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    South Carolina Primary Guide: How to Vote and What’s on the Ballot

    Not sure if you can vote? Or where? We’ve got you covered. Here is a handy, last-minute guide to voting in South Carolina.How to votePolls close in South Carolina at 7 p.m. Eastern time. People who are in line at their polling location at that time will be allowed to vote.The deadline to register to vote is at least 30 days before any election. Not sure if you’re registered? You can check on this page, with your name, date of birth and part of your Social Security number.If you used an absentee ballot, you can track its status here. Want to use an absentee ballot in the future? Here are the guidelines.Where to voteYou can find polling places near you on this site (it’s the same as where you check your voter registration status).According to the South Carolina secretary of state’s website, absentee ballots must be received by the county voter registration office by 7 p.m. Eastern time on Election Day.What’s on the ballotThere are a number of races for statewide office, as well as many local contests. You’ll be asked to make your pick for governor and House races, among others.Find a personalized sample ballot on this site. More

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    Raffensperger Wins Georgia’s G.O.P. Secretary of State Primary

    Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia Republican official who famously rebuffed former President Donald J. Trump’s requests to “find” enough votes to help him overturn the 2020 election, defeated a Republican primary challenge on Tuesday.Mr. Raffensperger, who serves as Georgia’s top elections official as secretary of state, won his G.O.P. primary against Representative Jody Hice, a Republican congressman who voted to overturn the 2020 election and who was backed by Mr. Trump. The Associated Press called the victory for Mr. Raffensperger, who was able to win back the trust of Republican voters in Georgia by promoting himself as a champion of “election integrity” and rebutting falsehoods made by Mr. Trump and his allies about the 2020 election. His victory amounted to a repudiation of Mr. Trump’s attempts to weaponize 2020 election falsehoods into political success in 2022. Mr. Raffensperger did not mention Mr. Trump by name in his victory remarks on Tuesday night, but he made a clear reference to him. “Not buckling under the pressure is what the people want,” Mr. Raffensperger said. Though Mr. Raffensperger was a hero to many Democrats for his refusal to overturn the 2020 election, he will still face stiff opposition in the general election in November. Democrats have placed a premium on secretary of state races across the country as a means of combating what they view as a wave of new restrictive voting laws. The contest in Georgia between Mr. Raffensperger and Mr. Hice elevated the once-sleepy down-ballot race into a hyperpartisan dogfight, helping to bring national attention to races for secretary of state across the country. After Mr. Hice earned Mr. Trump’s backing, a host of candidates who have publicly questioned or disputed the results of the 2020 election in several states announced their candidacy for secretary of state, worrying Democrats, election experts and some Republicans.After the 2020 presidential election, Mr. Raffensperger became perhaps the most famous secretary of state in the country, as a leaked audio call showed him resisting Mr. Trump’s pressure. And though he lamented the former president’s loss publicly, Mr. Raffensperger repeatedly asserted that Georgia’s elections had been free and fair. This immediately put him in the cross hairs of Mr. Trump, who has focused his political capital on ousting Republicans who either went against his whims after the 2020 election or voted for his impeachment after the riot at the Capitol. Mr. Trump quickly endorsed Mr. Hice, the first secretary of state candidate to earn his endorsement, in March of last year. “Jody has been a steadfast fighter for conservative Georgia values and is a staunch ally of the America First agenda,” Mr. Trump said. “Unlike the current Georgia secretary of state, Jody leads out front with integrity.”Representative Jody Hice at a campaign event in Macon, Ga., in February.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesAs he sought to fend off Mr. Hice’s challenge, Mr. Raffensperger shifted to the right. He was one of the most vocal proponents of the state’s new voting law, which added numerous new regulations and restrictions to casting ballots, even though the law also stripped Mr. Raffensperger of some of his powers as secretary of state. Understand the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6Why are these midterms so important? More

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    In Georgia, a G.O.P. Primary Tests the Power of a Trump Vendetta

    Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is fending off a challenger fueled by Donald J. Trump’s election lies. But do voters still care about 2020 as much as the former president does?ATLANTA — An anti-Trump Republican advocacy group recently organized a focus group of G.O.P voters in Georgia to get their take on perhaps the most competitive and consequential primary election in the state. They heard a lot of indecision.Most of the voters, convened by the group, the Republican Accountability Project, knew little about the race between Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, and his leading challenger, Representative Jody Hice. Mr. Raffensperger seemed to get the benefit of the doubt — until the voters were reminded of the back story.As the state official responsible for certifying the 2020 presidential election results, Mr. Raffensperger rejected President Donald J. Trump’s attempt to overturn his defeat. Mr. Trump recruited Mr. Hice to seek revenge.“Go Jody, I guess?” said one voter.Three out of six others agreed.The exchange offered a glimpse into why the Republican primary race for the office that oversees elections remains a dogfight just days from Election Day, on May 24. Two years after Mr. Trump lost Georgia by the slimmest of margins and Democrats captured both of the state’s open Senate seats, wounds from the 2020 election have still not completely healed for some partisans.But marshaling that residual anger to unseat an incumbent is not an easy feat. Mr. Raffensperger has worked to win back Republicans by casting himself as a defender of “election integrity,” even as he has spent hours debunking a laundry list of false claims about the 2020 election. Some voters’ memories and passions have faded. Many never had strong opinions about their secretary of state.It all has made the race one of the purest tests yet of whether the 2020 election lie can be weaponized to win elections. While polls have shown that leagues of Republican voters in Georgia and elsewhere largely embraced the fiction that the 2020 election was “stolen” in its immediate aftermath, it is not clear those concerns alone, or Mr. Trump’s personal vendetta, are enough to drive voters’ choices.“I think 2020 was really a turning point in how closely people looked at things,” said Salleigh Grubbs, chairwoman of the Cobb County Republican Party. “Before, people might not have even realized that the secretary of state was in charge of running the elections for the state. But now they’re keenly aware of it.”Mr. Hice, whom Mr. Trump endorsed last year, is one of more than a dozen candidates running for secretary of state under the America First banner, alongside others in battleground states like Arizona, Michigan and Ohio. They share an unflinching loyalty to Mr. Trump and a belief that the 2020 election was marred. Some are calling for a law enforcement arm to more aggressively prosecute violators of election laws.Representative Jody Hice, who is running to be Georgia’s secretary of state, at an event of Atlanta Young Republicans on Thursday.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesPolls show large numbers of undecided voters in the race, with Mr. Hice and Mr. Raffensperger neck and neck, each with about one-third of the vote. Both campaigns are braced for a runoff.Mr. Trump’s attempt at payback for 2020 in Georgia is floundering in the state’s other marquee primary on Tuesday. Former Senator David Perdue, his pick to challenge Gov. Brian Kemp after the governor refused to overturn the election results, is trailing Mr. Kemp in polls and fund-raising. Mr. Trump has hardly weighed in publicly on Mr. Perdue’s prospects since hosting a “tele-rally” for the former senator in April. His former vice president, Mike Pence, is set to visit the state to campaign for Mr. Kemp on the eve of the primary election.Mr. Kemp has been adept at using his office to win over skeptical Republicans, passing a slew of conservative policies on elections, law enforcement and education. For voters still enthralled with false claims of fraud, Mr. Kemp can point to the Election Integrity Act of 2021, which limits provisions like ballot drop boxes and mobile voting centers.“When voters see that kind of activity around the concern they have, it just becomes difficult to drive an argument that people who are in office are being inattentive to the issue,” said Brad Alexander, an Atlanta-based political consultant and Raffensperger supporter, who was among several who argued that the potency of the “stolen” election debate has started to wane.In January, 43 percent of Georgia Republican voters said they were confident that the November elections would be fair and accurate, according to a University of Georgia poll. By April, that number had increased to nearly 60 percent. And a record number of voters have already participated in the state’s primary elections, topping more than 700,000 voters on the final day of early voting.Mr. Hice, a four-term congressman, was one of the 147 House Republicans who voted against certifying the election results for President Joe Biden. He later took part in a White House meeting alongside Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene to try to determine how the election results could be flipped in Mr. Trump’s favor. He has claimed, falsely, that Mr. Trump would have won in Georgia if the election had been “fair.”At a meeting with the Atlanta Young Republicans on Thursday, Mr. Hice made unsupported claims about “ballot harvesting,” said he no longer wanted to use Dominion Voting machines and slammed Mr. Raffensperger for sending out unsolicited absentee ballots ahead of the last election. The voice of the people had been “violated” in 2020, he said.County officials in Georgia identified 64 cases of potential fraud out of the state’s roughly 5 million votes in the 2020 election, according to an Associated Press survey of all but 11 of the state’s 159 counties.Fulton County election workers in Atlanta counting ballots after the 2020 election.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesBut Mr. Hice has tried to make his case about more than just 2020 — raising the prospect of fraud in the future.“The issue is not who wins an election, but the issue is absolutely, Was it a fair election?” he said. “If the election itself is compromised or violated, then all the effort out there really doesn’t matter anymore. And that’s what we’ve got to defend. That’s what we’ve got to protect at all costs.”Most of the young Republicans in the room said they wanted to hear what Mr. Hice would do differently from Mr. Raffensperger in elections should he be elected.“Even if you’re not a dogmatic, election-was-stolen person, there are a lot of people with reasonable doubt, and that reasonable suspicion is fair,” said Chris Campbell, 39, a national accounts manager at SmartFeeds. “Raffensperger didn’t address those concerns well, and people don’t have confidence in him. But I do have confidence in Hice and trust that he would run the office with integrity.”The Trump InvestigationsCard 1 of 8Numerous inquiries. More

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    Midterm Stakes Grow Clearer: Election Deniers Will Be on Many Ballots

    Republican voters in this week’s primary races demonstrated a willingness to nominate candidates who parrot Donald J. Trump’s election lies and who appear intent on exerting extraordinary political control over voting systems. The results make clear that the November midterms may well affect the fate of free and fair elections in the country.In Pennsylvania, Republican voters united behind a nominee for governor, Doug Mastriano, who helped lead the brazen effort to overturn the state’s 2020 election and chartered buses to the rally before the Capitol riot, and who has since promoted a constitutionally impossible effort to decertify President Biden’s victory in his state.In North Carolina, voters chose a G.O.P. Senate nominee, Representative Ted Budd, who voted in Congress against certifying the 2020 results and who continues to refuse to say that Mr. Biden was legitimately elected.And in Idaho, which Mr. Trump won overwhelmingly in 2020, 57 percent of voters backed two Republican candidates for secretary of state who pushed election falsehoods, though they lost a three-way race to a rival who accepts Mr. Biden as president.The strong showings on Tuesday by election deniers, who have counterparts running competitively in primaries across the country over the coming months, were an early signal of the threat posed by the Trump-inspired movement.“It’s a big problem,” said former Representative Charlie Dent, a Pennsylvania Republican, who added that the G.O.P. needs “to show an alternative vision for the party. I don’t think we’re seeing enough of that right now.”While election issues have dominated several high-profile Republican primaries so far, G.O.P. candidates do not always place 2020 objections at the center of their pitches to voters. Instead, fomenting doubts about Mr. Biden’s victory is often the table stakes of Republican primaries that can tilt hard to the right. Candidates who avoid the subject risk losing credibility with the party’s base.When talking to voters, many Republican candidates have focused heavily on a broader list of promises to restore conservative governance. And in many general-election races, candidates from both major parties are likely to focus on inflation and the economy.Still, the election issue hangs over several races in presidential battleground states. Republicans trying to reclaim governor’s mansions and take over top offices overseeing elections have fallen over one another for the last year and a half to cater to voters who believe myriad false claims about the 2020 contest.The biggest single test will be next Tuesday in Georgia, where Mr. Trump has backed a slate of candidates running on election-denial platforms against the incumbent governor, secretary of state and attorney general.After the Pennsylvania and North Carolina PrimariesMay 17 was the biggest day so far in the 2022 midterm cycle. Here’s what we’ve learned.Trump’s Limits: The MAGA movement is dominating Republican primaries, but Donald J. Trump’s control over it may be slipping.‘Stop the Steal’ Endures: G.O.P. candidates who aggressively cast doubt on the 2020 election have fared best, while Democratic voters are pushing for change. Here are more takeaways.Trump Endorsements: Most of the candidates backed by the former president have prevailed. However, there are some noteworthy losses.Up Next: Closely watched races in Georgia and Alabama on May 24 will offer a clearer picture of Mr. Trump’s influence.Mr. Trump’s choice for governor, former Senator David Perdue, appears likely to fall short against Gov. Brian Kemp, whom Mr. Trump still blames for his 2020 loss in Georgia. All three races could wind up in runoffs if no candidate secures a majority of the primary vote.Representative Jody Hice of Georgia is running with Donald J. Trump’s backing for Georgia secretary of state. Mr. Trump was angry that Brad Raffensperger, the incumbent, did not help him overturn the state’s 2020 results.Audra Melton for The New York TimesMr. Perdue and Representative Jody Hice, who is challenging Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state, have each falsely argued that rampant voter fraud marred the 2020 Georgia contests. Mr. Perdue began a debate with Mr. Kemp by declaring: “The election in 2020 was rigged and stolen.” Mr. Hice said he would not have certified Mr. Biden’s victory.In the state’s Senate race, the leading Republican candidate, the Trump-backed former football star Herschel Walker, said on Wednesday that he wasn’t sure if Mr. Biden had been lawfully elected in 2020.“I don’t know,” Mr. Walker told a New York Times reporter after a speech in Macon, Ga. “I do think there was problems. And I think everybody else thinks there was problems, and that’s the reason right now everybody’s so upset.”But no Republican nominee for a major swing-state office has done more to amplify bogus election claims than Mr. Mastriano in Pennsylvania.Mr. Mastriano has helped promote continuing — and constitutionally impossible — efforts to decertify Pennsylvania’s 2020 results. Julio Cortez/Associated PressA state senator and retired Army colonel, he spent $3,354 in campaign funds to charter buses to Washington on Jan. 6, 2021. A Senate Judiciary Committee report said that video footage had confirmed that Mr. Mastriano had “passed through breached barricades and police lines” near the Capitol, though he has denied that he breached the lines and there is no evidence that he entered the Capitol itself.This March, Mr. Mastriano held a campaign event in Gettysburg at which attendees signed a petition calling on Pennsylvania to decertify the state’s 2020 results, according to The York Daily Record.The decertification push has become the latest litmus test in 2020 election denialism. It has also rattled Republicans in Wisconsin, where one of the party’s four major candidates for governor has made undoing Mr. Biden’s 2020 victory in the state the central plank of his campaign.Mr. Trump has encouraged the decertification effort in Wisconsin and offered a late endorsement to Mr. Mastriano. The former president has conditioned his endorsement, the most valuable seal of approval in Republican politics, on amplifying false claims about the election.Once in office, Trump-backed candidates are likely to try to follow through on promises to alter election law — in some cases, by simply making voting more difficult, but in others, by going so far as to give Republican-controlled state legislatures the right to overturn election results.In Pennsylvania, Kathy Barnette, a Jan. 6 rally attendee who pushed many false stolen-election claims and campaigned on a slate with Mr. Mastriano, placed third in the state’s G.O.P. Senate primary with about 25 percent of the vote.And the two men locked in a photo finish for first place, Dr. Mehmet Oz and David McCormick, have also cast doubt on the 2020 election results, refusing to say Mr. Biden won fairly.Dr. Mehmet Oz is not as strident as Mr. Mastriano on election issues, but he has declined to say that Mr. Biden won fairly.Kriston Jae Bethel for The New York TimesDr. Oz, who was endorsed by Mr. Trump, has said in his stump speech that “we can’t leave 2020 behind,” without articulating precisely what he means.Understand the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6Why are these midterms so important? More

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    The fight over voting continues. Here’s the latest.

    The conflict over sweeping new restrictions on voting, largely confined to statehouses and governors’ desks since 2020, is spilling over into the midterm elections.About two dozen states have tightened laws regulating matters like who is eligible to vote by mail, the placement of drop boxes for absentee ballots and identification requirements. Many of the politicians driving the clampdown can be found on the ballot themselves this year.Here are some of the latest developments.In Pennsylvania, the four leading Republican candidates for governor all said during a debate on Wednesday that they supported the repeal of no-excuse absentee voting in that state.In 2020, about 2.6 million people who were adapting to pandemic life voted by mail in Pennsylvania, more than a third of the total ballots cast. But Republicans, smarting over President Donald J. Trump’s election loss to Joseph R. Biden Jr. and promulgating baseless voter fraud claims, have since sought to curtail voting by mail. A state court in January struck down Pennsylvania’s landmark law expanding absentee voting, a ruling that is the subject of a pending appeal before the U.S. Supreme Court.Lou Barletta, one of the four on the debate stage and a former congressman, asserted that no-excuse absentee voting was conducive to fraud.“Listen, we know dead people have been voting in Pennsylvania all of our lives,” Mr. Barletta said. “Now they don’t even have to leave the cemetery to vote. They can mail in their ballots.”Several states had already conducted elections primarily through mail-in voting before the pandemic, with there being little meaningful evidence of fraud. They include Colorado and Utah, a state controlled by Republicans.Elsewhere in Pennsylvania, officials in Westmoreland County, which includes the suburbs east of Pittsburgh, voted this week to scale back the number of drop boxes used for absentee ballots to just one. The vote was 2-to-1, with Republicans on the Board of Commissioners saying that the reduction from several drop boxes would save money. The lone Democrat said that the change would make it more difficult for people to send in their ballots.In Arizona, two Trump-endorsed Republican candidates — Kari Lake in the governor’s race and Mark Finchem for secretary of state — sued election officials this month to try to stop the use of electronic voting machines in the midterm elections. Helping to underwrite the lawsuit, along with similar efforts in other states, is Mike Lindell, the MyPillow chief executive.In Nevada, a push by Republicans to scale back universal mail-in voting while introducing a new voter ID requirement ran into a major setback on Monday when two different judges in Carson City invalidated those efforts.In Georgia, Brian Kemp, the Republican governor, signed a bill on Wednesday empowering the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to pursue criminal inquiries into election fraud, an authority solely held by the secretary of state in the past. More

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    Election Deniers Are Running for Secretary of State Across the Country

    Brazenly partisan candidates who insist that Donald Trump won the 2020 election are transforming races for the once-obscure office of secretary of state.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.That intense focus on a once-obscure state-level office has dramatically transformed its place in American politics — and the pool of candidates it attracts. Campaigns for secretaries of state this year are attracting more money, more attention and more brazenly partisan candidates than ever before.All told, some 21 candidates who dispute Mr. Biden’s victory are running for secretary of state in 18 states, according to States United Action, a nonpartisan group tracking races for secretary of state throughout the country.“It’s like putting arsonists in charge of the Fire Department,” said Joanna Lydgate, the group’s chief executive. “When we think about the anti-democracy playbook, you change the rules and you change the players so you can change the outcome.”Many of the election deniers are running in solidly red states where it is less likely that their actions could tilt a presidential election. But several others, who have formed a coalition calling itself the America First slate, are running in states won by Mr. Biden in 2020, including in the crucial battleground states of Michigan, Arizona and Nevada.The coalition’s members are coordinating talking points and sharing staff members and fund-raising efforts — an unusual degree of cooperation for down-ballot candidates from different states. They are in strong position to win Republican primaries in those battleground states, as well as in somewhat-bluer Colorado and heavily Democratic California.Their chances in November, should they succeed in the primaries, could rest heavily on how well Republicans fare in the midterm elections, given voters’ tendency to vote for down-ballot candidates such as secretary of state from the same party as their choices for governor or senator.A Look Ahead to the 2022 U.S. Midterm ElectionsIn the Senate: Democrats have a razor-thin margin that could be upended with a single loss. Here are 10 races to watch.In the House: Republicans appear poised to capture enough seats to take control, thanks to redistricting and gerrymandering alone.Governors’ Races: Georgia’s contest will be at the center of the political universe, but there are several important races across the country.Key Issues: Both parties are preparing for abortion rights and voting rights to be defining topics.While local election officials typically oversee the counting of individual ballots, and state legislatures sign off on slates for the Electoral College, secretaries of state often certify elections and set the tone of how elections are run. Their election-management duties generally include distributing voter registration cards, allocating voting machines, educating voters, auditing election results and ordering recounts.Had secretaries of state taken their cues from Mr. Trump in the last election, they could have put their thumbs on the scales of fair elections by forcing the closure of polling places, removing ballot drop boxes or withholding other resources that could make voting easier in heavily Democratic precincts. Worse, critics say, they could have raised doubts about, or even refused to certify, Mr. Biden’s victories.The powers of secretaries of state to subvert elections vary from state to state and are largely untested in court. Mr. Trump’s phone call to Mr. Raffensperger in Georgia raised the specter of out-and-out fraud in the tabulation of a presidential vote. Short of that, in states where secretaries of state have the power to certify elections, the refusal to do so could be a vital step in overturning one. In a presidential election, state legislators and the governor hold the power to approve an alternative set of presidential electors, and refusing to certify could boost such an effort.In contests for governor or for House or Senate seats, the refusal to certify the result of an election could send states into uncharted legal waters.Those who say they are alarmed at the possibilities include many current Democratic secretaries of state — and a few Republican ones.“The narrative that is being promoted by people who are ill-informed and simply trying to promote a political narrative to benefit themselves in a particular candidacy is very dangerous,” said John Merrill, the Republican secretary of state in Alabama who is term-limited.Former President Donald J. Trump urged Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, to “find 11,780 votes” — the margin by which Mr. Trump lost the state.Damon Winter/The New York TimesThe significance of the America First coalition’s parallel efforts can be seen clearly in Arizona, where the slate’s candidate is Mark Finchem, a former firefighter and real estate agent who has served in the state House since 2015 and has become the leading Republican contender for secretary of state. He has raised some $663,000 for his campaign, according to state filings, more than the two leading Democratic candidates combined.Mr. Finchem, who declined to comment for this article, was in Washington on Jan. 6 and attended the Stop the Steal rally that led to the storming of the Capitol. He has publicly acknowledged his affiliation with the Oath Keepers, the far-right militia group whose leader and other members were charged with seditious conspiracy for their roles in the Capitol riot. He championed the Republican-ordered review of the 2020 vote in Maricopa County — though he never endorsed its conclusion that Mr. Biden won — and received a prime speaking spot in Mr. Trump’s Jan. 15 rally outside Phoenix.There, Mr. Finchem told the crowd that the 2020 election had prompted him to run for secretary of state, said he was part of a “nationwide populist movement to regain control over our government” and called for the State Legislature to decertify the presidential result in Arizona, which Mr. Biden carried by nearly 11,000 votes.“Ladies and gentlemen, we know it and they know it — Donald Trump won,” Mr. Finchem said.The coalition’s other candidates include Jim Marchant in Nevada, a former state legislator; Rachel Hamm in California, who contends that Mr. Trump actually won that deep-blue state; and Kristina Karamo in Michigan, who developed a high profile in conservative media after she made uncorroborated claims that she had seen fraudulent ballots being counted in Detroit during the 2020 election, allegations that have been disproved by both local election officials and courts.Major donors to the coalition include such promoters of election conspiracies as Mike Lindell, the chief executive of My Pillow, and Patrick Byrne, a former executive at Overstock.com, both of whom have also helped fund several election-denial campaigns and lawsuits. Mr. Byrne said he gave the group $15,000.“​​We would like as many like-minded secretary of state candidates to come forward as we can,” Mr. Marchant said at a Las Vegas conference that featured members of the coalition along with speakers who are well-known to followers of QAnon conspiracy theories. “I’ve got a few that have contacted me. We’re working to bring them into the coalition.”In an interview, Mr. Marchant said the group had presented its theories about the 2020 election at three “summits” in different states recently and planned others in Wisconsin, Texas, Colorado and Nevada.He brushed off concerns about undermining confidence in elections and instead assailed sitting state and local officials for resisting further audits of the 2020 vote. “If they’re so confident, wouldn’t they gloat and say, ‘See, we told you so?’” he said. “They won’t. They can’t afford to do that.”United States Representative Jody Hice of Georgia was one of the first secretary of state challengers to be endorsed by Mr. Trump.Dustin Chambers/ReutersTony Daunt, a longtime Michigan Republican official who was appointed last year to the panel that certifies the state’s election results, said Ms. Karamo, who has falsely claimed that Mr. Trump won Michigan, was unqualified to be secretary of state because of the “nonsense regarding the stolen election.”But Mr. Daunt and Mr. Merrill, of Alabama, are among very few Republican election officials who have publicly criticized the spreading of lies about the 2020 election. Instead, pro-Trump Republicans are enthusiastic about those candidates, and both the candidates and their supporters say the changes they are pushing for will make it more difficult to commit election fraud, which they portray as a pressing threat.Mr. Finchem is sponsoring a bill in Arizona that would treat all voters’ ballots as public records and make them searchable online. Another of his bills would require all ballots to be counted by hand, although studies show that hand counting introduces more errors. And he has repeatedly called for “currency grade” paper as a countermeasure against fake ballots, though there is no evidence that fake ballots have posed a threat to fair elections.Nothing and no one has catalyzed Republican enthusiasm for secretary of state contests more than Mr. Trump himself, who has offered three endorsements for Mr. Finchem, Ms. Karamo and United States Representative Jody Hice, who is challenging Mr. Raffensperger in Georgia’s Republican primary. Mr. Hice reported more than $575,000 in donations for his secretary of state candidacy in June, twice Mr. Raffensperger’s total.And Mr. Marchant, in Nevada, said he entered the race after being encouraged by allies of Mr. Trump.While the money being spent on races for secretary of state as yet does not approach the fund-raising by candidates for governor or Senate, they are no longer the low-budget affairs they once were. In Georgia, Michigan and Minnesota, fund-raising is more than double what it was at this point during the 2018 midterms, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.Despite their fund-raising struggles in the Arizona contest, Democrats are having some success creating a national support structure for secretary of state candidates.Jocelyn Benson, the Democratic secretary of state in Michigan who is facing a likely re-election battle against Ms. Karamo, has raised $1.2 million this campaign cycle, more than six times what her Republican predecessor raised by this point in 2014. Nationally, Democratic candidates for secretary of state raised six times as much money in 2021 — and from five times as many donors — as they did in 2017, according to ActBlue, the Democratic donation platform.Kristina Karamo, a Republican candidate for secretary of state in Michigan, claimed she had seen fraudulent ballots being counted during the 2020 election.Nic Antaya/Getty ImagesJena Griswold, the secretary of state in Colorado and the chairwoman of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, said she had hired full-time staff for the first time in the association’s history. She said the group had set a fund-raising goal of $15 million for this cycle, far surpassing the $1.8 million it raised in 2019 and 2020, and had raised $4.5 million toward that goal so far.“The stature of the office is different, and the stature of what officeholders are doing is also different,” Ms. Griswold said.Susan C. Beachy More