A new midterm target: Secretaries of state
In Michigan, Georgia and beyond, they are the faces of election security — and a major focus of Trump’s ire
WASHINGTON — Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson and her 4-yearold son were settling in to watch “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” after putting up decorations in December 2020 when dozens of protesters descended on her home, chanting, “Stop the steal” and “We want an audit.”
Benson had been on the radar of then-President Trump and his allies since that spring, when he railed against her decision to send absentee ballot applications to all Michigan voters, calling her a “rogue Secretary.” But the nighttime protest, marked by what she described at the time as “armed individuals shouting obscenities,” solidified her role as a central figure in the fight over control of American elections.
The stakes have increased heading into this year’s midterm election.
Democratic groups, donors and incumbents like Benson have raised record amounts of money to secure seats in battleground states as Trump loyalists run on his unfounded claims of election fraud, challenging Democrats as well as Republicans such as Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in their campaigns to administer elections and sign off on the results.
“Secretaries of state are, in the battle over the future of our democracy, serving on the front lines,” Benson said in an interview with The Times.
“Clearly the work that we did to successfully defend democracy in 2020 has placed us in a greater spotlight,” she said.
Many secretaries of state became household names in the 2020 election as they worked to keep voters safe during the pandemic and debunk election misinformation spread by Trump and others. Decisions like Benson’s absentee ballot applications and Raffensperger’s rejection of Trump’s request to “find 11,780 votes” highlight the outsized role these officials increasingly play in elections.
Two dozen states will vote this fall to determine who oversees their elections. Trump has endorsed three candidates in those races, including a man seen outside the U.S. Capitol during last year’s Jan. 6 insurrection who has acknowledged ties to the far-right Oath Keepers.
The former president has also backed Michigan’s Kristina Karamo, who rose to prominence in conservative media after claiming she saw fraudulent absentee ballot counting during the 2020 election. Karamo testified before a Michigan Senate committee that investigated election fraud allegations and found no evidence of widespread or systematic fraud in the state.
Karamo did not respond to requests for an interview.
Early indicators suggest Benson, who is expected to announce her reelection plans soon, has an edge in fundraising and name recognition; a recent poll showed her with a 14-point lead over Karamo. She has outraised Karamo 7 to 1, collecting $1.6 million in 2021 compared with Karamo’s $228,000, according to campaign finance reports. Karamo has led fundraising among Republicans vying for the party’s nomination for secretary of state in April.
But Democrats say they don’t take those numbers for granted.
“I anticipate the cost of running for secretary of state to more than double this year, because of that additional scrutiny,” Benson said. “What I’m grateful for is that more voters than ever before will be paying attention to these important races.”
The Democratic Assn. of Secretaries of State has beefed up operations for the 2022 elections, hiring Executive Director Kim Rogers as its first full-time staffer last April and raising a record $4.5 million with affiliated organizations in 2021.
Rogers said the group is focused on protecting incumbent election officials in Michigan, Colorado, Minnesota and New Mexico; holding on to an open seat in Arizona, where another highprofile Democratic secretary of state, Katie Hobbs, is running for governor; and on potentially flipping the office from Republican to Democratic in Nevada and Georgia.
“We’ve always said that the states are the last line of defense,” Rogers said, adding that she expects interest in state-level politics to increase after last month’s failed effort to advance voting rights legislation in the U.S. Senate.
The Republican State Leadership Committee, which helps GOP candidates seeking down-ballot positions including secretaries of state, raised $33.3 million in 2021, a $14million increase from 2019.
“It’s up to us to stop them from continuing to erode public confidence in our elections and to support Republican secretaries of state in their efforts to make it easier to vote and harder to cheat,” the committee’s communications director, Andrew Romeo, said in a statement to The Times.
If elected, Karamo and other Trump-backed candidates wouldn’t be able to unilaterally change election laws and procedures. A secretary of state’s powers are set by state constitutions and election laws, safeguarding against a secretary “going rogue,” said Rebecca Green, co-director of the Election Law Program at William & Mary Law School.
And anything a secretary of state does can be challenged in court. Still, election officials wield significant power to interpret and implement the rules.
Benson’s decision to send absentee ballot applications ahead of the 2020 election helped lead to a record turnout of Michigan’s 7.7 million registered voters that year. Of the 5.5 million votes cast, nearly two-thirds were absentee ballots.
But a secretary’s greatest power might be as the face of a state’s election system. In the last two years they have increasingly been responsible for building trust in election processes and in those who administer them.
“Having the person who oversees elections fundamentally believe in the process and in democracy is a pretty important message right now,” said Rogers, of the Democratic secretaries group.
In a January Quinnipiac poll, 57% of voters surveyed said they did not believe there was widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election. However, 71% of Republicans polled said they did.
Trump’s Save America PAC has made donations of $5,000 to $7,000 to his favored candidates in Arizona, Georgia and Michigan. He has brought Rep. Jody Hice (R-Ga.) and Arizona state Rep. Mark Finchem onstage to speak at recent rallies.
Finchem has acknowledged ties to the far-right Oath Keepers and was seen outside the Capitol during the Jan. 6 attack. He promoted the partisan “audit” of Maricopa County’s 2020 election results, though the review found no evidence of fraud, and recently co-sponsored legislation to give Arizona’s Legislature the power to reject election results.
Hice, a former conservative talk show host, told Trump backers at a Georgia rally in September that Raffensperger had “massively compromised the right of the people at the ballot box” and “opened wide the door for all sorts of irregularities and fraud to march into our election system.”
Raffensperger has criticized Hice for challenging the certification of the presidential election but not his own reelection to Congress on the same ballot.
Trump’s endorsed candidates are part of a coalition of “America first” secretary of state hopefuls, according to Jim Marchant, a former GOP state representative in Nevada running to lead elections there. Marchant received Trump’s endorsement in his failed congressional bid in 2020. He sued unsuccessfully to request a new election, claiming he was a victim of voter fraud.
Marchant, who as of now has not received Trump’s endorsement for secretary of state, said allies of the former president encouraged him to forgo a second congressional campaign in favor of running to oversee elections and reaching out to like-minded candidates.
He compared the effort to a now-defunct group launched in 2006 to help elect Democratic secretaries of state following losses in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections that they blamed in part on Republican election officials.
“We’re just learning from them, and we’re going to counter that,” he said.
The effort to elect Trump allies has coincided with a push by GOP lawmakers in several states to shift duties away from secretaries of state, give legislatures more power over elections, and introduce steep fines for election officials who make technical mistakes or send absentee ballot applications to voters who haven’t requested them.
In Arizona, lawmakers blocked Hobbs, the Democratic secretary of state, from representing the state in election cases.
In Georgia, last year’s overhaul of election laws replaced GOP Secretary of State Raffensperger as head of the State Election Board with a political appointee, and gave the board the power to take over local election boards.
Raffensperger has also suffered political consequences: a well-funded primary challenge from Hice and censure by the state GOP.
Although efforts to transfer power from election officials to lawmakers have been successful in GOP-controlled states, they have stalled in states with split governments, such as Michigan, where Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer vetoed voting bills from the GOPheld Legislature.
In response, conservatives have launched a petition drive in Michigan seeking to impose stricter voter ID laws, ban donations to local election offices and block local officials from sending out unsolicited absentee ballot applications. Another petition seeks to create a powerful board to audit election results, including those in 2020. The petitions need 340,000 valid signatures to advance to a vote in the Legislature. If passed, they cannot be vetoed.
As the 2022 midterms approach, Benson said she and her staff are meeting with voters to answer questions about election security, encouraging them to tend to the testing of election equipment and volunteer to be poll workers.
The challenge of the 2020 election wasn’t in administering it or tabulating the results, she said — it was anticipating the level of doubt, falsehoods and concerted efforts to overturn the results.
“Though the 2020 effort to overturn a presidential election was a failure,” she said, “we should anticipate that future election subversion efforts will be more sophisticated, and strategic, and perhaps even successful.”