Republican Secretaries of State Walk a Minefield of Election Lies

At a meeting of the National Association of Secretaries of State in August 2021, in response to a wave of highly partisan reviews billed as “audits” of the 2020 election results, a group of four Republican and four Democratic secretaries of state drew up a resolution setting clear standards for audits. The measure passed unanimously with the exceptions of Mr. Warner, who voted against it, and Mr. Ashcroft, who abstained, and shortly after that left the association entirely in protest of the measure, which he argues violated the group’s bylaws.

Neither Mr. Warner nor Mr. Ashcroft directly claims that the election was stolen. Both have instead maintained that a significant number of ballots were cast “outside of the law” in key states on account of expansions in remote voting made in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, and that these issues have yet to be sufficiently settled in court.

Although many legal challenges to the election were rejected by judges on the merits, others were dismissed on technical grounds. One postelection challenge, to the use of drop boxes for voting in Wisconsin, won in the state’s Supreme Court this year.

Some Republican secretaries who stood by the outcome of the 2020 election have nevertheless given credence to lesser claims, directly or indirectly. Frank LaRose, the Republican secretary of state of Ohio, has publicly rebuked conspiracy theorists’ claims about the election in Ohio, but also raised questions about “things that happened in other states” in interviews. “Could it have changed the electoral count?” he said in an interview with The Columbus Dispatch in April. “Who knows.”

In December, Louisiana’s Voting Systems Commission, a panel led by the Republican secretary of state Kyle Ardoin, invited Phil Waldron, a prominent election conspiracy theorist, to testify at a hearing. In January, Mr. Ardoin announced that Louisiana would no longer participate in the Electronic Registration Information Center, a cross-state information-sharing platform used to maintain voter rolls, which had lately become the subject of right-wing conspiracy theories.

This has angered some Democratic secretaries of state, who note that election officials and often secretaries of state themselves have faced personal threats as a result of the conspiracy theories that their Republican counterparts have been reluctant to check.