These 10 State Officials Could Play Outsize Role in Presidential Election
Fred Lucas /
The map of battleground states in the November presidential election is expanding, and Democrats are in charge of elections in the bulk of these competitive states.
Secretaries of state once held an office that got little attention. However, after the disputed results of the 2020 election, the statewide office gained significantly more attention and both parties focused on it in 2022.
That year, Democrats scored big wins to become top election officials in the key battleground states of Arizona, Nevada, and Michigan.
Georgia’s Brad Raffensperger is the only elected Republican to be a secretary of state in a battleground state. However, former President Donald Trump and Raffensperger have had a confrontational relationship since the outcome of the 2020 election in Georgia.
In two battleground states, North Carolina and Wisconsin, state election boards run elections and oversee any related controversies. In those states, secretaries of state tend to other matters.
Here are 10 key chief state election officials to watch in the months before the Nov. 5 rematch between President Joe Biden and his predecessor, Trump.
1. Activist Past of Michigan Elections Chief
Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat in her second term, has a resume of left-wing activism before taking office.
This year, Benson is overseeing elections in a state considered a “Tossup” by The Cook Political Report.
After college, she became a hate crime investigator for the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center, which is known for labeling some mainstream center-right organizations as “hate groups” comparable to the Ku Klux Klan or neo-Nazis.
Benson later worked as a legal assistant for National Public Radio. She went to Harvard Law School and became a voting rights lawyer, according to the Capital Research Center.
In 2004, Benson worked for the Democratic National Committee’s “election protection program,” training 17,000 volunteer lawyers.
She founded the Michigan Center for Election Law and Administration in 2010 and ran the organization until 2019.
She was elected Michigan’s secretary of state in 2018, a strong year for Democrats.
In January 2020, Public Interest Legal Foundation found over 2,500 dead people were still on Detroit’s voter rolls and discovered that over 4,700 voters registered multiple times.
The foundation, an election watchdog group, noted that Benson’s office mismanaged voter rolls. She publicly defended her office, however.
The Michigan Board of State Canvassers approved a petition drive to recall Benson. But the petitions failed to gain the required 1 million signatures in 60 days to get on the 2020 ballot.
Another nine efforts to recall Benson were made in 2021, but none of the petitions were approved for circulation.
Public Interest Legal Foundation sued Michigan over Benson’s refusal to remove the names of 26,000 dead people from voter registration lists. Of those, almost 4,000 had been dead for over two decades; 17,479 were dead for more than a decade; 23,663 had been dead for at least five years.
2. The Wolfe of Wisconsin
Wisconsin is a “tossup” state, according to The Cook Political Report.
The administrator of the Wisconsin Elections Commission is Meagan Wolfe, and she is considered the state’s chief election official. But Wolfe has been a controversial figure, holding onto her job through a court decision.
The elections commission appointed Wolfe to the post in 2018 and she was unanimously confirmed by the Republican-controlled state Senate in 2019. She previously was the commission’s deputy administrator and has worked for the panel since 2011.
The Wisconsin Elections Commission is divided evenly between Republicans and Democrats. The commission deadlocked in a vote last year to remove Wolfe over complaints of how she handled the 2020 election.
Last year, state Republican lawmakers in Wisconsin voted to oust her from the job. But Attorney General Josh Kaul, a Democrat, sued to challenge the Senate vote. A state judge ruled that the Senate lacked the authority to fire Wolfe.
During the 2020 election, Wisconsin’s five largest cities signed on to get assistance from the left-leaning Center for Tech and Civic Life, the organization that doled out about $350 million in election administration grants contributed by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife.
But that funding included “clawback provisions” if any of the cities failed to meet the center’s criteria. These requirements included working with partner organizations such as the National Vote at Home Institute.
The Amistad Project, a national election watchdog group, filed a complaint in 2021 with the Wisconsin Elections Commission about how the cities of Green Bay and Milwaukee worked with the Center for Tech and Civic Life. Amistad’s complaint argues that the commission’s Wolfe promoted these partnerships.
“The WEC administrator’s involvement raises serious doubts regarding the objectivity of the commission in conducting an investigation,” Erick Kaardal, special counsel for the Amistad Project, argued in the complaint.
In 2021, Wolfe told a state Senate committee that it’s up to each individual city in Wisconsin whether to accept a grant with or without strings attached. However, critics note that emails show that Wolfe provided information about CTCL partner groups to elections officials in four cities.
The chairwoman of the Wisconsin Elections Commission is Ann S. Jacobs, a Democrat appointed by Senate Minority Leader Janet Bewley, a Democrat.
Jacobs is a Milwaukee lawyer. She was a public defender before going into private practice and specializing in personal injury and medical malpractice cases.
3. Pennsylvania Republican Appointed by Democrat
Pennsylvania is considered a “tossup” in the presidential election by The Cook Political Report and others.
Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt is a Republican, but was appointed to the office by Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, in January 2023.
That same month, Biden presented Schmidt with a Presidential Citizens Medal at a White House ceremony marking the two-year anniversary of the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.
Biden did so because Schmidt, as a Republican election official in Philadelphia, resisted efforts by the Trump campaign to challenge the outcome of the 2020 election.
In 2021, Schmidt testified to the U.S. Senate’s Rules and Administration Committee about threats against himself and his family in the aftermath of the election. Democrats quickly warmed to him.
Still, Schmidt has a record of tackling voter fraud when he was a member of the Philadelphia City Commission, which supervises elections in the city. He was the only Republican on the panel; the other two members were Democrats.
In that post, Schmidt made a referral to the U.S. Justice Department in 2014 about voting irregularities. After the Trump administration came into office, U.S. Attorney William McSwain took the case.
Prosecutors found voting irregularities in 2014, 2015, and 2016. This led to the indictment and eventual convictions of Michael “Ozzy” Myers, a former Democrat congressman, and Domenick J. Demuro, a Philadelphia election judge, in an election fraud and bribery scheme.
In 2017, while an election commissioner, Schmidt reported that at least 317 noncitizens were registered to vote in the city to the Pennsylvania Department of State, though many of the noncitizens had self-reported.
Schmidt said these voters were removed from the voter rolls. His office obtained information about 220 of the 317, and found that 44 of the noncitizens had voted in past elections.
Still, Schmidt said it was plausible that the noncitizens thought they were eligible to vote.
“All voter fraud is an irregularity; not all voter irregularities are fraud,” Schmidt said at the time. “Regardless of the intent, the damage is still the same.”
Schmidt was president of the Committee of Seventy, an organization in Philadelphia that fights political corruption.
Before becoming an election commissioner, he worked for the Government Accountability Office, or GAO, a federal watchdog agency, as a senior performance analyst.
4. Georgia Republican Clashed With Trump
Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, gained national name recognition after the 2020 election, when he certified the state’s election for Biden, the victor in the first Biden-Trump presidential race.
Raffensperger’s office clashed with Trump’s 2020 campaign, and Trump’s now famous phone call with Raffensperger—later leaked—that became a key part of the Fulton County prosecution of Trump for trying to change the outcome.
However, Raffensperger has advocated strongly for Georgia’s 2021 election reform law, which expanded voter ID to apply to mail-in ballots and restricted the controversial practice of ballot harvesting.
Raffensperger, a former businessman first elected in 2018, defeated a Trump-backed challenge in the 2022 Republican primary from Rep. Jody Hice of Georgia.
Before serving as secretary of state, Raffensperger was on the city council of Johns Creek, Georgia, and then served two terms in the Georgia House of Representatives.
John Fervier, chairman of the five-member Georgia State Elections Board, was appointed by Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, in January. Fervier is the vice president of risk management and security for Waffle House, Inc., a company he worked for for more than 35 years.
Former Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal, a Republican, appointed Fervier to the Georgia Subsequent Injury Trust Fund, which regulates workers’ compensation claims. The Associated Press reports there are no political contributions on record, but said in 2012, he expressed support for Republican Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign.
The Cook Political Report categorizes Georgia as “Lean Republican.”
5. Democrat Chair in North Carolina
Karen Brinson Bell is executive director of the North Carolina Board of Elections, a job she has held since 2019. She is listed on the board’s website as the state’s “chief elections official.”
Bell previously was the election board’s deputy director beginning in 2015. She oversees 100 county election boards.
Bell has worked in county and state election administrative roles since 2006. From 2011 to 2015, she was director of the election board in Transylvania County, a heavily Republican-leaning county. Before that, she was a district elections technician for the state board.
North Carolina is categorized as “Lean Republican” in the November election, by The Cook Political Report.
The chairman of the North Carolina Board of Elections is Alan Hirsch, a Democrat from Chapel Hill who has been on the board since 2023. Hirsch is president of the North Carolina Healthcare Quality Alliance, a nonprofit that focuses on rural opioid addiction treatment and prevention as well as mental health issues.
Hirsch has donated thousands of dollars to Democrat campaigns, including the state’s Democratic Party, former President Barack Obama, and North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, according to Open Secrets.
Democrats have a 3-2 advantage on the state election board.
6. Campus Vote in Arizona
Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, was elected in 2022 and will oversee the presidential election in a state rated by The Cook Political Report as “Lean Republican” this year.
In April, Fontes announced that his office was working with ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge, a youth voting organization, to start the Arizona Campus Voting Challenge—in which state universities compete for the highest campus voter registration.
Arizona is required to keep two separate voter registration lists. The state requires proof of citizenship to vote in state and local elections. However, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the state can’t require this proof from voters in federal elections, under the National Voter Registration Act of 1993.
“We have the strictest regime in the country when it comes to noncitizens not being able to vote,” Fontes told The Daily Signal in February. “We have a system where documented proof of citizenship has to be submitted [for state and local elections], and it’s a very cumbersome system. That’s what the law requires, and we’ll continue to follow it. It’s far more thorough than we see just about anywhere.”
Fontes, a former Marine, previously was a prosecutor in the Denver district attorney’s office. He later went to work as a prosecutor for the county attorney’s office in Maricopa County. Fontes was elected Maricopa County recorder in 2016.
7. Nevada Rolls Dice on Biden Executive Order
The Cook Political Report categorizes Nevada as a “Lean Republican” state. The presidential election will be overseen by Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar, a Democrat elected in 2022.
Aguilar was eager to participate with the Biden administration based on Biden’s 2021 executive order directing federal agencies to work with outside interest groups to register and mobilize voters, an effort some critics call “Bidenbucks.”
The Daily Signal first reported, based on a public records request, that Aguilar asked that at least four federal agencies be designated voter registration agencies in Nevada. He wrote to top officials in the federal Labor, Health and Human Services, and Veterans Affairs departments, as well as U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, a subagency of the Department of Homeland Security.
Aguilar is a former special counsel to the chancellor of the Nevada System of Higher Education. Before that, he was general counsel for the Andre Agassi Foundation for Education.
Aguilar also previously worked on brand sustainability at the global headquarters of Adidas in Germany. He is a former member of the Nevada Athletic Commission, which regulates boxing and mixed martial arts, appointed by then-Govs. Jim Gibbons and Brian Sandoval, both Republicans. These are major draws in Nevada.
8. Shifting Minnesota?
Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a member of what the state calls the Democratic-Farm-Labor Party, was first elected in 2018.
Simon was first elected to the state House of Representatives in 2004, rising to assistant majority leader.
Minnesota is generally a solidly blue state although it saw a razor-thin margin in the 2016 presidential race. The state doesn’t make voter rolls available to the public, the lawsuit contends.
The Cook Political Report recently moved Minnesota from “Likely Democrat” to “Lean Democrat,” meaning the state is competitive but Democrats still have an edge.
Nevada hasn’t chosen a Republican presidential candidate since Richard Nixon in 1972.
Simon called for the Minnesota Legislature to pass bills this year to provide for automatic voter registration, to restore voting rights to felons, and to preregister 16- and 17-year-olds to vote.
Public Interest Legal Foundation, the election watchdog group, said it found 515 duplicate names on voter registration lists across six Minnesota counties where it filed complaints.
9. Battleground Virginia?
Like Minnesota, another reliably Democrat state in recent years, Virginia appears to be in play in the Nov. 5 election. Recent polls have shown the state to be quite competitive between Trump and Biden.
Still, The Cook Political Report lists Virginia as “Likely Democrat,” meaning it leans heavily Democrat, even as the report moved other states to the more competitive “Lean Democrat” category.
John O’Bannon is chairman of the Virginia Board of Elections.
O’Bannon is a former Republican member of the Virginia House of Delegates, serving from 2001 to 2018. A medical doctor, he attended the Medical College of Virginia at Virginia Commonwealth University.
10. Tightening in New Hampshire
New Hampshire hasn’t voted Republican in a presidential race since 2000, but recent polls show the Biden-Trump contest within the margin of error.
The Cook Political Report categorizes New Hampshire as “Lean Democrat.”
Secretary of State David Scanlan is a Republican appointed by the state Legislature in 2022. Scanlan won through a competitive process against a Democrat nominee when a joint session of the Legislature voted.
He took over the position after the retirement of Democrat William Gardner, who held the position for over two decades.
A native of Pennsylvania and graduate of West Virginia University, Scanlan previously served as deputy secretary of state to Gardner.