.

Sens. Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, a Democrat, and Susan Collins of Maine, a Republican, who sponsored the legislation, have said they expect to pass it before the end of the year. That would mean it could be enacted before the 2024 presidential election cycle and before Democrats potentially lose the U.S. House in the midterm election.

Here are the five GOP candidates for governor who have said they would not have certified Biden as the winner of the 2020 election or who say the 2020 election was rigged:

Arizona

Kari Lake, a former news anchor, is a staunch supporter of Trump’s baseless claims that he won the 2020 election. The GOP nominee in Arizona is also endorsed by Trump and has suggested that she won’t accept the results of her upcoming election if she loses.

“If we don’t win, there’s some cheating going on. And we already know that,” she said just hours before polls closed on primary day.

After she won the race, she told reporters: “We out-voted the fraud, we didn’t listen to what the fake news had to say.”

Lake said during an Arizona Republican debate in June that she would not have certified Biden’s victory in Arizona.

In the same debate, she called the election corrupt and said — with no evidence — that 34,000 ballots “were counted two, three, and four times” in Arizona and that 200,000 ballots were trafficked by mules. “He lost the election, and shouldn’t be in the White House,” she said about Biden.

Pennsylvania

Republican state Sen. Doug Mastriano will face Democrat Josh Shapiro in November in Pennsylvania. Mastriano is an extreme supporter of Trump’s Big Lie.

The nominee was at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 and helped thousands of others come to the event by bus. He says he left before the riot began, but video contradicts his claim and shows him passing through police lines.

The House Jan. 6 committee has subpoenaed Mastriano for information about how he participated in events that led to the insurrection.

Shapiro, Fetterman lead in new Franklin & Marshall College poll | Thursday Morning Coffee

Mastriano has also surrounded himself with other election deniers. In June, he hired election denier and former Trump campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis to be a senior adviser on his campaign.

After the 2020 election, Mastriano led a state Senate hearing in which Ellis and Trump campaign lawyer Rudy Giuliani testified and shared false information about fraud in the election.

In Pennsylvania, the governor appoints the secretary of state. Though Mastriano has not publicly named the person he plans to select, he has hinted at his pick in interviews with far-right radio and TV programs. Mastriano has said he would appoint someone who would dramatically reform elections.

“I saw better elections in Afghanistan than in Pennsylvania,” Mastriano, an Army veteran, said while campaigning.

He has vowed that his pick for the state’s top election official would require everyone to “re-register” to vote, a requirement that would violate the National Voter Registration Act. And according to election experts consulted by Bolts magazine, a secretary of state under Mastriano could try to refuse to certify election results from Democratic-leaning counties.

Mastriano is also a user of Gab, an online platform for hate speech

Michigan

Tudor Dixon, a conservative commentator, is endorsed by Trump and recently dodged the question when asked if she still believes Trump won the 2020 election. But on numerous occasions since 2020, the Michigan GOP nominee has supported Trump’s claims that fraud cost him the election.

In a debate in May, Dixon unequivocally answered “yes” when asked if she believes Trump legitimately won the 2020 election in Michigan.

And in a November tweet reply to Trump, she wrote: “Steal an election then hide behind calls for unity and leftists lap it up.”

In an interview in November 2021, Dixon blamed Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson for “not running the election the way she should have” and “in a way that was rife for fraud.” She then said that Benson provided the opportunity for Joe Biden to tilt the election so he could win.

Wisconsin

Tim Michels, a millionaire construction executive and the most recent election denier to win a GOP primary, is also supported by Trump, although he has distanced himself from the former president in recent months and has been more hesitant to say he believes the 2020 election was stolen.

During a debate in July, Michels said that if elected, he would not prioritize decertifying the 2020 election results.

But he’s tried to appeal to all GOP primary voters, also saying he would consider signing legislation that came to his desk from the GOP-controlled Assembly to decertify the results. He said he would “need to see the details” before making a decision on decertification. Biden beat Trump in Wisconsin by about 21,000 votes.

It’s not the only time Michels has gone back and forth on his support for the former president. He also said in a debate that he wouldn’t endorse Trump if he ran for president in 2024, but then reversed course in a later campaign event.

Maryland

Republicans in Maryland elected attorney and state delegate Dan Cox in the June primary over a candidate supported by the state party establishment and current Republican Gov. Larry Hogan.

Cox has been endorsed by Trump and organized buses and attended the rally outside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

“I am co-hosting two buses to the Million MAGA March/Rally with the Frederick County Conservative Club in support of President Trump @realDonaldTrump on January 6, 2021 to #StoptheSteal,” he wrote on Twitter on Jan. 1, 2021.

Later that day, he tweeted: “Pence is a traitor.”

After the election, in December 2020, he wrote on Facebook that Trump should seize voting machines. He also called for an audit of the 2020 election in Maryland, even though he wasn’t able to cite any credible evidence of fraud.

Cox has continued to deny the results of the 2020 election, writing on his social media platforms in June that the election was “the GREAT HEIST of 2020.”Hogan has called Cox a “QAnon whack job.”

Pennsylvania Capital-Star is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Pennsylvania Capital-Star maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor John Micek for questions: info@penncapital-star.com. Follow Pennsylvania Capital-Star on Facebook and Twitter.

Republican candidates who claim that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump have been nominated for governor in four critical swing states, raising concerns that if elected they could try to sway election results in 2024 and beyond.

In Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, Republican primary voters elected a candidate who has denied the results of the 2020 election and believes that voter fraud influenced the results. GOP voters also nominated an election-denying candidate in Maryland, though he has less chance of winning in a blue state.

Many more Republican gubernatorial candidates have questioned whether the 2020 election was legitimate or refused to say that President Joe Biden was the rightful winner. But these five are more vocal election deniers, who would be willing to call for audits or move to decertify results.

If they win in November, they will have less of a direct impact on elections than the six election deniers who are running for secretary of state, a position that’s the chief election official in most states. But the governors’ impact could still be significant.

They will sign or veto legislation governing the administration of elections, which could affect which voters are able to cast ballots and how much financial support counties get to administer elections. Governors can also issue executive orders concerning election administration in emergency situations. And in Pennsylvania, the governor gets to appoint the secretary of state, giving that governor immense power over elections.

Currently, state law determines whether governors play a part in the certification of electoral votes, but in every state, governors are then supposed to transmit those votes to Congress.

If Congress were to pass a bill to modernize the Electoral Count Act to reform how electoral votes are counted, governors could be empowered to select their state’s presidential electors in a new way.

The current proposal, introduced by a bipartisan group of senators, requires that at least six days before the Electoral College meets, each governor must submit a “certificate of ascertainment” identifying their state’s presidential electors, and that document would be “conclusive.”

The provision is included to prevent states from submitting more than one slate of electors, as seven states did in 2020 when Trump supporters submitted fake electors.

If a rogue, election-denying governor chose to certify the electors with fewer votes, the certification would then go to state and federal courts, who would have the final say.

Marc Elias, an elections lawyer who has worked for Democratic campaigns and elected officials, has expressed concerns that the reform bill gives too much power to potentially election-denying governors.

“One would hope that a federal court would overturn the results in a particular state if the ‘Big Lie’ governor, for instance, certified the presidential candidate who received fewer lawful votes than the candidate who actually won,” he wrote for Democracy Docket, a progressive voting advocacy group he started. “But nothing in this law assures that or even expresses that preference over the conclusiveness of the governor’s certification.”

But Rick Pildes, a constitutional law professor at New York University, said that’s a misunderstanding of the bill.

He said currently, governors have too much discretion when it comes to transmitting the document certifying the state’s electors. “The concern there is a governor who comes up with reasons to refuse to send the result that the state has already certified as the proper result of the election,” he said.

Several of the GOP candidates for governor say that in 2020, they would not have transmitted their state’s certified electors.

But the Electoral Count Reform Act would protect against that possibility by adding judicial review. Pildes also said that a simple tweak, making it clear that the results of the judicial review would preempt the governor’s decision, could make that even clearer and has been supported by senators.

Under “the Reform Act bill, Congress is binding itself to the position that it should accept the certificate from the governor unless the federal court orders that certificate to be modified, and in that case, Congress should accept the certificate as it’s required to be modified by the federal court,” Pildes said.

Sens. Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, a Democrat, and Susan Collins of Maine, a Republican, who sponsored the legislation, have said they expect to pass it before the end of the year. That would mean it could be enacted before the 2024 presidential election cycle and before Democrats potentially lose the U.S. House in the midterm election.

Here are the five GOP candidates for governor who have said they would not have certified Biden as the winner of the 2020 election or who say the 2020 election was rigged:

Arizona

Kari Lake, a former news anchor, is a staunch supporter of Trump’s baseless claims that he won the 2020 election. The GOP nominee in Arizona is also endorsed by Trump and has suggested that she won’t accept the results of her upcoming election if she loses.

“If we don’t win, there’s some cheating going on. And we already know that,” she said just hours before polls closed on primary day.

After she won the race, she told reporters: “We out-voted the fraud, we didn’t listen to what the fake news had to say.”

Lake said during an Arizona Republican debate in June that she would not have certified Biden’s victory in Arizona.

In the same debate, she called the election corrupt and said — with no evidence — that 34,000 ballots “were counted two, three, and four times” in Arizona and that 200,000 ballots were trafficked by mules. “He lost the election, and shouldn’t be in the White House,” she said about Biden.

Pennsylvania

Republican state Sen. Doug Mastriano will face Democrat Josh Shapiro in November in Pennsylvania. Mastriano is an extreme supporter of Trump’s Big Lie.

The nominee was at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 and helped thousands of others come to the event by bus. He says he left before the riot began, but video contradicts his claim and shows him passing through police lines.

The House Jan. 6 committee has subpoenaed Mastriano for information about how he participated in events that led to the insurrection.

Mastriano has also surrounded himself with other election deniers. In June, he hired election denier and former Trump campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis to be a senior adviser on his campaign.

After the 2020 election, Mastriano led a state Senate hearing in which Ellis and Trump campaign lawyer Rudy Giuliani testified and shared false information about fraud in the election.

In Pennsylvania, the governor appoints the secretary of state. Though Mastriano has not publicly named the person he plans to select, he has hinted at his pick in interviews with far-right radio and TV programs. Mastriano has said he would appoint someone who would dramatically reform elections.

“I saw better elections in Afghanistan than in Pennsylvania,” Mastriano, an Army veteran, said while campaigning.

He has vowed that his pick for the state’s top election official would require everyone to “re-register” to vote, a requirement that would violate the National Voter Registration Act. And according to election experts consulted by Bolts magazine, a secretary of state under Mastriano could try to refuse to certify election results from Democratic-leaning counties.

Mastriano is also a user of Gab, an online platform for hate speech

Michigan

Tudor Dixon, a conservative commentator, is endorsed by Trump and recently dodged the question when asked if she still believes Trump won the 2020 election. But on numerous occasions since 2020, the Michigan GOP nominee has supported Trump’s claims that fraud cost him the election.

In a debate in May, Dixon unequivocally answered “yes” when asked if she believes Trump legitimately won the 2020 election in Michigan.

And in a November tweet reply to Trump, she wrote: “Steal an election then hide behind calls for unity and leftists lap it up.”

In an interview in November 2021, Dixon blamed Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson for “not running the election the way she should have” and “in a way that was rife for fraud.” She then said that Benson provided the opportunity for Joe Biden to tilt the election so he could win.

Wisconsin

Tim Michels, a millionaire construction executive and the most recent election denier to win a GOP primary, is also supported by Trump, although he has distanced himself from the former president in recent months and has been more hesitant to say he believes the 2020 election was stolen.

During a debate in July, Michels said that if elected, he would not prioritize decertifying the 2020 election results.

But he’s tried to appeal to all GOP primary voters, also saying he would consider signing legislation that came to his desk from the GOP-controlled Assembly to decertify the results. He said he would “need to see the details” before making a decision on decertification. Biden beat Trump in Wisconsin by about 21,000 votes.

It’s not the only time Michels has gone back and forth on his support for the former president. He also said in a debate that he wouldn’t endorse Trump if he ran for president in 2024, but then reversed course in a later campaign event.

Maryland

Republicans in Maryland elected attorney and state delegate Dan Cox in the June primary over a candidate supported by the state party establishment and current Republican Gov. Larry Hogan.

Cox has been endorsed by Trump and organized buses and attended the rally outside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

“I am co-hosting two buses to the Million MAGA March/Rally with the Frederick County Conservative Club in support of President Trump @realDonaldTrump on January 6, 2021 to #StoptheSteal,” he wrote on Twitter on Jan. 1, 2021.

Later that day, he tweeted: “Pence is a traitor.”

After the election, in December 2020, he wrote on Facebook that Trump should seize voting machines. He also called for an audit of the 2020 election in Maryland, even though he wasn’t able to cite any credible evidence of fraud.

Cox has continued to deny the results of the 2020 election, writing on his social media platforms in June that the election was “the GREAT HEIST of 2020.”Hogan has called Cox a “QAnon whack job.”

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Colorado’s election officials, like so many across the country, faced a surge of violent threats after the 2020 election.

Pennsylvania Capital-Star is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Pennsylvania Capital-Star maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor John Micek for questions: info@penncapital-star.com. Follow Pennsylvania Capital-Star on Facebook and Twitter.

Mark Finchem, an Arizona state representative who has said he would not have certified the 2020 election, won the Republican primary for secretary of state on Tuesday, making him the latest election denier to move closer to controlling his state’s election system.

Across the country, Republicans who say the 2020 election was rigged are vying to be elected secretary of state, a position that would grant them immense control over their states’ election systems.

As of July 28, at least 20 election deniers are running for secretary of state in 16 states, according to States United Action, an organization that tracks these races.

Races for secretary of state since 2020 have gone from low-profile contests to ones in which massive amounts of money have been spent on candidates who have a higher profile than ever before.

As November approaches, candidates in Arizona and three other critical states — Michigan, Minnesota, and Nevada — continue to claim that Donald Trump won the 2020 election and have vowed to erect barriers to voting. All the candidates have raised enough money to be competitive.

They’ve all won the Republican nomination and will appear on the ballot in November. They all have close ties to Trump allies and many of them have been endorsed by Trump.

Here’s how four candidates are campaigning and what they say about the future of elections in their states:

Arizona

Finchem has ties to QAnon, is supported by former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, and has been endorsed by Trump.

He’s also a staunch believer in the Big Lie and was at the U.S. Capitol for the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection. He’s one of Arizona’s most vocal Republicans claiming the 2020 election was stolen and that the results should have been decertified in Arizona.

Since announcing his candidacy to run Arizona’s elections, he’s repeated those claims on the campaign trail. He’s told voters not to put mail ballots in “Zuckerboxes,” (a reference to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s grants to local and state election departments) claiming they are part of the “Democrat fraud machine.”

He’s also called for the arrest of Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, who is running for governor, and former Maricopa County Recorder Adrian Fontes, who is running for secretary of state as a Democrat.

In an interview with right-wing media outlet Real America’s Voice, Finchem reiterated his claims about voter fraud.

“For those media outlets that claim there’s no fraud, you’re willfully ignoring the evidence,” Finchem said, looking directly into the camera. He called Nov. 3, 2020, a “gaping wound in the American psyche.”

Michigan

In Michigan, Kristina Karamo, a community college professor who worked the polls in 2020 and claimed the election was fraudulent, is challenging Democrat Jocelyn Benson, the current office holder, for secretary of state. Karamo won the Michigan Republican Party’s nomination in April.

After the 2020 election, Karamo served as a poll challenger at the TCF Center in Detroit and went on Fox News as a “whistleblower” to falsely claim that she witnessed fraud on Election Day. She alleged without evidence that votes were incorrectly counted for Joe Biden and that “thousands” of ballots were dropped off in the middle of the night.

A month after the election, she testified before a state Senate committee about the fraud she said she witnessed.

Karamo hosts a podcast where she claims that left-wing anarchists organized the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, according to CNN.

“I believe this is completely Antifa posing as Trump supporters,” Karamo said on an episode the day after the insurrection, according to CNN’s analysis. “I mean, anybody can buy a MAGA hat and put on t-shirt and buy a Trump flag.”

In recent months, she has campaigned against Benson, who she calls an “authoritarian leftist” and who she says isn’t protecting the integrity of Michigan’s elections.

She often shares an unverified video that she purports to show mail ballot fraud.

She’s also alleged that Benson is lying about threats to her life. A month after the election, Benson said that armed protesters showed up outside her home to shout obscenities and make ambiguous demands, but Karamo claims without evidence that these allegations are false.

In recent interviews, Karamo has said that “cleaning up the corruption in our election system is a matter of national survival.” She also claims without evidence that corruption in the voter registration database means that thousands of illegal ballots are being produced.

Minnesota

Kim Crockett, a lawyer with a history of incendiary remarks, won the Minnesota Republican Party’s endorsement in April to be its candidate for secretary of state. She has called the election rigged and believes Trump won the election in Minnesota and nationally.

If elected the chief of Minnesota’s elections, she has said she would push for more restrictions on voting by mail. She also wants to shorten the early voting period and supports voter ID requirements. According to the Minnesota Reformer, her campaign sent an email saying Republicans need to overcome a “margin of fraud” in the upcoming election.

Though she speaks out about her views on the 2020 election being rigged more infrequently and uses less inflammatory language than other high-profile secretary of state candidates, Crockett still interjects her beliefs into her public appearances, statements, and interviews.

On Twitter, Crockett has said that the terms “election deniers” and “election conspiracy theorists” are labels used “to shut up those advocating policies making it harder to cheat.”

She’s also tweeted about making sure what happened in 2020 never happens again and “ensuring ineligible ballots and illegal election procedures do not disenfranchise legitimate voters.”

She has said in a radio interview that six weeks of early voting is “ridiculous” because voters should be listening to candidates and their minds could change before Election Day.

And she has used an antisemetic trope to tie the election system to Democratic mega donor George Soros and is part of a right-wing network, led by Republican lawyer Cleta Mitchell, to recruit an army of activists to become poll workers. As she campaigns across the state, she’s been pushing the recruitment of conservative election judges and ballot board members.

Nevada

Jim Marchant, a former state assemblyman who is linked to QAnon and has also spouted false claims about the 2020 election, won the GOP primary in June and is the party’s nominee for secretary of state. Marchant continues to claim that Biden did not legitimately win the election.

“It’s almost statistically impossible that Joe Biden won,” he said in an interview with NBC News earlier this year. He also said he would not have certified the election had he been secretary of state at the time.

If he wins in November, Marchant has said he would get rid of electronic voting machines, vote by mail, and early voting. He has also called for the hand counting of paper ballots.

In an interview with the Washington Post in February, Marchant claimed that Nevada voters “haven’t elec­ted anybody here since 2006. They have been installed and selec­ted by the cabal.”

In frequent interviews with Bannon’s “War Room” TV program, Marchant repeatedly claims that establishment Republicans and Democrats don’t want to protect elections.

In one recent interview, Marchant said that Trump allies convinced him to run for secretary of state instead of for Congress this year. Marchant previously ran for Congress in 2020, and he was the victim of fraud in that race.

“I contend that the secretary of state races around the country right now are the most important races in the country and the reason is that we control the election system,” he said.

Georgia Recorder is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Georgia Recorder maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor John McCosh for questions: info@georgiarecorder.com. Follow Georgia Recorder on Facebook and Twitter.

Venture capitalist Blake Masters, who has questioned whether the upcoming November midterm election will be legitimate and has embraced the Big Lie about the 2020 election, was leading the GOP primary for U.S. Senate by nearly five percentage points. While former television journalist Kari Lake was trailing Karrin Taylor Robson by less than eight percentage points, she insisted that her strong performance among voters who showed up at the polls on Tuesday instead of voting by mail would result in her eventual victory.

Both earned endorsements from former president Donald Trump by supporting his Big Lie, and Lake has claimed without evidence that her election was rigged against her.

While wins by Lake and Masters would pose a danger to democracy, even more concerning is election deniers like Finchem taking control of positions in which they’ll be able to control their state’s election systems.

As of July 28, at least 20 election deniers are running for secretary of state in 16 states, according to States United Action, an organization that tracks these races.

Since the 2020 election, races for secretary of state have gone from low-profile contests to ones in which massive amounts of money have been spent on candidates who have a higher profile than ever before.

As November approaches, candidates in Arizona and three other critical states — Michigan, Minnesota, and Nevada — continue to claim that Donald Trump won the 2020 election and have vowed to erect barriers to voting. All the candidates have raised enough money to be competitive in their races.

They’ve all won the Republican nomination and will appear on the ballot in November. They all have close ties to Trump allies and many of them have been endorsed by Trump.

Here’s how four candidates are campaigning and what they say about the future of elections in their states:

Arizona

Finchem has ties to QAnon, is supported by former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, and has been endorsed by Trump.

He’s also a staunch believer in the Big Lie and was at the U.S. Capitol for the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection. He’s one of Arizona’s most vocal Republicans claiming the 2020 election was stolen and that the results should have been decertified in Arizona.

Since announcing his candidacy to run Arizona’s elections, he’s repeated those claims on the campaign trail. He’s told voters not to put mail mallets in “Zuckerboxes,” (a reference to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s grants to local and state election departments) claiming they are part of the “Democrat fraud machine.”

He’s also called for the arrest of Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, who is running for governor, and former Maricopa County Recorder Adrian Fontes, who is running for secretary of state as a Democrat. Finchem may face Fontes in November; he leads state Rep. Reginald Bolding in the contest for the Democratic secretary of state nomination.

In an interview with right-wing media outlet Real America’s Voice, Finchem reiterated his claims about voter fraud.

“For those media outlets that claim there’s no fraud, you’re willfully ignoring the evidence,” Finchem said, looking directly into the camera. He called Nov. 3, 2020, a “gaping wound in the American psyche.”

Michigan

In Michigan, Kristina Karamo, a community college professor who worked the polls in 2020 and claimed the election was fraudulent, is challenging Democrat Jocelyn Benson, the current office holder, for secretary of state. Karamo won the Michigan Republican Party’s nomination in April.

After the 2020 election, Karamo served as a poll challenger at the TCF Center in Detroit and went on Fox News as a “whistleblower” to falsely claim that she witnessed fraud on Election Day. She alleged without evidence that votes were incorrectly counted for Joe Biden and that “thousands” of ballots were dropped off in the middle of the night. A month after the election, she testified before a state Senate committee about the fraud she said she witnessed.

Karamo hosts a podcast where she claims that left-wing anarchists organized the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, according to CNN.

“I believe this is completely Antifa posing as Trump supporters,” Karamo said on an episode the day after the insurrection, according to CNN’s analysis. “I mean, anybody can buy a MAGA hat and put on t-shirt and buy a Trump flag.”

In recent months, she has campaigned against Benson, who she calls an “authoritarian leftist” and who she says isn’t protecting the integrity of Michigan’s elections.

She often shares an unverified video that she purports to show mail ballot fraud.

She’s also alleged that Benson is lying about threats to her life. A month after the election, Benson said that armed protesters showed up outside her home to shout obscenities and make ambiguous demands, but Karamo claims without evidence that these allegations are false.

In recent interviews, Karamo has said that “cleaning up the corruption in our election system is a matter of national survival.” She also claims without evidence that corruption in the voter registration database means that thousands of illegal ballots are being produced.

Minnesota

Kim Crockett, a lawyer with a history of incendiary remarks, won the Minnesota Republican Party’s endorsement in April to be their candidate for secretary of state. She has called the election rigged and believes Trump won the election in Minnesota and nationally.

If elected the chief of Minnesota’s elections, she has said she would push for more restrictions on voting by mail. She also wants to shorten the early voting period and supports voter ID requirements. According to the Minnesota Reformer, a sister publication of the Arizona Mirror, her campaign sent an email saying Republicans need to overcome a “margin of fraud” in the upcoming election.

Though she speaks out about her views on the 2020 election being rigged more infrequently and uses less inflammatory language than other high-profile secretary of state candidates, Crockett still interjects her beliefs into her public appearances, statements, and interviews.

On Twitter, Crockett has said that the terms “election deniers” and “election conspiracy theorists” are labels used “to shut up those advocating policies making it harder to cheat.”

She’s also tweeted about making sure what happened in 2020 never happens again and “ensuring ineligible ballots and illegal election procedures do not disenfranchise legitimate voters.”

She has said in a radio interview that six weeks of early voting is “ridiculous” because voters should be listening to candidates and their minds could change before Election Day.

And she has used an antisemetic trope to tie the election system to Democratic mega donor George Soros and is part of a right-wing network, led by Republican lawyer Cleta Mitchell, to recruit an army of activists to become poll workers. As she campaigns across the state, she’s been pushing the recruitment of conservative election judges and ballot board members.

Nevada

Jim Marchant, a former state assemblyman who is linked to QAnon and has also spouted false claims about the 2020 election, won the GOP primary in June and is the party’s nominee for secretary of state. Marchant continues to claim that Biden did not legitimately win the election.

“It’s almost statistically impossible that Joe Biden won,” he said in an interview with NBC News earlier this year. He also said he would not have certified the election had he been secretary of state at the time.

If he wins in November, Marchant has said he would get rid of electronic voting machines, vote by mail, and early voting. He has also called for the hand counting of paper ballots.

In an interview with the Washington Post in February, Marchant claimed that Nevada voters “haven’t elec­ted anybody here since 2006. They have been installed and selec­ted by the cabal.”

In frequent interviews with Steve Bannon’s “War Room” TV program, Marchant repeatedly claims that establishment Republicans and Democrats don’t want to protect elections.

In one recent interview, Marchant said that Trump allies convinced him to run for secretary of state instead of for Congress this year. Marchant previously ran for Congress in 2020, and he was the victim of fraud in that race.

“I contend that the secretary of state races around the country right now are the most important races in the country and the reason is that we control the election system,” he said.

***UPDATED: This story has been updated to reflect the Associated Press calling the race for Finchem.

Arizona Mirror is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com. Follow Arizona Mirror on Facebook and Twitter.

During the 2020 election, Rhonda Briggins and her sorority sisters spent days providing voters in metro Atlanta with water and snacks as they waited in long lines at polling places.

First in a two-part series

The lines for early voting and on Election Day at times stretched on for hours. As the national co-chair for social action with the Delta Sigma Theta sorority for Black women, Briggins felt compelled to help, and she and her sisters unofficially adopted one DeKalb County location where many elderly Georgians cast their ballots.

“When you’re a senior or someone with an infant child, line relief is very critical,” she said. “It allows someone to not have to suffer just because they want to exercise their right to vote.”

But if Briggins tries to do the same in November, she could face criminal charges.

In March 2021, four months after former President Donald Trump claimed that voter fraud cost him the state’s electoral votes and the presidency, Georgia’s Republican governor signed a law criminalizing people who give food or drinks to voters waiting at the polls.

Georgia was not alone. Across the country, states have passed new laws that give the green light to prosecutors to treat like criminals all kinds of people involved in the election process, whether they are voters, election officials or third parties that assist voters.
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Of those new penalties, 102 of them — the vast majority — were enacted in 18 Republican-controlled states: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, West Virginia, and Wyoming.

[See all of the new criminal penalties here]

In Oklahoma, for example, voters who apply to receive a blind-accessible ballot electronically but are not blind are now committing a felony. And in Texas, it’s a felony for an election official to solicit the submission of a mail ballot application by a person who did not request one.

Briggins could get up to a year in jail now for handing out snacks or water. “That is just inhumane,” she said. “They’re on the wrong side of history.”

Many of the new criminal penalties are being challenged in court. In a request for an injunction to stop the line relief ban, attorneys representing Briggins’ sorority, non-profit groups, and a Black church wrote, “If anything threatens election integrity in Georgia, it is the law that treats these messengers like criminals.”

More than 60 new felonies

States Newsroom analyzed every voting-related bill passed by state legislatures since the 2020 election, creating a database of every new criminal offense codified into law. In total, states enacted more than 60 new felonies and more than 50 new misdemeanors.

The new offenses, made law in dozens of voting bills, range from low-level misdemeanors to felonies punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

While there are no official projections of how many Americans might wind up charged with felonies or misdemeanors, some states, like Florida, have already beefed up their elections enforcement offices. A handful of other states have given power to investigate election crimes to new agencies or government officials.

The new laws not only criminalize actions typically described by Republicans as voter fraud (like altering a ballot, electioneering, or voting more than once), but also criminalize the activities of people trying to assist voters or attempting to make an election run smoothly.

Sean Morales-Doyle, the acting director of the voting rights program at the liberal-leaning Brennan Center for Justice, said many of the new laws regulate what are often innocent or even laudable actions. Others have vague definitions of what could be considered criminal conduct.

“The effect of the laws is not only to deter people from engaging in nefarious conduct or interfering with elections,” he said. “It deters people from engaging in completely legitimate, innocent, even good conduct because they’re scared of getting close to the line and potentially being accused of a crime.”

If convicted of an election-related felony, voters or election officials face a number of collateral consequences, including potentially losing their right to vote for a significant amount of time, depending on the state that convicts them.

Nicole Porter, senior director of advocacy for the Sentencing Project, a group focused on reducing imprisonment, said she finds the new criminal penalties contradictory with the now bipartisan acknowledgement that the U.S. prison system is too large.

She noted that many states are moving to allow more people with felony convictions to vote, but creating dozens of new potential felonies works against the effort to expand voting rights.

The new laws are a direct response to Trump’s Big Lie that voter fraud cost him the 2020 election. Republican lawmakers across the country capitalized on that lie and have used their control of state legislatures to push new laws that they claim will prevent future fraud.

“It’s a lot of political theater,” said Jonathan Diaz, voting rights counsel with the Campaign Legal Center. “This is almost entirely politically motivated because there’s just no evidence to suggest that there’s a need for any of this.”

He added that “the second-order consequences” of the new laws “and the chilling effect that they have on voters and on civic engagement is really, really damaging to the overall health of democracy.”

Voters targeted

The most commonly known type of voting laws target voter fraud — actions taken by voters like submitting false information on a registration form, voting more than once, or impersonating another voter or deceased person to cast a ballot.

These types of offenses are exceedingly rare, and when they do occur, they are usually committed by voters who are misinformed, confused, or don’t understand the law.

But the dozens of new criminal laws targeting voters, coupled with prosecutions using the already existing laws, work to discourage participation by people who don’t want to end up facing criminal penalties.

For example, prosecutors in Texas brought charges against Crystal Mason, who was eventually convicted of illegal voting but alleged that she did not know that being on supervised release from prison made her ineligible to vote. While prosecutions against people like Mason are rare, they have a chilling effect on others, especially non-white voters, who want to avoid ending up in her situation.

Texas’ highest criminal court recently ruled that her conviction be reviewed because a lower court wrongly determined that it didn’t matter that Mason was not aware that she was ineligible.

There is little incentive for someone who is ineligible, like an undocumented immigrant or someone with a prior felony conviction, to unlawfully register and cast a ballot, as the potential consequences outweigh the benefits of a single vote.

Prosecutors and law enforcement are already equipped with the tools they need to address these types of election wrongdoing, but convictions are still extremely rare.

“It’s not for lack of trying,” Diaz said. “It’s not for lack of will. It doesn’t happen.”

As a result, these offenses have little or no impact on elections.

Nevertheless, Republican lawmakers in recent years have overplayed their significance as part of their broader rhetoric about the threats of voter fraud.

Since November 2020, some states have increased these types of voter fraud crimes from misdemeanors to felonies, a move that Diaz described as a political attempt by Republicans to “rev up their base.” Studies show that increasing the severity of criminal penalties on an offense does not increase its deterrent effect.

South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster, a Republican, signed a law in May creating in-person early voting for the first time, but also increasing six already existing voting-related offenses from misdemeanors to penalties.

Three directly affect voters: attempting to vote in someone else’s name or otherwise voting fraudulently, attempting to vote more than once in the same election, and attempting to impersonate another person to vote. The new felonies carry a fine of $1,000 to $5,000 and up to five years in prison. Previously, the misdemeanor carried a maximum of three years in prison.

West Virginia also increased several penalties from misdemeanors to felonies, including voting while not legally entitled. The felonies are punishable by between one and 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000.

Experts say the higher penalties are unlikely to change conduct and having more criminal laws on the books may not even lead to more prosecutions.

“Even if there’s no change to how many folks are being prosecuted, there will be an impact on conduct and on people’s willingness to participate fully in the democratic system,” Morales-Doyle said.

Next: New laws that target election officials and people who try to help voters

Arizona Mirror is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com. Follow Arizona Mirror on Facebook and Twitter.

Wisconsin Examiner is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Wisconsin Examiner maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Ruth Conniff for questions: info@wisconsinexaminer.com. Follow Wisconsin Examiner on Facebook and Twitter.