Today, Explained - When an election denier becomes election chief

Episode Date: September 13, 2022

A quartet of 2020 election deniers are running for secretary of state this year in key swing states, raising questions about whether they could fairly administer the 2024 presidential election. This episode was produced by Victoria Chamberlin, fact-checked by Victoria Dominguez and Serena Solin, engineered by Paul Robert Mounsey, and edited by Matt Collette and Noel King, who also hosted. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained   Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Secretary of State in any given U.S. state is often the person who oversees elections. Once upon a time, this was a low-key job. But enter Christina Caramo, a Republican who's running to be Secretary of State in Michigan. While campaigning, she's offered her thoughts on the non-political Cardi B. Cardi B is another tool of Lucifer because she peddles filth in the culture. And on the political, abortion. I'm going to discuss how abortion is child sacrifice and how it's really a satanic practice. Karamo has formed an alliance with three other Republican candidates for secretary of state.

What they have in common is a delusion. They think Donald Trump won the 2020 election and they want to make it right. They are people running with the explicit stated purpose of either trying to overturn the last election that happened now almost two years ago and running to make it easier for their guy, Donald Trump, to win in 2024. Ahead on Today Explained. Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. And you are?

My name is Zach Monsalero, and I am a state politics reporter at Politico. So the midterms are coming up in November. Who are you paying attention to this year? The folks running for office to run elections. We have 50 states in D.C., so we have 51 different ways of running elections. But in a lot of states, a secretary of state is that state's chief election officer. And what that means is that they are, at the end of the day, in charge of elections in their state. Not every state has a secretary of state. Some of them do it with state boards of elections. Some of them have a lieutenant governor handle it. But by and large, your secretary of state is the one who runs the top line policy for elections in your state. In these upcoming midterms, 25 states are going to decide who's in charge of state elections.

You've been looking into candidates for these offices who deny the results of the 2020 elections and who may win. Tell me about who you've been following. For every state, like like Vermont, where the candidate there has no shot of winning, there's these battleground states that kind of track with what you think of as a traditional battleground state, where the Secretary of State candidate, who is an election denier, could very well be the next chief election official come 2023. The four I'm really watching the most closely is Pennsylvania, where Doug Mastriano is a state senator running for governor, but he can appoint the secretary of state. We're going to fight like hell for voting integrity, and we're going to start with voter ID.

Nevada, Jim Marchant, a former state lawmaker. And the reason our country's in the shape it's in right now is because we didn't pay attention to the Secretary of State races from a long time ago. We let George Soros and Harry Reid get on top of it back in 2004. In Michigan, Christina Caramo. These people are looking to gaslight us. And part of the gaslight is to corrupt the election system so we no longer have control over our republic. And then Arizona, where State Rep. Mark Fincham is running for secretary of state. Hello, fellow patriots. Are we going to take Arizona back or what?

Those are the four kind of top of the ticket election deniers running for chief election official in their states. Tell me about each of them. Tell me about Mark Fincham first. Mark Fincham is maybe the most prominent of the four of them. He really rose to fame in the state and elsewhere shortly after the 2020 election where he hosted allies of the then President Donald Trump, now former President Trump, right after the election for that hearing. And I'm using air quotes on a podcast, but for a hearing where he kind of spread conspiracy theories about the election. Secretary of State candidate and Oro Valley State Representative Mark Fincham hosted a day-long hearing, which included many of the same players we saw in Maricopa County's election recount. Try to create misinformation about the election has basically

never stopped since then. Individuals clearly do not want us to look at what's going on in Pima County. It's the sit down and shut up attitude that we have been getting in this county since I moved here in 1999. Arizona had this thing called an audit is what the folks there call it. State Representative Mark Fincham is calling for statewide door-to-door voter verification in Arizona. But it was really like a ham-fisted review of the election by election deniers. Now there are people that are in this race who they didn't like the audit. They say it undermines democracy. And while Mark Fincham wasn't running it, he was one of the chief proponents of it. And now he is running in that state to be secretary of state.

Okay, tell me about Christina Caramo in Michigan. Caramo was running in Michigan after she was a poll watcher in the 2020 election. The folks who watched the proceedings, basically, and she claimed to have seen some malfeasance there, never backed it up, kind of shot off from there. The poll worker then said, I think I'm going to give it to the Democrats. That's absolutely absurd. That is illegal. The vote should have been tossed out. She's the Republican Party's nominee, and she won the nomination at a convention, not through a primary.

There, they pick those down-ballot statewide offices through a convention. So she didn't have a whole regular population voting on her to give her the nomination, but she won there. And she has caught a lot of attention for sometimes outside the norms view, we'll say, but very prominently kind of talks about other issues kind of out of the purview of an election administrator. But having intimate relationships with people who are demonically possessed or oppressed, I strongly believe that a person opens themselves up to possession. Demonic possession is real. She talks a lot about abortion, which most election officials have nothing to do with. We have a society where we just slaughter children.

She's, you know, kind of spread some conspiracy theories and conspiracy theories adjacent, both with and without elections. And there she's running against the Democratic incumbent, probably what might be one of the closest states. Jocelyn Benson there is the Democratic Secretary of State. It's one of those things that there's just so many races going on at one time that it's tough to get a handle on these down ballot races, that someone like Secretary Benson, who's got a statewide profile, has been running for elections for a while, and she quite literally wrote the book on secretaries of state, kind of going up against someone who has no experience whatsoever in elections, has done basically everything within her power

to hurt elections. So it's kind of that perfect dichotomy in Michigan. Tell me about Jim Marchant in Nevada. Jim Marchant is the self-appointed leader of all these candidates. He brought them together in a coalition called the America First Secretary of State Coalition. With our coalition, we're going to counter and reverse what they did, and we're going to get our country back to what our founders gave us and have the votes of the people actually count. They can kind of swap ideas, theoretically fundraise for each other, even though none of them are really strong fundraisers. And Marchand has been trying to like rally them all together and give them a common platform

and give them a common ideal to run on. Ironically, out of the four of those folks that we've talked about, he's the only one not endorsed by former President Donald Trump. The other three have scored Trump's endorsement. But Marchand is trying to turn these individual state races and states spread out across the country into more of a collective, into more of a movement, and kind of been spearheading a lot of those efforts. How full-throated is his support? Has he come right out and said, these are folks who want to overturn the 2020 election, and that's why they've got me behind him? Earlier this month, Trump was in Pennsylvania rallying for Doug Mastriano.

His first general election rally, however we want to define general election, was in Pennsylvania to try to get Doug Mastriano elected. Doug is a former army colonel who honorably served our country in uniform for 30 years before going on to fight for you in the state senate. And of course, Doug Mastriano is also running for governor. This is not just election-based, but Trump has been clear, I will say, very clear about how he feels about the 2020 election, and all of these candidates are rowing in the same direction as him. Please introduce your next Michigan Secretary of State. This is a wonderful woman with a beautiful mom and dad who I just met. And the important thing is, even if they can't overturn the 2020 election, which they can't do, it's what can they do for future elections that could potentially

put a thumb on the scale for a Trump or a Trump-like candidate. That's also in there as well. Why has Donald Trump not endorsed Marchant in Nevada? So the short answer is we don't know. Trump endorsed Marchant in 2020 for his house run, which he lost. So he's obviously familiar with him. But Marchant hasn't picked up the former president's endorsement this year, which is interesting given that he got out early for a handful of the other candidates in primaries. I guess maybe Marchant had the most competitive primary. He didn't have the obvious path to the nomination, so that could be part of it. These folks will never, ever, ever talk to the mainstream press, more or less, but where they do go is they go talk to Steve Bannon, and Steve Bannon has held

up Marchant in particular with these four candidates as the leader of this group. You have stirred up a hornet's nest, brother, a down ballot race like Secretary of State. You got the national, international, Guardian, CNN, BBC. All they're saying is this Marchant guy is a bad guy. He's a vegan. So it kind of gives him that platform in that far right media with Steve Bannon, with, you know, similar broadcasters like Bannon and other like OAN and things like that. So he's being held up at least out there as partially the leader of this group. And sure, you know, there's not a lot of big money flowing through these races. Secretary of State contests don't typically attract a lot of spending even in a normal year. And this is certainly an abnormal year.

So it's not like Marchant is serving as a major hub for donors or anything like that. But setting some sort of level of platform, that's kind of what he has done and what he's professed, basically. These four folks have all survived the GOP primary. Can they win a general election? There's not a lot of attention on these races, so it really gives any one of them a viable opportunity to win. Of course, this year, we've seen a lot more attention on these races, and none of these folks are good fundraisers. Money isn't everything in politics, but it helps your campaign. But just think about the states

where they're running, right? Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada have some of the closest elections over the last decade. That probably won't change this year. And some in particular, Doug Mastriano, who does have that statewide platform because he is running for governor, even though he's not raising a lot of money, even though there is not that even institutional Republican support for him, he has been polling closely behind the Democratic gubernatorial nominee, Josh Shapiro, there. You know, could Mark Fincham, Christina Karamo, Jim Marchant win? Absolutely.

These are down-ballot races that don't attract a lot of attention, so it gives candidates a lot easier path to winning in a nomination that they wouldn't otherwise win in a Senate race where there would be hundreds of millions of dollars potentially pouring in to kind of tip the race. Could a secretary of state really do a lot of damage to a state's electoral system? A secretary of state can't just snap their fingers and all of a sudden they declare whoever is the next senator, whoever wins the presidential election from that state, they can't do that. They don't have that authority. But they both have kind of sweeping authority to certify elections in many states saying, yes, this is who the winner is. And they also have in many states, and it's very different state by state, but in many states, they have the ability to set top line policy.

So, no, a secretary of state can't just snap their fingers, declare the person who lost by 100,000 votes is suddenly the next senator, the next governor, the next whatever. But they do have so many entry points into the election system that can really tip the scales. Sure, they may not be able to declare unilaterally who the winner is, but there's so many other things that they can do. Thank you. digital picture frames. They were named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura frames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an aura frame as a gift, you can personalize it, you can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an aura frame for himself. So setup was super simple. In my case, we were celebrating my grandmother's birthday and she's very fortunate.

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So now Christina is running for Secretary of State to clean up Michigan's election for good. Today Explained, we're back with Zach Montalaro of Politico, who's been covering a group of four would-be Republican secretaries of state who have banded together under the delusion that the 2020 election was stolen. Zach, if these America First coalition candidates win in November, and they did pick a nice anodyne name for their group, what is their platform? It is, we would hope, too late to overturn the 2020 election, as these folks might have wanted to happen.

They got to do something going forward. What are they pledging to do? Yeah, so not all of them have ruled out somehow overturning the 2020 election, which, yeah, I guess to be incredibly clear, it's both not based in reality. And even if it was, which it is not, there is no legal path to do so. But not all of them have ruled it out. The Marchant group kind of puts forward six broad kind of policy ideas. One big one that they kind of focus on is voter ID.

We ran better elections in Afghanistan, a war-torn third world country, than I've seen in Pennsylvania in some cases here. In Afghanistan, the International Commission mandated voter ID. In Pennsylvania, you just show up and sign a piece of paper or mail in something with a signature we don't even know if it matches anything. Voter ID is something that's not just limited toward this kind of group of election deniers. It's popular among the American right. It's actually popular among most Americans. Most Americans think in poll after poll after poll believe there should be some level of ID. And ID laws are very,

very different across the country. So no one state kind of has a copycat policy, but they're running to have some level of ID, likely photo ID, in their state. Another thing they're running on, which actually most election officials broadly think is a good idea, paper ballots. Most people vote on paper ballots, meaning that when you go fill out your ballot, you actually have the physical paper that is counted. What makes them different is that most states then count those ballots with a machine. Much, much quicker to count an election with a ballot tabulator than doing it by hand. A lot of these candidates are running saying, actually, we want to go back to hand counting ballots. We're going to do our best to get rid of the voting machines in Nye County.

And then we're going to go to other counties here in Nevada. Sounds nice in theory. It's something that every experienced election official would absolutely tear their hair out about. Some of these states, if you think about, I don't know, Maricopa County in Arizona, for example, could have dozens and dozens of races. It would take far too much time to hand count it. And hand counting is likely less accurate than a ballot tabulator, which has been proven over and over and over and over again to be accurate. So they're running to do that.

And maybe the third and one of the biggest things is looking to eliminate or severely curtail the use of mail-in voting. We're going to do our best to get rid of these ridiculous universal mail-in ballots. Most states in America allow at least most of their voters to vote via the mail. What these candidates are running on is saying, no, no one can request a mail ballot without a specific excuse. And that excuse is typically, you know, disability, age is sometimes included, or you're out of the county on election day.

So it would be a really severe rollback of access to mail ballots. It's an army of people across our state who are fighting back little MAGA warriors, and we're getting the job done. Thank you. If they win, given that they're in swing states, the big unknown is going to be the 2024 election. What could they do in those jobs to upend the electoral process in the states where they're from in 2024? So one that gets the most attention, and I actually think wrongly, but one that gets the most attention is certifying elections, being that final check, this person won, who said we won? And it's really unprecedented. We don't exactly know how it would go about, but they could say, actually, no, I'm not certifying this election, though what happens next is a huge question mark. It would almost assuredly end up in state and or federal court,

but even the premise of that, even saying they're not going to sign off on a free and fair election is in itself just a challenge to the fundamental baseline of the system. The next things they can do vary really dramatically state by state. Some states have pretty strong secretaries of state. Some states have pretty weak ones. But broadly, a lot of them can set policy. They can't change the laws automatically, but they can make things much, much harder to happen. Think about drop boxes, which have become a point of contention. What sort of rules could they put around drop boxes? What sort of rules could they put around signature matching? If you submit a mail ballot in many states, there's a process called signature matching. How do they make it

harder to have those ballots be approved? And what many of these candidates also say they want to do is totally erase the state's current voter rolls and start fresh. The most important thing is I get to appoint the secretary of state, and that secretary of state is going to clean up the election logs. We're going to reset, in fact, the registration. You have to re-register. We're going to start all over again. I don't think there's a path legally to do that. That would certainly face many, many, many, many challenges in the court. But there's just every little pressure point that they kind of stick their fingers into

and make elections more difficult to run and make it more challenging for these county-level officials to do their jobs. So yes, certifying elections is important, and that could be a big, big thing that they mess up. But at every step of the way, throughout an election, a secretary can kind of put their thumb on the scale. And that is what's, I think, most concerning, at least to me. What could they do, not when everyone's watching, you know, the day after the election, but what do they do in the two years leading up to it? I'm curious about how much concern this is causing in the Secretary of State community. Christina Karamo has a political rival. Her name is Jocelyn Benson. She's the current Secretary of State in Michigan. She's

publicly been banging the drum about how she's worried. Now, to be fair, she wants to win her election. Have you talked to any current secretaries of state about what they are most afraid of? Secretaries are concerned about these folks running for office. And here we are talking about concerted efforts, some of them by candidates themselves, to undermine that basic process. Obviously, the people who are directly running against them are concerned about it. If you are the secretary in Michigan, you are concerned about your opponent. If you are in Arizona, you know, you are concerned about who your successor is. But it's a broader fear.

2020 really tested this bipartisan consensus of secretaries of state. It was a tough year for election officials at all levels. I don't know what injecting someone as militant as a Mark Fincham into that conversation would do. If you want to cast out on elections and you use your campaign to do it, it seems like you might either bring people around to your way of thinking, or at the very least, continue to fire up those people who think the 2020 election was stolen. How have you seen this play out with potential voters? That weird balancing act these candidates have to strike. It's kind of like the Georgia runoffs after the 2020 election.

And one of the hypotheses for why the Republicans lost there is they were saying, oh, the 2020 election was stolen from you, but go vote again. If you vote, we will win. If you don't, we will lose America. This Tuesday, everything is on the line. again. So how these candidates kind of walk that line remains strange and interesting. You know, Mark Fincham has said in interviews that, you know, what we got to do is we got to vote so much. Everyone's going to go out and vote that they can't possibly sneak in enough fake votes. We know that they're going to try and inject fictitious votes into the system. Obviously, no one's sneaking in fake votes, but that's kind of how they go about doing it. And that's one of the things that people who oppose them kind of like to point out. How are

you running for election saying that elections aren't fair? Wouldn't you just kind of throw your hands up and kind of wash your hands of it? Stephen Richer, who is the Republican Maricopa County recorder out in Arizona, says that all the time. I unseated the former Democrat chief elections official of Maricopa County. Yes, I beat the Democrat on a ballot that were supposedly rigged. These people want to run for election on the same rules that they say aren't fair, or in fact, won their own election on the same rules that they say aren't fair. I don't know how you kind of hold those two competing thoughts in your head, because I don't have them, but they do.

Have you talked to anyone who said, if people like this win elections and start fiddling with the system, Americans' trust in the way we vote is going to bottom out, and that could just be catastrophic. A lot of Americans don't think about elections. They think about elections as a one-a-day event. Elections really are, you know, a full year. It does not take 48 hours to prepare for a primary. It takes a year. It does not take 72 hours to prepare for a general election. It takes that whole year running up to it. So the challenge is how do you kind of restore people's trust in elections when they don't

trust it? And there's been no really good answer to that, honestly. A lot of these honest election officials of both parties, and I want to stress that election officials in America are a bipartisan group and by and large are good people running good elections, doing their best, is they're outgunned. You know, your secretary of state, your county clerk, your local registrar does not have the same platform as some of these people do. And that's true for Republicans, and that's true for Democrats. Some part of America at this point won't be reached by election officials, will never believe we have free elections, and they're wrong, but they'll never believe that there are free elections. It's the race for election officials of both parties to reach the rest of Americans who just don't think about elections all that much and say,

no, look, we do have a fair system. Come in and see. That's been the real push since 2016, but especially since 2020 is transparency, transparency, transparency. Come in and see how we test the ballot machines to make sure that they are actually counting what they're saying they're going to count. Come in and ask questions. By and large, your state election official, your local county clerk, whatever, will be more than happy to answer your questions. Maybe not right at this very second because they're super busy preparing for the general election, but election officials want you to feel good about elections.

They want to answer your questions. They want you to come in and watch the testing. They want poll watchers to actually watch and see how American elections are run. So it's the arms races. Can you reach enough Americans who just have a weird gut feeling about it but aren't so far gone? Can you reach them in time? And that's the real question ahead of this year and ahead of 2024.

Today's show was produced by Victoria Chamberlain and edited by Matthew Collette. It was fact-checked by Tori Dominguez and Serena Solon. It was engineered by Paul Robert Mounsey. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained.