PHOENIX (AP) – An Arizona lawmaker endorsed by former President Donald Trump who attended the Jan. 6, 2021 rally that preceded the violent assault on the U.S. Capitol and another lawmaker who also believes the results of the 2020 presidential election should be overturned are among the four Republicans vying for the top spot in the presidential battleground.
It’s a trend seen in several Republican primaries this year that has produced mixed results for those who peddle conspiracy theories and promote the falsehood that widespread fraud led to Trump’s defeat. Tuesday’s primary election features similar candidates in Kansas and Washington state.
In Kansas, voters will choose between a challenger who questions the 2020 presidential results and the Republican incumbent who believes the election was safe in his state. Washington state’s open primary also has a candidate who supports Trump’s unsupported claims, though that’s not the toughest challenge facing the Democratic incumbent.
So far this year, Republican primary voters have been split on whether to put electoral skeptics on the November ballot.
In June, Nevada voters selected former state lawmaker Jim Marchant, who has been repeating false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, to face the Democrat in an open race for secretary of state . But in Colorado, GOP voters rejected a local election clerk who had run with Trump allies promoting voting machine conspiracies and instead elected a Republican who promised to keep politics out of elections.
And Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who rejected Trump’s request to “find” enough votes for him to win the state, easily survived a primary challenge to advance in that state’s May primary.
The Arizona secretary of state race is the most compelling and consequential of Tuesday’s primary battles, in part because of Republican state representative Mark Finchem.
The retired Michigan police officer and current Arizona House member was at the Capitol on Jan. 6 and claims Trump lost Arizona to rampant fraud. He supported a controversial and much-criticized state Senate “audit” of the 2020 election results in the state’s most populous county and this year tried to get the Republican-controlled Legislature to notify Congress that Arizona wanted to decertify the win election of Joe Biden.
Finchem is also suing one of Arizona’s leading Republican gubernatorial candidates in federal court to block the use of vote-counting machines in Arizona. The lawsuit claims they are potentially prone to hacking that can change votes. A judge is considering whether to dismiss the case.
Finchem’s claims come despite a lack of hard evidence of any widespread fraud that would have changed the outcome in Arizona, where Biden beat Trump by just over 10,000 votes. He maintains that “dummy ballots” tainted the results.
“So for you to say there’s no evidence, I think the media is deliberately ignoring the evidence that is there,” Finchem said.
His top contenders include another state House member, Shawnna Bolick, a Trump supporter who says the 2020 election was deeply flawed. She said in a televised debate that she would not have certified the election if she had been secretary of state, even though it was a requirement to do so without a court order.
“And I would have been breaking the law at the time and that would have been fine,” he said in the debate, which was held on Arizona PBS.
The other two Republican candidates are state Sen. Michelle Ugenti-Rita, who recognizes Biden’s victory and has made election reform a key focus during her 12 years in the Legislature, and Beau Lane, a businessman and political newcomer who ‘has won the endorsement of Republicans. Governor Doug Ducey.
Ugenti-Rita said none of the other candidates understand election law and she believes she has broad support across the state.
“They immediately recognize my background and experience, and they feel confident that I can do the job and that’s the message,” Ugenti-Rita said of the voters. “This is what the people want. They’re done with platitudes – it doesn’t take politics anywhere.”
Lane said his executive experience makes him the best choice for the job. He noted his long commitment to Republican politics, when as a young man he was a farmer at the 1980 Republican convention at which Ronald Reagan was named president.
“Above all, we need someone who can be a fair dealer and help restore faith in elections,” he said.
Lane said that aside from a few hiccups and isolated cases of voter fraud, the 2020 election went well, though he joined other Republicans in criticizing Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, who he is seeking his party’s nomination for governor.
“Was there organized and rigged fraud that changed the outcome of the election?” he asked. “I haven’t seen any evidence of that.”
Two Democrats are seeking their party’s nomination: former Maricopa County Recorder Adrian Fontes, who lost his seat in the 2020 election, and Arizona House Minority Leader Reginald Bolding. Both criticize Finchem and other Republicans who are questioning the results of the 2020 election and say a Finchem victory would be dangerous for democracy.
In Kansas, Secretary of State Scott Schwab also faces a challenge from his right in the state’s Republican primary.
Schwab is a former member of the Kansas House who has defended the use of ballots, which Trump and other Republicans say are prone to misuse, although there is no widespread evidence of that. He has dismissed baseless theories about fraud, at least as a possibility in the Kansas election.
“There were concerns that people had in other states, and some people want to have that concern in Kansas, but it’s just hearsay, ‘I heard that in Georgia.’ I heard it in Arizona, I heard it in Nevada, so Kansas,’” Schwab said during a recent interview. “And you can’t copy and paste situations from one state to another simply because our statutes are so different.”
Schwab’s main opponent is Mike Brown, a construction contractor and former county commissioner of Johnson County, the state’s most populous and home to Kansas City-area suburbs.
Brown has made questions about the security of the Kansas election central to his campaign. He has vowed to ban ballot boxes and said he will use the secretary of state to investigate cases of voter fraud, rather than taking Schwab’s approach of working through prosecutors.
Brown said that when Schwab says the Kansas election ran smoothly and without significant problems, the question is, “Why did he say that, or why can he prove it?”
“Their response is, ‘There’s nothing to see here, keep moving,'” he added. “You should start looking and you should stop moving.”
Washington state’s “top two” primaries include Democratic Secretary of State Steve Hobbs, who was appointed by Gov. Jay Inslee last November and hopes to retain his seat for the remaining two years of his four-year term. former Republican Secretary of State Kim Wyman. He is the first Democrat to hold the position since 1965, filling Wyman’s seat after she left for an election security job in the Biden administration.
Hobbs faces several Republican and unaffiliated opponents, including Tamborine Borrelli, an “America First” candidate who was fined by the state Supreme Court last month for making legally meritless claims alleging voter fraud generalized
Hobbs has raised the most among the candidates in the race so far, followed by Pierce County Auditor Julie Anderson, who is running as a nonpartisan and said she is the most experienced in calling elections.
Among Republicans in the race, former Sen. Mark Miloscia — now head of the conservative Family Policy Institute — has raised the most money. Republican Sen. Keith Waggoner trails Miloscia on money, but has been endorsed by former Republican Secretary of State Sam Reed.
Hobbs has pointed to his experience as a lieutenant in the Washington National Guard and his months leading the bureau to say why he is better positioned to address issues ranging from cybersecurity concerns to election disinformation.
Anderson said he’s running as a nonpartisan because of the hyper-polarization across the country, saying “we don’t need political parties in the secretary of state’s office calling balls and strikes at home.”
Under Washington’s primary system, the top two vote-getters advance to the November general election, regardless of party. It will likely take days for the results to be tallied because this is a mail-in election.
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Associated Press writers John Hanna in Topeka, Kansas, and Rachel La Corte in Olympia, Washington, contributed to this report.
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