Georgia state representative Bee Nguyen has seemed destined to wage epic battles in her fast-changing state ever since replacing Stacey Abrams in its legislature four years ago when the now-nationally-recognized Democrat announced her first bid for governor.

Or maybe it’s since former president and Georgia native Jimmy Carter decided, more than 40 years ago, to double the number of refugees admitted to the US from Vietnam – including her parents. Nguyen was born in Iowa, but has lived in Georgia since her parents moved here when she was seven.

Now, events of recent months have made it clearer than ever what’s at stake for Nguyen in her next bid: becoming Georgia’s secretary of state, responsible for overseeing elections and other duties in a state that seems set to be at the center of 2022’s midterm elections and also a key battleground in the 2024 presidential race.

Since becoming the first Asian American woman in Georgia’s legislature, she has led her party’s fight against Republican-backed restrictions on voting. Now, if she becomes her party’s nominee for secretary of state, her ideas may prove vital to building election integrity and restoring voter confidence in Georgia, and by example, elsewhere in America at a moment when US democracy itself seems in peril.

She may have just received a boost last week when Abrams announced her intentions to run for governor again. If successful, Abrams would become the nation’s first Black woman governor. Having Abrams on the ballot should “mobilize resources and get people aware of the seriousness” of the midterm elections next year, said Adrienne Jones, political science professor at Morehouse College. Having Abrams in office may provide a backstop to protecting elections in Georgia as well, Nguyen said. “We need Stacey Abrams to veto further erosion of voting rights,” she said – especially if federal voting rights legislation isn’t passed.

Still, the challenges Nguyen faces include Georgia being one of three states where Donald Trump has endorsed Republican candidates for secretary of state who believe the 2020 election was “stolen”, along with Arizona and Michigan. The plan is to help elect election administrators who will make it difficult for Trump to lose in 2024. The former president has already visited Georgia to stump for current member of Congress Jody Hice, who is hoping to oust incumbent Brad Raffensperger – the same official who taped Trump’s 2 January phone call, in which the former president asked the current secretary of state to find “11,780 votes”. Fulton county district Attorney Fani Willis is leading an investigation to determine if Trump committed a crime in that call and other efforts to change last year’s election results.

These events, along with continuing threats against Georgia election officials and poll workers, have made Georgia emblematic of the chaos surrounding voting and elections in the US. The resulting situation has given the once-overlooked office of secretary of state new importance, Nguyen said.

In that context, “We’re no longer looking at this as a Georgia issue,” she said. “It’s an American issue.”

At the same time, the challenges for Georgia’s next secretary of state aren’t limited to overseeing elections in a state where millions of voters still believe the 2020 election was stolen. Or even sorting out the impacts of the state’s new election law, which allows the Republican-controlled legislature to take over local election boards, and is the subject of a handful of lawsuits alleging that the law makes it harder for thousands to vote.

If elected, Nguyen will also have to face the fact that Georgia had already been struggling with election cybersecurity issues before 2020, resulting in a federal judge ordering former secretary of state and now governor Brian Kemp to scrap the entire state’s system – a historical first. Then the legislature ignored top cybersecurity experts and bought another vulnerable system – first used statewide in last year’s election. There’s also a 2018 US Commission on Civil Rights report that rated Georgia among the nation’s worst for violating the rights of voters.

Against this backdrop, Nguyen has adopted a clear-eyed, practical approach to her campaign. Reached by phone after returning to Atlanta from meetings with community groups in coastal Georgia, she mentions a query she got about the Republican-controlled state legislature certifying elections under the new law. “I said, there’s nothing we can do about that. The secretary of state’s office is a safeguard to democracy – but it’s not a silver bullet.”

Communicating transparently with the public, combating disinformation, and evaluating past elections for successes and failures are all key to protecting elections, said John S Cusick, counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund who is representing plaintiffs in one of the suits against Georgia’s new law. “While there are limitations, there are also opportunities,” he said.

Nguyen has a host of ideas to “help offset” the new law, as well as restore voter confidence.

They include building cybersecurity expertise into the secretary of state’s office, she said. “What I envision is hiring top-notch security experts,” she said. Their duties would include monitoring threats to the election system, as well as disinformation and conspiracies online, and communicating with the state’s 159 counties and their election officials in real time.

As a legislator, Nguyen voted against the current $100-plus million computerized elections system, chosen despite top cybersecurity experts recommending that the state use hand-marked paper ballots, as in many other states.

This decision is what Richard DeMillo, chairman of Georgia Tech’s School of Cybersecurity and Privacy, calls the “original sin” underlying Georgia’s current situation. “They denied the ground truth … that these are opaque systems with vulnerabilities,” he said. “This is independent of whether the [2020] election was hacked, of which there is no widespread evidence.”

Still, scrapping the entire system now would mean that Republican legislators “would have to admit they made an error”, said Nguyen. Her plan would at least make cybersecurity part of the central function of the secretary of state’s office, a first. She hopes to pay for it with federal funds.

Other ideas include communicating by mail, text and email with registered voters when trying to maintain rolls current, instead of using only mail and then “purging” voters from the rolls when they don’t respond.

“The state should be doing everything they can to notify voters,” she said – including about changes such as new deadlines for requesting absentee ballots or new polling locations. Also, she would make more information on voting available in languages other than English – a practice still controversial in Georgia. And, she would like to install computerized kiosks in grocery stores located in areas with spotty Internet access, to enable voters to do everything from updating registrations to sending in absentee ballots.

As for election workers – the historically anonymous and now increasingly threatened key to running elections – “what I have witnessed as a member of the Government Affairs Committee [of the legislature] is that the secretary of state isn’t acting as a collaborative partner” with local election boards, Nguyen said. She wants to change that, improving training, and, she hopes, using federal funds to help counties obtain the equipment they need to avoid such issues as long lines due to a lack of voting machines.

Although Nguyen allows that some of these ideas may seem “unsexy”, she says they are “necessary pieces to safeguard democracy. It’s like, ‘Here’s what we can do.’”

One thing that Nguyen recognizes as necessary to run for secretary of state in the post-Trump era is a personal security plan.

As an Asian-American woman in the public eye, she has become accustomed to bigotry; she noted that someone had posted on Twitter several days before we spoke, “Go back to your shit-hole country.” But “before last year, there was general harassment,” she said. “Now it’s more death threats.”

Late last year, Nguyen personally contacted voters from a list Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s team had compiled, after the Big Lie promoter alleged they had voted fraudulently. Nguyen proved the accusation to be wrong. Video of her testimony was widely seen. The death threats increased. She contacted law enforcement officials; they advised that she remove personal information from the Internet as much as possible. “I asked family members to lock down their social media accounts,” she added. Police drove by her house.

The situation is not without irony for Nguyen. “I have a frame of reference from my parents,” she said. “They saw a loss of civil liberties. My Dad was imprisoned by the government for three years. They have said to me that they never believed they would lose their country. I’m very concerned – we’re facing threats, disinformation, people actively trying to dismantle democracy. I believe we have a limited time to redirect ourselves.”