The survival of American Democracy may not depend on who is Senator or President, but who is a state's Secretary of State.

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BY CHARLOTTE ALTER/PHOENIX, Time, SEPTEMBER 21,2022 - ... Fontes is running for Arizona secretary of state, a typically anonymous role that oversees the tedious details of election administration: training poll workers, managing the statewide voter-registration database, verifying the accuracy of voting machines, and certifying election results. But in 2022, the job has taken on an outsize importance. Fontes’ opponent, Republican Mark Finchem, is an election denier: an avid promoter of former President Donald Trump’s baseless claim that the 2020 election was stolen through widespread voter fraud. He is one of many Republicans running to oversee America’s next elections while denying the legitimacy of the last one. ....

The Trumpian Stop the Steal movement is unprecedented for its scale, its longevity, its resistance to established facts, and its embrace of violence as a mechanism to overturn the will of the voters. Proponents believe that the 2020 presidential race was actively stolen, not just that the outcome was unfair. They believe this so strongly that many of them stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 to stop the election’s certification, breaking a nearly 250-year tradition of peacefully transferring power. They believe it even though judges found that more than 60 of Trump’s postelection legal challenges were lacking in merit; even though state and federal investigations have repeatedly found no widespread voter fraud in 2020; and even though Trump’s own Department of Homeland Security, Justice Department, and FBI vouched for the election’s integrity. In Arizona, the Republican-sponsored audit that set out to prove mass voter fraud in the state actually revealed the opposite, uncovering a handful more votes for Biden and fewer for Trump. ...

If any of these candidates win, experts warn, they would possess a broad array of powers to undermine future elections if they don’t like the results. A rogue election official could attempt to prematurely stop the counting of ballots, pervert the Electoral College process, turn over the outcome of the election to partisan state legislators, or simply refuse to certify the result, all while publicly sowing doubt about the validity of the contest. It could present an existential test for American democracy. “If you can’t have trusted, neutral people running our elections, then you don’t really have free and fair elections,” says Lawrence Norden, senior director of the Elections and Government Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a law and policy institute. “Then we’re not a functioning democracy anymore.” 

...of 552 Republicans on the ballot in 2022, 201 have stated that the 2020 election was stolen or taken action to overturn the results, and an additional 61 have “raised questions” about the outcome. According to this tally, roughly 60% of American voters will have at least one election denier on their ballot in November. Many of them are running for statewide roles that would oversee the next election. (link to the full article)

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