Free and fair elections are foundational to our representative democracy. A government intended to reflect and honor the will of the people works only if the people can express their will. That's why we have elections.

But don't take the word of your friendly political columnist.

John Lewis, the late Georgia congressman and hero of the civil rights movement, said voting is precious and "the most powerful non-violent tool we have in a democratic society." Former President Reagan called the right to vote "the crown jewel of American liberties."

Alas, we have a president who believes his most precious right, apart from lining his silken pockets, is nursing his over-ripened ego. Donald Trump can't stand the fact he lost the 2020 election — which he most emphatically did — and so he's built a carapace of lies: about illegal ballots, rigged election machinery, rampant voting by noncitizens, and so on.

Worse than his deceit — which has deeply undermined faith in our elections and the dedicated people who run them — is Trump's brazen efforts to rig the system by disenfranchising millions of voters, all so he can keep Democrats from winning office.

Reagan, no less than Lewis, probably is turning cartwheels in his grave.

But there's a chance to push back. In November, voters in 26 states will elect a secretary of state, choosing the officials who will oversee the 2028 presidential race throughout most of the country. What could possibly go wrong?

Let's hope we don't find out.

The secretary of state used to be one of those ministerial posts that few outside government knew or much cared about; from a political standpoint, the office and its occupant seemed dull and dry as Melba toast. That changed after 2000, when Republican Katherine Harris placed her weighty thumb on the scale and helped deliver Florida's 25 electoral votes, and the White House, to George W. Bush.

What really politicized the office of secretary of state, though, was Trump's obsessive compulsion with his 2020 defeat.

Spurred by his incessant lies about supposed fraud, allies and opportunists set out to hijack the country's election machinery and do Trump's dirty work from the inside. In 2022, a group calling itself the America First SOS Coalition endorsed a slate of cranks and quacks who ran for secretary of state in 14 states, including the presidential battlegrounds of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin.

Thankfully, all of them lost, save for one candidate in Indiana. Among those defeated was Tina Peters, the former county elections chief in Mesa County, Colo., who went on to infamy, and prison, for orchestrating a security breach aimed at "proving" 2020 votes were stolen from Trump. (Never mind that he won the county by nearly 30 percentage points.)

The SOS Coalition apparently is defunct; its website address now leads to an online gambling portal.

But more than two dozen election deniers ran for secretary of state this year, according to States United Democracy Center, a nonpartisan group that works to promote fair and secure elections nationwide. Six of those candidates won their primaries and made it to November's ballot, including in three states — Arizona, Nevada and Wisconsin — that promise to be key once more to picking the next president.

The stakes in those races are considerable, said Peverill Squire, a University of Missouri expert on state elections. "Who's going to be administering [election] rules? How they're going to interpret those rules?" he said, offering examples of the office's import. "Whether they're going to try to make it more difficult to vote, or easier to vote. Whether they're going to try to engage in activities that will further raise doubts in some people's minds about how fairly the election has been conducted."

The contest in Nevada is a rerun of 2022, when Democrat Cisco Aguilar narrowly defeated Republican Jim Marchant. Undeterred, Marchant continues to spout gibberish about sabotaged voting machines and other far-fetched claims of election chicanery. Among the remedies he's floated, according to the Nevada Independent, is using technology to measure voters' heartbeat as a way to verify their identity.

Um...

Meanwhile, in Arizona, incumbent Democrat Adrian Fontes faces Republican state Rep. Alexander Kolodin, an attorney who was sanctioned by the State Bar for pursuing baseless claims of 2020 election fraud. One of his Trump-inspired lawsuits was swiftly rejected by a federal judge who noted its conspicuous lack of "relevant or reliable evidence" — thus raising doubts not just about Kolodin's discernment but also his capacity to cover even the basics.

In Wisconsin, where elections are overseen by a six-member, bipartisan commission, Republican Jay Schroeder is running on a pledge to dismantle that fair-minded system, calling it a "failed experiment." Had he been secretary of state in 2020, Schroeder told NBC News, he would not have certified Joe Biden's victory in the state.

That's all you need to know, Wisconsin.

Great amounts of time, energy and resources are being devoted this election to races for Congress and for statehouses across the country, which makes sense.

Control of both the House and Senate are in play on Nov. 3. There are more than a dozen gubernatorial contests with at least some degree of competition, including close races in Ohio, Georgia and Wisconsin.

But with so much riding on the outcome, it's also worth paying heed to those down-ballot races for secretary of state.

You can't keep elections on the straight and narrow if the people running them are crooked.

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