The Key Swing State Officials to Watch If the Presidential Election Is Contested
This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox.
In the wake of the failed effort on Jan. 6, 2021, to force Congress to set aside the results of the presidential race, lawmakers stepped up and passed the bipartisan Electoral Count Reform Act, which spelled out the rules for how one presidency ends and another begins. That brought some needed clarity to the federal government’s role in how votes are to be cast, counted, and certified—leaving the biggest weak spots upstream in the states.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Which is why as U.S. voters hit the final leg of a seemingly deadlocked presidential election season, those in swing states tasked with overseeing the elections might find themselves becoming national figures as the battle between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris comes to a conclusion.
At their best, these leaders make up an idealistic safeguard against the rampant disinformation, foreign interference, and just base political nihilism that is clogging the conversations about whether the vote tallies this week can be trusted. At their worst, they might be the gunk that clogs an otherwise clean process of electing someone to take over the most powerful job on the planet. At present, none appear to be among the rampant election deniers that vied for key election posts in battleground states, and largely lost.
Here are seven names that might come up as election officials and partisan lawyers join what could be an intense and protracted legal and public-relations fight over which votes should be counted and how.
Al Schmidt, Secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania
As Pennsylvania’s top elections administrator, Schmidt has endured a particularly tumultuous campaign cycle. As 2,500 ballots in Lancaster County are being examined as part of a possible criminal investigation, Trump has already asserted that massive fraud is underway: “They have already started cheating in Lancaster,” Trump said in the final march in Pennsylvania, perhaps the closest and most consequential swing state.
But here’s the rub that numbs a lot of the partisan sniping: Al Schmidt is a Republican. Granted, he’s the type of rare Republican who did not subscribe to Trump’s Big Lie about 2020 and has been a constant safeguard against GOP conspiracy theories.
In 2020, when he was the only Republican on the Philadelphia elections board, Schmidt refused to indulge Trump’s baseless attacks. Now in the top job in the state, he has quickly moved to find a remedy when errors have occurred—one polling site closed early, for instance—and later complied with court orders dealing with more serious voting issues. If things go as planned on Tuesday, Schmidt would be more than pleased to remain anonymous. Then again, he has shown he isn’t one to hide in a shadow for the sake of convenience. If that were his style, the former top staffer for the Philadelphia GOP would not have accepted the nomination to his current job from Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat who found Schmidt’s moxy worthy of the gig.
Brad Raffensperger, Georgia Secretary of State
Schmidt’s counterpart in Georgia similarly would prefer the job as elections chief had remained a bureaucratic backwater. But as the elected Republican who oversaw the vote-counting that showed Trump’s defeat in Georgia, Raffensperger found himself thrust into the spotlight in the wake of Trump instructing him on a call to “find” pro-Trump votes to swing the state to him. A recording of the call in short order made its way to the press—and prosecutors—and, in some circles, made the Georgia Secretary of State a hero for the pro-democracy set.
To say Raffensperger has been a constant in Trump’s craw would be to understate the ex-President’s enmity toward him. But time and time again, Raffensperger has not only proven capable of running elections in Georgia, but of being a pretty solid politician, to boot: he fended off a Trump-backed primary challenge in 2022 and won re-election in the general by a wider margin than four years earlier.
Still, Georgia has become Ground Zero for efforts to install unelected election officials who could meddle in the actual results. So far, courts seem to have been able to shut down the most egregious efforts—hand-counting every single ballot, for instance, would have been a terrible embrace of human error. But Raffensperger could find himself once again in the national spotlight. After all, foreign-produced deep-fake videos are already surfacing underfoot there in Georgia.
Adrian Fontes, Arizona Secretary of State
Since the post-election violence of the 2020 election, the no-nonsense Fontes has hardened his vote-counting centers. Literally.
Fontes knew things couldn’t stay the same after Phoenix-centered Maricopa County became a flashpoint for Trump supporters to gather and flood vote-counting centers with their jeers and threats. And that was even before this year, where the FBI has warned that Arizona was drawing higher-than-normal levels of threats toward election workers.
Fontes, a Democrat, has been among the most outspoken critics of political violence against election workers but also has not shied from the risks. At a cost of millions, he has ensured old facilities were upgraded to harden them against mob rule and new ones were built to accommodate transparency from those looking for fraud. Even drop boxes for ballots are now wired with GPS trackers and the computers tallying votes are air-gapped, meaning they are not and have never been connected to the Internet lest they be hacked.
If it all seems like a lot, it’s worth recalling that Arizona has been a loud and proud environ for Big Lie adherents, including Kari Lake, the current GOP nominee for an open Senate seat that seems to be trending in Democrats’ favor of holding it. As proof of the threat, the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office gathered reporters last week to go over Election Day protections, including new barbed wire atop the parking lot where elections workers park. Perhaps the most sobering statistic? On Election Day 2020, the sheriff deployed 50 deputies. Now, that total will hit 200 and, in a stunning detail, could include snipers.
Cisco Aguilar, Nevada Secretary of State
Since winning his 2022 race by a narrow margin against a Trump-backing Big Lie adherent and QAnon sympathizer, Aguilar, a Democrat, has invested $30 million to modernize the state’s voting infrastructure. But even that migration has given fodder to those convinced the update was plagued by error if not fraud. Not helping matters: a top election official in the state’s second-most-populous county says the new system has massive problems and that she was placed on leave to silence her worries.
Typically, the leave of an interim registrar of voters in a northern Nevada county on its own would not merit national attention. But the abrupt exit of Cari-Ann Burgess—seemingly every party to the act is telling a different version of events—has captured the imagination of voters in that Western state and its ripe ground for conspiracy theories. Given Washoe County is a politically mixed county and home to Reno, it is perhaps one of the handful of marquee counties that political analysts watch as early hints before all the votes are counted. (Mail ballots postmarked by Election Day and received by Nov. 9, four days after Election Day, will still be tallied.)
The biggest prize that Aguilar will be watching is Las Vegas’ Clark County, where roughly 7-in-10 votes are expected. That county is overwhelmingly supportive of Democrats, given the power of the culinary workers’ union that controls the Las Vegas Strip. But Nevada, despite being the smallest prize among the seven battlegrounds, is still a huge state, and the new tech platform stands to elevate Aguilar’s profile, in good ways or bad. That doesn’t mean he is numb to the risk. As he told TIME in 2022 about the stakes: “I could totally f-ck up the country, and that’s on me.”
Meagan Wolfe, Administrator of Wisconsin Elections Commission
The apolitical head of elections in Wisconsin, Wolfe might be a familiar name given her inclusion in TIME’s Democracy Defenders project back in September. As we wrote of her at the time:
In most states, the chief election official is a partisan position. Wisconsin is unusual in that Wolfe’s post is nonpartisan, something she says she takes very seriously in the face of conspiracy theories positing, without evidence, that Joe Biden won the battleground state in 2020 with her help. Wolfe says she and other election officials have been subjected to “four years of continuous attacks,” intimidation, and death threats. She’s also withstood calls from powerful political figures for her to resign. “If we were to give in to those attempts to sway us, to intimidate us out of our roles, what type of message would that send?” she asks. “I just won’t be a part of that, part of allowing those attempts to sway how I operate.”
Having been in this role since 2018, Wolfe is familiar with the terrain, even as all that’s old seems new again. After all, Trump all the way back in May was saying he might not accept the election results in Wisconsin. In 2020, Trump’s legal team sought to disqualify more than 150,000 votes in a state that was decided in Biden’s favor by about 21,000 votes. With margins that close, Wolfe knows there’s scant room for shading.
Jocelyn Benson, Michigan Secretary of State
Another familiar name to those who have been following TIME’s coverage of campaign integrity, Benson is considered a rising rock star in a role typically noted for processing business forms, giving OKs to notaries public, and professional licensures—think doctors, nurses, and plumbers.
But it’s come at a cost, one she recognized after the 2020 campaign. When the Democrat spoke to TIME’s Charlotte Alter, she made this prescient observation: “We had to be prepared to endure a multiyear, multifaceted nationally coordinated effort to enable those who tried and failed to undo the results in 2020 to succeed in 2024.”
The risks are not isolated:
Benson has gotten used to living under siege. Shortly after the 2020 election, she had to rush her young son into the bathtub to hide from Trump supporters who had surrounded her home to angrily protest Michigan’s election results. Another time, Benson was unloading groceries in her kitchen when a man started pounding on the door, forcing her to send her son into the basement and call for help. (“Mom, I thought that man was going to kill you,” Benson recalls her son saying.) She’s gotten phone calls about being hung from a tree. They scare her, but they don’t deter her. If anything, she says, the threats have strengthened her commitment to the job. “My determination to lead our state’s election system through this challenging time became etched in granite,” she says.
If the tone on display at Trump events is any guide, Benson is in for a tricky stretch between Election Day and Jan. 6.
Karen Brinson Bell, North Carolina Board of Elections, Executive Director
As North Carolina’s elections chief, the task of wrangling parochial boards and making sure they’re following the rules falls to Brinson Bell. But a decision by the Republican-controlled Legislature might ensure a smooth night in the Tarheel State, even if democracy advocates see it differently.
Mail ballots must now be received by 7:30 p.m. on Election Day; previously, voters in North Carolina had a three-day buffer to get their ballots to the counting desks. That will presumably speed up the counting—and shorten the window between the first cut of a count and those who are looking for fraud in every shift and with every refresh of the datasets.
Now, Brinson Bell says, the results could come as soon as 9:30 p.m. on Tuesday, although she told reporters last week that midnight is probably a better target for the announcement of full results. Still, there is this one hiccup: state officials won’t verify the numbers for another 10 days, which means Brinson Bell will still be a name to keep on deck if Trump’s team decides to embrace a scorched-earth strategy in a state that has shown him with a persistent but statistically insignificant advantage in polling. It wouldn’t be the first time Trump has confused pre-Election Day polling as a substitute for the actual counting.
Make sense of what matters in Washington. Sign up for the D.C. Brief newsletter.