Trump-backed Republicans want to oversee upcoming state elections

For most American voters, secretary of state — at the state level, not the cabinet secretary who leads the U.S. State Department — is probably a fairly obscure government office. In much of the country, these officials work behind the scenes on unglamorous tasks such as election administration, and few reach the household-name level.

But in the wake of the Republican Party’s Big Lie, and Donald Trump’s ongoing fixation on installing allies in key positions, secretaries of state — and upcoming campaigns to elect secretaries of state — have taken on extraordinary importance.

For example, the former president has already endorsed three far-right candidates in 2022 secretaries of state races: Georgia’s Jody Hice, Michigan’s Kristina Karamo, and Arizona’s Mark Finchem. There’s no great mystery as to what the three have in common: Each have been deeply critical of the 2020 presidential election and eager to lend credence to ridiculous conspiracy theories about Trump’s defeat.

Hice, a sitting Republican member of Congress, refused to vote to certify President Joe Biden’s victory; Karamo has falsely claimed there’s “overwhelming evidence” that raise doubts about Biden’s win in Michigan; and Finchem, a state legislator, is a notorious “Stop the Steal” activist. Trump, of course, wants them to win so that his loyal allies will be responsible for administering upcoming elections in key states.

But they’re not alone. As Rachel noted on last night’s show, Reuters published an important special report yesterday on the “wider group of Republican secretary-of-state contenders in America’s swing states who have embraced” demonstrably false claims about Trump’s defeat.

Those alarms are ringing for a reason. When the people running elections are the same people who believe false claims about election results, that’s a serious problem for our democracy.

And yet, here we are. Reuters interviewed nine of the 15 declared Republican candidates for secretary of state in five battleground states — Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Nevada — and concluded that 10 of them “have either declared that the 2020 election was stolen or called for their state’s results to be invalidated or further investigated.”

How many of the candidates accepted the legitimacy of Biden’s victory? Two.

Significant amounts of money are pouring into these contests — again, races that are typically low-profile, down-ballot affairs — as GOP candidates run on platforms that would make it more difficult for voters to participate in future elections.

It’s hard to overstate how consequential these races may become. Reuters’ report focused special attention on the GOP candidates in Arizona: