Coalition of Election Deniers Plans To Take Over The Nation In 2024
If you hadn’t noticed, a stealth move is afoot to steal America and it is in plain sight, from under our noses, bit by bit, slowly like a Chinese water torture and some of the leading thieves are members of a shady organization known as “America First Secretary of State Coalition (SOS).”
The goal of the new Republican group is nothing less than to elect “Stop the Steal” Republicans as secretaries of state around the nation so that they will be in a position to undermine the 2024 presidential election in favor of a re-election of trump. Proponents of trump’s debunked voter fraud conspiracy created the coalition to back candidates to run for secretary of state offices nationwide to assume more power over elections systems. As the commissioner of elections, the secretary of state is responsible for administering state and federal election laws.
This is not a complete list but the buyer (or the voter) should beware that the targets are not just critical swing states like Arizona, Michigan, and Pennsylvania but also the rest of the red, blue and the purple leaning states. In other words, the entire nation is under furtive assault.
The coalition has endorsed more than a dozen candidates for state secretary of state, as well as Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano. The coalition is financially supported by the Conservatives for Election Integrity PAC (CFEI PAC), which was founded by Marchant and has received significant funding from former Overstock.com CEO Patrick M. Byrne.
According to published reports, the coalition formed after a meeting in May 2021 between Marchant, QAnon conspiracy theorist Wayne Willott, and other conservative activists and fundraisers, including Mike Lindell, founder and CEO of My Pillow, Inc.
The America First Secretary of State Coalition cloaks its arguments in a smokescreen about a fraudulent election system that can only be fixed by draconian changes to the system, such as single day voting, eliminating the use of voting machines to conduct all ballot counting by hand, ending voting by mail, requiring voters to re-register to vote, an act of voter suppression last used by southern segregationists in the Jim Crow south, to deny the vote to African Americans, requiring government-issued voter identification cards, banning ballot drop boxes and requiring a nationwide audit of the 2020 presidential election.
The secretary of state is the formal head of elections in many states and his or her influence trickles down to the registrars of voters and town clerks and many others involved in carrying out elections. If victorious, the trump-backed secretaries of state will foment state and local threats to voting rights, there will be veiled intimidation to election workers, excuses made for voting restrictions and local election security breaches.
The America First Secretary of State Coalition has endorsed candidates in Wyoming, Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada and New Mexico. All have denied the results of the 2020 election. The coalition also has backed the GOP candidate for governor in Pennsylvania, where the governor appoints a secretary of state
Republican candidates in blue-leaning Connecticut and Vermont, also have come down on the side of trump and the big lie.
The America First Secretary of State Coalition has had mixed results so far. Audrey Trujillo was nominated as secretary of state in New Mexico and Dough Mastriano was nominated as GOP candidate for Pennsylvania governor. Kristina Karamo was nominated for secretary of state in Michigan as were Mark Finchem in Arizona, Diego Morales in Indiana, Chuck Gray in Wyoming and Jim Marchant in Nevada. Finchem has said that if he loses the general election for secretary of state, he will not concede.
Losing primary candidates who were backed by America First SOS include Michael Brown in Kansas, Tina Peters in Colorado, Jim Zeigler in Alabama, Keith Blanford in South Carolina, Rachel Hamm in California, Jody Hice in Georgia, Dorothy Moon in Idaho and Robert Borer in Nebraska.
Coalition Members include:
Jim Marchant
The coalition’s president is Jim Marchant, a Republican candidate for Nevada Secretary of State.
Marchant was the Republican nominee for Nevada’s 4th congressional district in 2020. He lost and sued to have the election reversed, based on unfounded voter fraud claims. Marchant backs trump’s claims and falsely, said that “It’s almost statistically impossible that Joe Biden won.”
Marchant has been endorsed by other election deniers, like far right wingers, Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz. and Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., along with trump’s former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. Marchant spoke at an October 2021 QAnon conference in Las Vegas and was actively involved in the attempt to send alternate electors to Washington,D.C., to overturn the 2020 election.
In supporting trump, Marchant believes in the baseless conspiracy theory that Dominion Voting Systems machines, in collaboration with deceased Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez and billionaire philanthropist George Soros, switched votes from former trump to Joe Biden.
Mark W. Finchem
Finchem has been member of the Arizona House of Representatives since Jan. 5, 2015. A member of the militia group, Oath Keepers, Finchem has been married four times, and has been estranged for over two decades from two adult children and does not know their children, according to family members.
After graduating high school, Finchem was a firefighter and police officer in Kalamazoo, Mich. He left the post in 1999 as personnel records included the note “retired, poor rating, would not rehire.”
As a member of the Arizona House, Finchem introduced legislation that would prohibit Arizona from implementing presidential executive orders, directives issued by federal agencies and U.S. Supreme Court rulings.
Finchem went to Washington, D.C., to take part in the Jan. 6, 2021, protest that was followed by an attack on the Capitol by trump supporters. Finchem claimed that leftists had instigated the violence. He also argued that as president, Barack Obama was seeking to establish a “totalitarian dictatorship” and that the 2017 rally by white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va., was a “deep state psyop” carried out by Democrats.
Kristina Karamo
Karamo is a Republican poll watcher who teaches a college orientation class at Wayne County Community College. She has a master’s degree in Christian Apologetics, a branch of theology that defends Christianity.
Karamo has said rampant voter fraud was perpetrated by the Democratic party, which was “taken over by a Satanic agenda,” and covered up by the media, “the biggest enemy of the American people” who “need to be destroyed.”
Rachel Hamm
Rachel Hamm, an author, speaker and host of The Rachel Hamm Show, came in third in the GOP primary for California Secretary of State, collecting 9.4 percent of the vote or 263,374 votes.
Hamm said she entered the race because her son saw Jesus in a closet at their home. She previously claimed that a Satanist killed a raven on her lawn to “assert the power of Satan over my home.”
Tina Peters
Peters, the clerk for Colorado’s Mesa County, was outspoken in the “Stop The Steal” debacle and allegedly breached voting machines in her office and leaked their data to conspiracy theorists, incorrectly claiming that the machines showed evidence of vote tampering in the 2020 election. She has pleaded not guilty to 10 criminal charges stemming from the breach.
Peters picked up just 29 percent of the vote for Colorado Secretary of State and accused state election officials of “cheating.” She raised $256,000 for a recount, which she lost.
Jody Hice
Hice, a member of Congress from Georgia since 2015, lost the 2022 race for the GOP nomination for Secretary of State. Hice lost to incumbent Brad Raffensperger, who had refused to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia after trump and his Republican allies, including Hice, made baseless claims of fraud. In Congress, Hice was one of the 139 Republican representatives who voted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Hice opposes same-sex marriage, compared homosexuality to alcoholism and supported conversion therapy.
Hice was senior pastor of Bethlehem First Baptist Church in Bethlehem, Georgia; first vice president of the Georgia Baptist Convention; Professor of Preaching at Luther Rice Seminary; and was senior pastor at The Summit Church, a Southern Baptist church, in Loganville, Ga.
Audrey Trujillo
Audrey Trujillo claimed that Biden’s victory was a “coup” and called for a statewide audit of the election. She also alleged that the United States was no better than “any other communist country like Venezuela.”
Trujillo’s Twitter account posted tweets mocking Mexicans and suggesting Jews played a nefarious role in developing coronavirus vaccines. According to her website, Trujillo’s goals as Secretary of State “are to focus on fair elections, bring back integrity and make sure every legal citizens vote is counted.”
Dorothy Moon
Moon has been a member of the Idaho House of Representatives since 2016 and has been the chair of Idaho Republican Party since July 2022. During her losing 2022 campaign for secretary of state, Moon made baseless claims of voter fraud, claiming on the Idaho House floor without evidence that people from Canada came into Idaho to vote in the 2020 presidential election. Two months after losing her bid for secretary of state, she was elected chair of the Idaho Republican Party. In a poetic moment, Moon defeated an incumbent named Tom Luna.
Moon is a member of the John Birch Society. She supported Eric Parker, a right-wing militia movement leader who pleaded guilty to obstructing a court order, arising from his role in the 2014 Bundy standoff in Nevada, in which armed men faced off with federal agents at a ranch near Bunkerville, Nev. Moon spread anti-vaccine misinformation, claiming that her son became autistic after receiving a vaccine.
Doug Mastriano
Mastriano is a prominent figure in fundamentalist Christian nationalism and has called the separation of church and state a myth. He has made social media posts referencing QAnon and has spoken at events that promoted QAnon and 9/11 conspiracy theories. A close ally of trump, Mastriano attended the January 6 rally before the storming of the Capitol. Mastriano was seen on video passing through Capitol Police barriers after they had been breached by others in the crowd.
Kari Lake
Lake is a former television news anchor who stepped down after announcing her run for governor of Arizona. Lake centered her campaign on promoting the lie that the 2020 presidential election in Arizona and nationwide was “rigged and stolen.”
Lake falsely claimed that Biden did not receive 81 million votes and that Arizona was actually won by trump. She said that Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, who is running for governor in 2022 as a Democrat, should be imprisoned, because of baseless and unspecified allegations of criminality related to the 2020 election. Lake has falsely claimed that defendants arrested in connection with the Capitol attack were being “being held in prison without being charged.”
Lake was endorsed by trump, Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz. and disgraced former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn.
Keith Blanford
Blandford lost in the Republican primary for secretary of state in North Carolina.
In his campaign, Blandford claimed that “Covid is a BIOweapon used to support a regime change in the U.S.” and that “Big Tech, Big Pharma, Media, Foreign Powers colluded to rig a presidential election and we are currently under a puppet regime.”
“We believe this is not about Republican versus Democrat, but about Americans versus the Political Class,” Blandford said.
Diego Morales
Morales has the backing of former Vice President Mike Pence. Morales served as an aide to Pence while he was Indiana’s governor. Morales has claimed the 2020 presidential election was a “scam” and called for the number of early-voting days to be cut in half. Morales immigrated to the U.S. from Guatemala when he was in high school. He served in the National Guard before working in several state government roles.
Mike Brown
Mike Brown is a general contractor focusing on commercial construction. As Secretary of State, Brown said that ballot drop boxes would be “GONE. DAY ONE.”
He said that “election machines will be 100 percent safe and secure or I will immediately take the entire state of Kansas to paper ballots. DAY ONE.”
“Election is 100 percent over at 7 p.m. on Election Tuesday. PERIOD” and “voter roles statewide will be scrubbed, tried up, and clean. PERIOD,” Brown noted.
Robert Borer
Robert Borer picked up 52,792 votes for 31.4 percent of the primary vote for Nebraska Secretary of State but lost to Republican Bob Evnen.
A retired firefighter, Borer said he ran for office “to once again secure for us the sacred integrity of our elections. Without election integrity, there is no consent of the governed and we are no longer free citizens.”
Dante Sabatucci
Dante Sabatucci lost in his bid for the GOP nod for Congress in Ohio. He called himself a “Freedom Fighter, Ambassador for Christ.” As a missionary in the Dominican Republic, Sabatucci formed “Meeting God in Baseball” as a way to “introduce young people to the Word of God and disciple them as followers of Jesus Christ.”
Jim Zeigler
Jim Zeigler has been the state auditor of Alabama since 2015.
After the June 17, 2015, mass shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., Zeigler said that parishioners should take their guns to church. He also spoke before the League of the South, a white nationalist, neo-Confederate, white supremacist organization that was termed a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
In November 2017, after Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore was accused of child molesting, Zeigler argued that relationships between grown men and teenage girls were acceptable because “take Joseph and Mary. Mary was a teenager and Joseph was an adult carpenter. They became parents of Jesus.”
Jay Schroeder
Jay Schroeder claimed that Wisconsin had some of the worst election violations in the nation and that he was an “America First candidate for election integrity in Wisconsin.”
Shroeder said he wants to dissolve the bi-partisan, Wisconsin Elections Commission; end the use of the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) voter roll system; use only paper ballots; and have same day tabulation of ballots.