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--:-- Noelle King: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Noelle King.
--:-- Zach Montalero: And I'm Zach Montalero, a state politics reporter at Politico.
--:-- Noelle King: So the midterms are coming up in November. Who are you paying attention to this year?
--:-- Zach Montalero: 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.
--:-- Noelle King: And what that means is that they are at the end of the day in charge of elections in their state.
--:-- Zach Montalero: 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.
--:-- Noelle King: 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.
--:-- Zach Montalero: For every state, 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.
--:-- Noelle King: 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.
--:-- Zach Montalero: We're going to fight like hell for voting integrity, and we're going to start with voter Nevada, Jim Marchant, a former state lawmaker.
--:-- Noelle King: 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.
--:-- Zach Montalero: In Michigan, Christina Karamo. 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.
--:-- Noelle King: And then Arizona, where State Rep. Mark Fincham is running for Secretary of State.
--:-- Zach Montalero: Hello, fellow patriots. Are we going to take Arizona back or what?
--:-- Noelle King: 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.
--:-- Zach Montalero: 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 that election for that hearing.
--:-- Noelle King: 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.
--:-- Zach Montalero: 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.
--:-- Noelle King: 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.
--:-- Zach Montalero: 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.
--:-- Noelle King: OK, tell me about Christina Karamo in Michigan.
--:-- Zach Montalero: Karamo 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.
--:-- Noelle King: 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.
--:-- Zach Montalero: She the Republican Party nominee and she won the nomination at a convention not through a primary There they pick those down 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.
--:-- Noelle King: 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.
--:-- Zach Montalero: 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.
--:-- Noelle King: She talks a lot about abortion, which most election officials have nothing to do with.
--:-- Zach Montalero: We have a society where we just slaughter children.
--:-- Noelle King: She's, you know, kind of spread some conspiracy theories and conspiracy theories adjacent, both with and without elections.
--:-- Zach Montalero: 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.
--:-- Noelle King: 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-baller 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.
--:-- Zach Montalero: Kind of going up against someone who has, like, no experience whatsoever in elections, has done basically everything within her power to hurt elections.
--:-- Noelle King: So it's kind of that perfect dichotomy in Michigan.
--:-- Zach Montalero: Tell me about Jim Marchant in Nevada.
--:-- Noelle King: 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.
--:-- Zach Montalero: With our coalition, we're going to counter in reverse what they did. And we're going to get back, get our country back to what our founders gave us and have the votes of the people actually count.
--:-- Noelle King: They can kind of swap ideas, theoretically fundraise for each other, even though none of them are really strong fundraisers.
--:-- Zach Montalero: And Marchant has been trying to rally them all together and give them a common platform and give them a common ideal to run on.
--:-- Noelle King: 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.
--:-- Zach Montalero: The other three have scored Trump's endorsement. But Marchant 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.
--:-- Noelle King: 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?
--:-- Zach Montalero: Earlier this month, Trump was in Pennsylvania rallying for Doug Mastriano. His first general election rally, however we wanted to find general election, was in Pennsylvania to try to get Doug Mastriano elected.
--:-- Noelle King: 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.
--:-- Zach Montalero: Please introduce your next Michigan secretary of state. This is a wonderful woman with a beautiful mom and dad who I just met.
--:-- Noelle King: 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.
--:-- Zach Montalero: That's also in there as well.
--:-- Noelle King: Why has Donald Trump not endorsed Marchand in Nevada?
--:-- Zach Montalero: So the short answer is we don't know. Trump endorsed Marchand in 2020 for his House run, which he lost. So he's obviously familiar with him.
--:-- Noelle King: But Marchand 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.
--:-- Zach Montalero: 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.
--:-- Noelle King: 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.
--:-- Zach Montalero: And Steve Bannon has held up Marchant in particular with these four candidates as the leader of this group.
--:-- Noelle King: You have stirred up a hornet's nest, brother.
--:-- Zach Montalero: 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.
--:-- Noelle King: He's a vegan.
--:-- Zach Montalero: 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.
--:-- Noelle King: So he's being held up at least out there as partially the leader of this group.
--:-- Zach Montalero: 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.
--:-- Noelle King: 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.
--:-- Zach Montalero: 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.
--:-- Noelle King: Of course, this year, we've seen a lot more attention on these races and none of these folks are good fundraisers.
--:-- Zach Montalero: Money isn't everything in politics, but it helps your campaign.
--:-- Noelle King: 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.
--:-- Zach Montalero: That probably won't change this year.
--:-- Noelle King: And some in particular, Doug Mastriano, who does have that statewide platform because he is running for governor.
--:-- Zach Montalero: Even though he's not raising a lot of money, even though there is not that even institutional Republican support for him, he's been polling closely behind the Democratic gubernatorial nominee, Josh Shapiro there.
--:-- Noelle King: You know, could Mark Fincham, Christina Karamo, Jim Marchant win? Absolutely.
--:-- Zach Montalero: These are down ballot races that don't attract a lot of attention. So it gives candidates a lot easier path to winning 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.
--:-- Noelle King: Could a secretary of state really do a lot of damage to a state's electoral system?
--:-- Zach Montalero: 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.
--:-- Noelle King: They don't have that authority.
--:-- Zach Montalero: But they both have kind of sweeping authority to certify elections in many states saying, yes, this is who the winner is.
--:-- Noelle King: 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.
--:-- Zach Montalero: 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.
--:-- Noelle King: But they do have so many entry points into the election system that can really tip the scales.
--:-- Zach Montalero: Sure they may not be able to declare unilaterally who the winner is but there so many other things that they can do
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--:-- Noelle King: If you like to save but also like to stay in style, Burlington is your answer.
--:-- Zach Montalero: And the question you'll be asking yourself is, why go anywhere else?
--:-- Noelle King: Burlington. Deals. Brands. Wow.
--:-- Zach Montalero: So now Christina is running for secretary of state to clean up Michigan's election for good.
--:-- Noelle King: 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 Montalero: 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?
--:-- Noelle King: It is, we would hope, too late to overturn the 2020 election, as these folks might have wanted to happen.
--:-- Zach Montalero: They got to do something going forward. What are they pledging to do?
--:-- Noelle King: Yeah, so not all of them have ruled out somehow overturning the 2020 election.
--:-- Zach Montalero: Oh, dear Lord. 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.
--:-- Noelle King: But not all of them have ruled it out.
--:-- Zach Montalero: The Marchant group kind of puts forward six broad kind of policy ideas.
--:-- Noelle King: One big one that they kind of focus on is voter ID.
--:-- Zach Montalero: We ran better elections in Afghanistan, a war-torn third world country, than I've seen in Pennsylvania in some cases here.
--:-- Noelle King: In Afghanistan, the International Commission mandated voter ID.
--:-- Zach Montalero: 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.
--:-- Noelle King: Voter ID is something that's not just limited toward this kind of group of election deniers.
--:-- Zach Montalero: It's popular among the American right. It's actually popular among most Americans.
--:-- Noelle King: Most Americans think in poll after poll after poll believe there should be some level of ID.
--:-- Zach Montalero: And ID laws are very, very different across the country.
--:-- Noelle King: So no one state kind of has a copycat policy.
--:-- Zach Montalero: But they're running to have some level of ID, likely photo ID in their state.
--:-- Noelle King: Another thing they're running on, which actually most election officials broadly think is a good idea, paper ballots.
--:-- Zach Montalero: Most people vote on paper ballots, meaning that when you go fill out your ballot, you actually have the physical paper that is counted.
--:-- Noelle King: What makes them different is that most states then count those ballots with a machine.
--:-- Zach Montalero: Much, much quicker to count an election with a ballot tabulator than doing it by hand.
--:-- Noelle King: A lot of these candidates are running saying, actually, we want to go back to hand counting ballots.
--:-- Zach Montalero: We're going to do our best to get rid of the voting machines in Nye County.
--:-- Noelle King: And then we're going to go to other counties here in Nevada.
--:-- Zach Montalero: Sounds nice in theory. It's something that every experienced election official would absolutely tear their hair out about.
--:-- Noelle King: 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.
--:-- Zach Montalero: It would take far too much time to hand count it.
--:-- Noelle King: 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.
--:-- Zach Montalero: So they're running to do that.
--:-- Noelle King: And maybe the third and one of the biggest things is looking to eliminate or severely curtail the use of mail-in voting.
--:-- Zach Montalero: We're going to do our best to get rid of these ridiculous universal mail-in ballots.
--:-- Noelle King: Most states in America allow at least most of their voters to vote via the mail.
--:-- Zach Montalero: What these candidates are running on is saying, no, no one can request a mail ballot without a specific excuse.
--:-- Noelle King: And that excuse is typically, you know, disability, age is sometime included, or you're out of the county on Election Day.
--:-- Zach Montalero: So it would be a really severe rollback of access to mail ballots.
--:-- Noelle King: 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.
--:-- Zach Montalero: If they win, given that they're in swing states, the big unknown is going to be the 2024 election.
--:-- Noelle King: What could they do in those jobs to upend the electoral process in the states where they're from in 2024?
--:-- Zach Montalero: 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.
--:-- Noelle King: This person won, who said we won? And it's really unprecedented.
--:-- Zach Montalero: We don't exactly know how it would go about, but they could say, actually, no, I'm not certifying this election.
--:-- Noelle King: Though what happens next is a huge question mark.
--:-- Zach Montalero: It would almost assuredly end up in state and or federal court.
--:-- Noelle King: 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.
--:-- Zach Montalero: The next things they can do vary really dramatically state by state.
--:-- Noelle King: Some states have pretty strong secretaries of state. Some states have pretty weak ones.
--:-- Zach Montalero: But broadly, a lot of them can set policy.
--:-- Noelle King: They can't change the laws automatically, but they can make things much, much harder to happen.
--:-- Zach Montalero: Think about drop boxes, which have become a point of contention.
--:-- Noelle King: What sort of rules could they put around drop boxes?
--:-- Zach Montalero: What sort of rules could they put around signature matching?
--:-- Noelle King: If you submit a mail ballot in many states, there a process called signature matching
--:-- Zach Montalero: How do they make it harder to have those ballots be approved
--:-- Noelle King: And what many of these candidates also say they want to do is totally erase the state current voter rolls and start fresh
--:-- Zach Montalero: 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.
--:-- Noelle King: We're going to reset, in fact, registration. You have to re-register. We're going to start all over again.
--:-- Zach Montalero: I don't think it's a path legally to do that.
--:-- Noelle King: That would certainly face many, many, many, many challenges in the court.
--:-- Zach Montalero: 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.
--:-- Noelle King: So yes, certifying elections is important, and that could be a big, big thing that they mess up.
--:-- Zach Montalero: But at every step of the way, throughout an election, a secretary can kind of put their thumb on the scale.
--:-- Noelle King: And that is what I think most concerning, at least to me.
--:-- Zach Montalero: What do they do? Not when everyone's watching, you know, the day after the election.
--:-- Noelle King: What do they do in the two years leading up to it?
--:-- Zach Montalero: I'm curious about how much concern this is causing in the secretary of state community.
--:-- Noelle King: Christina Caramo has a political rival. Her name is Jocelyn Benson. She's the current secretary of state in Michigan.
--:-- Zach Montalero: She's publicly been banging the drum about how she's worried.
--:-- Noelle King: Now, to be fair, she wants to win her election.
--:-- Zach Montalero: Have you talked to any current secretaries of state about what they are most afraid of?
--:-- Noelle King: Secretaries are concerned about these folks running for office.
--:-- Zach Montalero: And here we are talking about concerted efforts, some of them by candidates themselves, to undermine that basic process.
--:-- Noelle King: Obviously, the people who are directly running against them are concerned about it.
--:-- Zach Montalero: If you are the secretary in Michigan, you are concerned about your opponent.
--:-- Noelle King: If you are in Arizona, you know, you are concerned about who your successor is.
--:-- Zach Montalero: But it's a broader fear.
--:-- Noelle King: 2020 really tested this bipartisan consensus of secretaries of state.
--:-- Zach Montalero: It was a tough year for election officials at all levels.
--:-- Noelle King: I don't know what injecting someone as militant as Mark Fincham into that conversation would do.
--:-- Zach Montalero: 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.
--:-- Noelle King: How have you seen this play out with potential voters? That weird balancing act these candidates have to strike.
--:-- Zach Montalero: It's kind of like the Georgia runoffs after the 2020 election.
--:-- Noelle King: 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.
--:-- Zach Montalero: If you don't, we will win. If you don't, we will lose America.
--:-- Noelle King: This Tuesday, everything is on the line. We are going to stop socialism in its tracks. Together, we are going to save...
--:-- Zach Montalero: So how these candidates kind of walk that line remains strange and interesting.
--:-- Noelle King: You know, Mark Fincham has said in interviews that, you know, what we got to do is we got to vote so much.
--:-- Zach Montalero: Everyone's going to go out and vote that they can't possibly sneak in enough fake votes.
--:-- Noelle King: We know that they're going to try and inject fictitious votes into the system.
--:-- Zach Montalero: Obviously, no one's sneaking in fake votes, but that's kind of how they go about doing it.
--:-- Noelle King: And that's one of the things that people who oppose them kind of like to point out.
--:-- Zach Montalero: 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?
--:-- Noelle King: Stephen Richer, who is the Republican Maricopa County recorder out in Arizona, says that all the time.
--:-- Zach Montalero: I unseated the former Democrat chief elections official of Maricopa County. Yes, I beat the Democrat on a ballot that was supposedly rigged.
--:-- Noelle King: 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.
--:-- Zach Montalero: 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.
--:-- Noelle King: 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.
--:-- Zach Montalero: A lot of Americans don't think about elections. They think about elections as a one-a-day event.
--:-- Noelle King: Elections really are, you know, a full year.
--:-- Zach Montalero: It does not take 48 hours to prepare for a primary. It takes a year.
--:-- Noelle King: It does not take 72 hours to prepare for a general election. It takes that whole year running up to it.
--:-- Zach Montalero: So the challenge is how do you kind of restore people's trust in elections when they don't trust it?
--:-- Noelle King: Yeah. And there's been no really good answer to that, honestly.
--:-- Zach Montalero: 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.
--:-- Noelle King: It is they're outgunned.
--:-- Zach Montalero: You know, your secretary of state, your county clerk, your local registrar does not have the same platform as some of these people do.
--:-- Noelle King: And that's true for Republicans and that's true for Democrats.
--:-- Zach Montalero: Some part of America at this point won't be reached by election officials. will never believe we have free elections.
--:-- Noelle King: And they're wrong, but they'll never believe that there are free elections.
--:-- Zach Montalero: 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.
--:-- Noelle King: Come in and see.
--:-- Zach Montalero: That's been the real push since 2016, but especially since 2020 is transparency, transparency, transparency.
--:-- Noelle King: Come in and see how we test the ballot machines to make sure that they are actually counting what they say they're going to count.
--:-- Zach Montalero: Come in and ask questions.
--:-- Noelle King: By and large, your state election official, your local county clerk, whatever, will be more than happy to answer your questions.
--:-- Zach Montalero: 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.
--:-- Noelle King: They want to answer your questions.
--:-- Zach Montalero: They want you to come in and watch the testing.
--:-- Noelle King: They want poll watchers to actually watch and see how American elections are run.
--:-- Zach Montalero: So it's the arms races.
--:-- Noelle King: Can you reach enough Americans who just have a weird gut feeling about it but aren't so far gone?
--:-- Zach Montalero: Can you reach them in time?
--:-- Noelle King: And that's the real question ahead of this year and ahead of 2024.
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