Meet Election Deniers Aiming to Control Our Elections

Nineteen states could elect insurrectionists, their supporters

Arizona Rep. John Finchem has organized events for the Oath Keepers, the right-wing militia group whose leader and 10 other members are charged with seditious conspiracy in the Jan. 6 insurrection.

He was in the crowd outside the U.S. Capitol, posting photos and praise for the attackers on social media. He adheres to the QAnon conspiracy, which sees former president Donald Trump as a savior who will rescue the world from a cabal of elite, Satanic pedophiles.

Finchem also has pushed bills to decertify the 2020 election and to withdraw Arizona’s 11 electoral votes from President Joe Biden. A leading proponent of auditing voting machines, he championed the GOP-ordered review of the 2020 vote, but has never accepted its conclusion that Biden actually won.

Yet, despite these actions, he is now the leading candidate for secretary of state, the office that oversees — and has the potential to undermine — what should be free, fair and accessible elections. Trump has enthusiastically endorsed him. Meanwhile, a citizen lawsuit is trying to remove him from the ballot.

Finchem is one of 23 secretary of state candidates in 19 states who promote “The Big Lie” of a stolen election, according to States United Action, a bipartisan group tracking the races.

“It’s like putting arsonists in charge of the fire department,” Joanna Lydgate, the group’s leader told The New York Times. “When we think about the anti-democracy playbook, you change the rules and you change the players so you can change the outcome.”

During a speech at the Jan. 5 warm-up rally for the insurrection, Finchem described his candidacy as part of a “nationwide populist movement to regain control over our government.” He warned, “This ain’t going away.”

Several of the candidates have formed an America First slate, sharing strategies and fund-raising. Major donors include election conspirators Mike Lindell, chief executive of My Pillow, and Patrick Byrne, a former executive at Overstock.com.

Secretary of state duties typically include managing all aspects of the elections, handling voter registration, allocating voting machines, educating voters, auditing election results and ordering recounts.

The Arizona office is unusually powerful because the state has no lieutenant governor, and the person in this position is next in gubernatorial succession. Finchem has raised $663,000 for his campaign, according to state filings — more than both Democratic challengers. Democrat Katie Hobbs, now in the job, is running for governor.

Congressman Jody Hice seeks to unseat the Georgia official who rebuffed Trump’s attempts to “find” votes after his narrow loss.

Other high-profile Trump endorsees to oversee elections include U.S. Rep. Jody Hice in Georgia, community-college professor Kristina Karamo in Michigan and Jim Marchant, a former state representative, in Nevada. Marchant, Karamo and Finchem spoke at a QAnon conference in Las Vegas in October.

Karamo, overwhelmingly elected by the state GOP convention on April 23, gained national attention with uncorroborated claims that fraudulent ballots were counted in Detroit during the 2020 election. Those allegations have been disproved by both local election officials and the courts.

Marchant, who falsely claimed he was the victim of election fraud after losing a legislative race, is pushing, along with Finchem, a return to the error-prone process of counting paper ballots.

Hice seeks to unseat Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who famously rebuffed Trump’s attempts to “find” votes after his narrow loss. Hice has led in recent polls, but a multi-candidate field makes a runoff likely. Raffensperger is trying hard to win back conservative voters, explaining he only followed the state constitution.

Hice, who called the Jan. 6 insurrection “our 1776 moment,” was one of the GOP lawmakers to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn Biden’s win, and was among those strategizing with White House officials on how to keep Trump in office.

Look beyond promises “to restore election integrity” and consider the chaos and destruction they will forment.

There is a chance that Finchem, along with Arizona congressmen Andy Biggs and Paul Gosar, could be disqualified to hold office. A group of Arizona voters are working with Free Speech for People, a nonpartisan legal group, to remove them from the Aug. 2 primary ballot. They violated their oaths of office by supporting an attack on the country, the group argues. Finchem initially tried to hide his Jan. 6 actions, the lawsuit notes.

The group’s efforts have been rejected by some courts. But an April 22 disqualification hearing targeting Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia did confront the lawmaker with her pro-violence rhetoric. No decision has been made yet about her candidacy.

The insurrection clause of the 14th Amendment hasn’t been invoked since the post-Civil War period. Yet in a way, we are living in another post-civil war period with multiple efforts to hold accountable those who planned and carried out efforts to overturn our democracy.

One sure way: Refuse to give them power. Voters must look beyond promises “to restore election integrity” and consider the chaos and destruction these candidates will likely foment — in local races as well as federal ones.

Whatever happens with the Arizona lawsuit, it rightly argues for the value of trustworthy elections:.“It formalizes a deeper, bedrock norm in our democracy: the peaceful transition of power … An attempt to disrupt those procedures, particularly through violence, is an attack on our country itself.”