Dems focus on secretaries of state with $5M

The left-leaning ballot access group iVote will spend at least $5 million across swing states to elect Democratic secretaries of state — the latest front in the “voting wars” that Democrats worried they have been losing.

“Republicans have understood the importance of the office,” said iVote president and founder Ellen Kurz. “There isn’t a single Democratic swing state secretary of state. And dozens of states have taken away opportunities to vote, purged voter rolls and disenfranchised certain voters every year.”

This year, iVote will focus on electing Democrats as the chief election officials in seven swing states: Arizona, Colorado, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico and Ohio. Only one of those

states, New Mexico, has a Democratic secretary of state.

Two of the states, Arizona and Michigan, have not elected Democrats to the office since the 1990s; Colorado has not elected a Democratic secretary of state since John F. Kennedy was in the White House.

“This isn’t a coincidence,” Kurz said. “The Republican party targeted these offices two decades ago along with state legislatures, for redistricting purposes. They understood the power of the office, and they knew their path to winning was shrinking. In these contested states — except Iowa, where it’s students they are after — there are great numbers of people of color. These are the people that Republican campaigns target to stop certain people from voting.”

The campaign for Colorado Secretary of State Wayne Williams, a Republican seeking a second term in November, argues that he doesn’t fit that mold — and sees any money spent by iVote against him as less likely to make an impact. Jena Griswold, a Louisville attorney, has raised by far the most money in pursuit of the Democratic nomination.

“If liberal, D.C., dark-money groups were seriously worried about voting rights, Secretary Williams and Colorado would be the least of their concerns,” said Justin Prendergast, his campaign spokesman. “The facts speak for themselves: Colorado has the highest level of voter registration in the country and is top five in turnout. You can literally register to vote via text message in this state.

“Ask other secretaries of state, and you’ll find that Colorado is a bipartisan model of how to get it done.”

Griswold has tried to paint Williams as friendly to the Trump administration, drawing pushback from him. She also has criticized the role of “dark money” in political campaigns. But in welcoming iVote’s interest in the race, her campaign said the group doesn’t qualify as dark money because 527 groups must disclose their donors.

“We are excited at the huge amount of Coloradans’ support” for Griswold, said Brian Courtney, her campaign spokesman. “The secretary of state plays a critical role, and as secretary of state, Jena will protect the right to vote of every eligible Coloradan, whether Republican, Democrat or unaffiliated; bolster cyber security in our elections; and increase transparency in campaigns and government.”

Kurz’s iVote is not the first Democratic group designed to win secretaries of states’ offices. In the run-up to the 2006, some wealthy donors funded a 527 group, the Secretary of State Project, to boost Democrats in races where their candidates had been struggling to raise money. In a good year for the party, the project was a success; its biggest coups came in Ohio, where Democrats warned that voter suppression had been costing them support, and Minnesota, where twoterm Secretary of State Mark Ritchie presided over a complicated recount that helped elect former Sen. Al Franken.

The project folded after 2008, just before Republicans mounted comebacks across the South and Midwest. In 2012 and 2016, Democrats found themselves in eleventh-hour lawsuits against Republican secretaries of state who tightened early voting periods, restricted the use of provisional ballots or purged voter rolls. In 2017, the party was thrown into a panic after Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a Republican who has crusaded against the specter of voter fraud, was tapped to run a federal electoral commission; it fell apart last year after states declined to supply it with voter data.

“They’ve systematically invested in candidate recruitment and support. They’ve coordinated across offices on policy through things like ALEC — see Kris Kobach,” Kurz said. “They’ve used the office to create a bench — see (Ohio’s Jon) Husted this year, for example. And the results are stunning.”

This is not the first time iVote has tried to assist Democrats in downballot races. In 2014, the group spent money in Iowa to back Brad Anderson, the Democratic nominee for secretary of state, who ran 20 points ahead of his party’s gubernatorial candidate and nearly won.

“They ran negative ads against Paul Pate, and they definitely helped,” said Anderson, referring to the Republican who won the election. “And the Republican I was running to replace was infamous, which helped with money. It was just a bad Democratic year.”

No Democrat, and no Republican, expects 2018 to create as many Republican openings as 2014. The issue now, Kurz said, was whether Democrats knew they could run real, well-funded campaigns.

“We would have won Brad Anderson’s race even in a Republican landslide if we had a small amount more money to talk to voters,” Kurz said. “Great candidates often do not even run for this office on the Democratic side because the idea of having to raise the money for a statewide election, which costs money, is daunting.”