Zac Weisz
11/13/22
(National Journal) As a case in point, iVote and the Democratic outside group End Citizens United highlighted Karamo’s antiabortion views during their ads—she had called the procedure a “satanic practice” in October 2020—even though secretaries of state have no jurisdiction over abortion access. “We [wanted] to make sure that people [heard] Kristina Karamo’s viewpoints and her positions using her own words, because so many of her viewpoints and positions are outside of the extreme, even. They are the fringy of the fringe,” ECU President Tiffany Muller told National Journal. The expensive gamble paid off this year, to extraordinary effect. Every Democrat who faced an election denier in their bid for secretary of state ran ahead of the Democratic candidate at the top of the ticket. In Michigan, Benson won by 14 points, eclipsing Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s hefty margin of victory—11 points—in a state that voted for Trump in 2016. In Arizona, Fontes received more votes than both Sen. Mark Kelly and Katie Hobbs, who was running for governor….Yet DASS, iVote, and ECU all put money down in Georgia to oust someone who upheld democracy in 2020—to no avail. Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, rebuffed Trump’s efforts to overturn the election results in Georgia. The groups cited Raffensperger’s support for Georgia’s new voting law, SB 202, which introduced more stringent rules for absentee voters, as the reason for trying to remove him….“This idea that somehow he is a hands-off guy who has had no control over these voting changes that have taken place in Georgia over the last four years just isn’t accurate,” Muller added.