Campaigning to Oversee Elections, While Denying the Last One (Marc Elias says read this)

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Marc E. Elias
@marceelias
Every proponent of Electoral Count Act reform needs to read this article and explain how their proposal will make things better and not potentially worse.
In Arizona, State Representative Mark Finchem is part of an unusual pro-Trump coalition of secretary of state candidates.
nytimes.com

Campaigning to Oversee Elections, While Denying the Last One
Brazenly partisan candidates who insist that Donald Trump won the 2020 election are transforming races for the once-obscure office of secretary of state.
4:09 PM · Jan 30, 2022

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/30/us/politics/election-deniers-secretary-of-state.html

No paywall
https://archive.fo/hHWjB

PHOENIX — Nearly two dozen Republicans who have publicly questioned or disputed the results of the 2020 election are running for secretary of state across the country, in some cases after being directly encouraged by allies of former President Donald J. Trump.

Their candidacies are alarming watchdog groups, Democrats and some fellow Republicans, who worry that these Trump supporters, if elected to posts that exist largely to safeguard and administer the democratic process, would weaponize those offices to undermine it — whether by subverting an election outright or by sowing doubts about any local, state or federal elections their party loses.

For decades, secretaries of state worked in relative anonymity, setting regulations and enforcing rules for how elections were administered by local counties and boards. Some held their jobs for many years and viewed themselves not as politicians but as bureaucrats in chief, tending to such arcane responsibilities as keeping the state seal or maintaining custody of state archives.

The aftermath of the 2020 presidential election changed all that.

In the two months between Election Day and Congress’s certification of President Biden’s victory, Mr. Trump and his allies pressured Republican secretaries of state, election board members and other officials in battleground states to overturn his defeat. In a phone call that is now the subject of an Atlanta grand jury investigation into Mr. Trump’s actions in Georgia, the former president urged Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, to “find 11,780 votes” — the margin by which Mr. Trump lost the state to Mr. Biden.

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