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Trump Angling To Put In Power Election Officials Who Could Twist Vote For Him In 2024

In what observers call an “incredibly dangerous” move, former President Donald Trump is pushing to replace swing-state election officials with those who backed his rigged election lie.

Trump has already endorsed Republicans who supported his endlessly repeated lies about the 2020 presidential election for top elections posts in three key swing states: Arizona, Michigan and Georgia, CNN noted.

Current elections heads in each of the states resisted his pressure to overturn votes. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger — who’s running again — recorded Trump ordering him in a post-election phone call to “find” enough votes to turn his defeat into a victory.

In his latest endorsement Monday, Trump pushed state GOP Rep. Mark Finchem for Arizona secretary of state. Finchem has peddled QAnon conspiracy theories and baselessly insists that that 2020 election was stolen from Trump via “rampant” fraud.

“It is incredibly dangerous to support people for office who do not accept the legitimacy of the 2020 election. It suggests that they might be willing to bend or break the rules when it comes to running elections and counting votes in the future,” Rick Hassan, law and political science professor at the University of California in Irvine told CNN. “Someone who claims falsely that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump lacks credibility and cannot be trusted to run a fair election.”

Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, chair of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, told CNN that there’s an “extreme amount of concern” about candidates pushing the rigged election lie.

if “anti-democracy” candidates are elected, “you could imagine a secretary of state refusing to certify election results,” she warned.

Twenty-six states have elections for their secretary of state in 2022.

Check out the full CNN analysis here.

This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.

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