最后一批选票仍在统计中宾夕法尼亚州共和党参议院初选唐纳德·特朗普(Donald Trump)上周进行了权衡，坚持他选择的候选人继续前进并“宣布胜利”，即使计票尚未完成。

这位前总统长期以来一直坚称选举是欺诈性的，因为他预计自己不会得到想要的结果。但从历史上看，全国两党的选举官员都遵守法律，不管他们的政治立场如何，都要清点和确认选票。

这可能会在11月发生变化:特朗普正在支持战场州(包括宾夕法尼亚州)的一系列候选人，这些候选人表示支持他在选举中的不信任，尽管有证据表明存在广泛的欺诈行为。如果当选，这些官员将有权进行选举，甚至试图拒绝或逆转选举结果，正如特朗普一再敦促他们做的那样。

特朗普在一份声明中说:“下次计票时，我们必须更加敏锐。”视频消息今年早些时候。“有一句名言:有时计票员比候选人更重要。我们绝不能让这种情况再次发生，”特朗普说，他引用了苏联独裁者约瑟夫·斯大林的话。

特朗普影响力的下一个重大考验是周二在佐治亚州，他支持否认选举的候选人参加投票，挑战不愿在2020年按照他的要求行事的现任者，并推翻总统乔·拜登的胜利。民主党人和许多共和党人根据候选人过去的声明预测，如果他们被选中代表共和党并在大选中获胜，他们将干扰未来的竞争，特别是在特朗普2024年的压力下。

“就在几年前，这可能会被认为是一种边缘和极端的观点，”明尼苏达州国务卿史蒂夫·西蒙，一名民主党人，谈到候选人质疑选举的浪潮。“现在它已经被主流化，非常规范化，这是一个非常非常大的问题。”

“这是一个潜在的紧急情况，”西蒙补充道，“尤其是在总统选举期间。”

国务卿通常负责监督和认证他们的地方选举。他们制定选举日的程序，并在验证结果方面发挥重要作用，因此任何拒绝这样做的行为虽然可能面临法律障碍，但可能是试图推翻投票的重要一步。

今年，该职位将在28个州争夺，包括明尼苏达州，西蒙在那里面临一名共和党人，他继续对2020年的结果表示怀疑。西蒙说，明尼苏达州和全国各地的选民应该能够信任他们选出的官员——除非有不法行为的证据——来证明人民的投票，无论结果是否对他们有利。

西蒙告诉美国广播公司新闻:“公平地说，这就是两党的国务卿在过去几年里大体上所做的事情。”。“但这一批新的候选人确实令人担忧，因为他们似乎没有那些相同的价值观。他们似乎被一个结果所驱使。”

其中一些候选人已经表示，他们将停止缺席和邮寄投票，并继续审计2020年的选举，以及该职位可以采取的其他行动，这些行动有可能削弱选民的信心。特朗普和他的盟友没有提供任何证据证明2020年大选中存在广泛的欺诈行为，全国各地有40多起法律挑战失败。

卡罗琳·卡斯特/美联社

宾夕法尼亚州州长共和党候选人、州参议员道格·马斯特里亚诺发言

前新泽西州州长克里斯蒂娜·托德·惠特曼(Christine Todd Whitman)是特朗普的共和党批评者，也是美国联合民主中心(States United Democracy Center)的联合主席。该中心是一个无党派倡导组织，跟踪否认竞选公职的人的上升。惠特曼警告说，如果特朗普让他的忠诚者在2024年就位，那么确保失败不会再次发生可能会容易得多。

“人们往往只关注联邦竞选和联邦选举，却忘记了它们是由各州管理的。这就是为什么这些选举如此重要，”惠特曼告诉美国广播公司新闻，描述他们战略背后的思想:“我们改变法律，所以我们可以改变裁判，所以我们可以改变结果。”

据统计，在特朗普在2022年中期选举中支持的111名候选人中，超过70%的人表示，他们认为2020年的选举存在欺诈行为五三八研究。据统计，截至本月，至少有23名选举否认者在18个州竞选国务卿美国联合行动。

特朗普已经正式支持共和党初选中的三名国务卿候选人。这些竞争者都认为，更重要的是继续追求他关于2020年的被揭穿的说法的可能真相，尽管专家们表示，民主规范受到破坏，选民信心受到侵蚀。

以下是特朗普在2020年质疑结果的六个关键州否认选举的候选人的简要介绍。

宾夕法尼亚州

被惠特曼称为“初选否认者”的州参议员道格·马斯特里亚诺(Doug Mastriano)赢得了特朗普的支持，并轻松赢得了共和党州长初选。宾夕法尼亚州州长办公室对未来的选举有强大的影响力。

马斯特里亚诺于2021年1月6日包租巴士前往椭圆广场的集会，特朗普在那里发表了讲话;那天在美国国会大厦被看见了(但说他没进去);2020年12月，他参加了白宫与宾夕法尼亚州共和党议员的会议，特朗普努力推翻该州和其他总统竞选战场的结果。

虽然马斯特里亚诺没有竞选国务卿，但宾夕法尼亚州是少数几个由州长任命首席选举官的州之一，如佛罗里达州和德克萨斯州。民主党人担心马斯特里亚诺-他一直对邮寄选票持批评态度，并呼吁调查宾夕法尼亚州如何进行2020年选举，坚称他希望“恢复对我们制度完整性的信心”-可能会任命一位听命于特朗普的国务卿。马斯特里亚诺回避说明他作为州长将如何履行这一职责。

甚至共和党人也担心马斯特里亚诺的胜利，正如共和党候选人在初选的最后阶段退出，以巩固最终落后于马斯特里亚诺的共和党候选人周围的选票。

格鲁吉亚

这位前总统在周二的初选前支持了一系列候选人，他们都在各自的政纲中宣扬各种形式的选举否定主义。

如果赫歇尔·沃克(Herschel Walker)和众议员乔迪·希策(Jody Hice)分别赢得参议院席位和国务卿职位，他们理论上可以试图推翻未来的选举结果——拒绝认证投票并将其发送给华盛顿——就像特朗普在2020年推动共和党州长布莱恩·坎普(Brian Kemp)和国务卿布拉德·拉芬斯佩格(John Kerry)那样。

在2021年1月的一次臭名昭著的电话中，特朗普要求Raffensperger“找到”近12，000张选票，以超越拜登。

正在挑战Raffensperger的Hice反对将佐治亚州的选举人票计入拜登，并表示他将取消拜登2020年获胜的资格-选举专家表示这一举动是不可能的。

虽然佐治亚州已经经历了三次独立的审计，都证实了拜登的胜利，但Hice表示，他将任命一名特别顾问进行调查。

亚利桑那州

在亚利桑那州，特朗普支持该州众议院的极右翼议员马克·芬奇姆(Mark Finchem)，他参加了1月6日在椭圆广场举行的集会。

与马斯特里亚诺一样，调查国会大厦袭击事件的众议院特别委员会向Finchem发出传票，要求“提供有关向华盛顿发送虚假选举人名单并改变2020年选举结果的信息”。(和马斯特里亚诺一样，芬奇姆1月6日也在国会大厦，但他说自己不在里面。)

在8月2日共和党初选之前，特朗普称赞Finchem在选举诚信方面表现出“令人难以置信的强大立场”。Finchem正在发起一项法案，将亚利桑那州的选票视为公共记录，并使它们可以在网上搜索，专家警告说，这可能会被利用。

民主党国务卿协会(Democratic Association of States)副主任塞米德里安·史密斯(Semedrian Smith)告诉美国广播公司新闻(ABC News)，“这些人得到了特朗普的支持，唯一的原因是他们曾表示，他们会寻求途径——或者已经证明会寻求途径——来破坏选举或实际上返回选举结果。”“想象一下那些已经声称他们愿意推翻选举结果的人是绝对可怕的，很难想象他们在未来绝对不会这样做。”

内华达州

参加6月14日共和党国务卿初选的前内华达州众议员吉姆·马尔尚(Jim Marchant)表示，如果拜登在2020年任职，他不会证明拜登获胜。

与马斯特里亚诺和芬奇姆一样，他也参与了一份欺诈性的选举文件，该文件试图将内华达州的6张选举人票授予特朗普而不是拜登，该文件已提交给国会和国家档案馆。马尔尚没有特朗普的支持，但他说特朗普的盟友鼓励他参选。

马尔尚的网站称，他的“首要任务将是彻底改革欺诈性的选举制度。”他曾表示，他支持修改州法律，允许立法机关推翻国务卿对选举的认证。

威斯康星州

威斯康星州是九个拥有负责选举监督的董事会或委员会而不仅仅是国务卿的州之一，但那里的保守派领导人正在推动解散两党选举委员会。

州众议员艾米·劳登贝克(Amy Loudenbeck)是共和党国务卿的领跑者，她说她支持从这个被她抨击为“破碎”的委员会手中夺走权力，并将权力移交给她寻求的办公室。

与此同时，在2020年大选后，近十几个其他州也试图削弱国务卿在选举中的权力，或将行政管理的某些方面转移到高度党派化的机构。

威斯康星州共和党周六选择在8月9日初选之前不支持任何全州办公室候选人，这是时代分裂的一个迹象。

密歇根

密歇根州的特朗普支持社区大学教授克里斯蒂娜·卡拉莫(Kristina Karamo)，她在上个月的一次大会上赢得了该党的提名。她在没有证据的情况下声称，她在2020年作为底特律的选举观察员工作时，目睹了处理邮寄选票的违规行为，从而获得了知名度。

卡拉莫将面对密歇根州国务卿乔斯林·本森(Jocelyn Benson)，这位民主党人和前法学院院长正在寻求她的第二个任期，特朗普曾攻击他为“流氓”。

本森在2020年大选后面临猛烈的批评告诉NBC新闻上周，特朗普在白宫会议上首次公开表示，她应该因叛国罪被捕并被处决。特朗普的一名发言人表示，本森在撒谎，但本森表示，这次经历向她表明，“他(特朗普)和他的支持者愿意堕落到什么程度，以推翻或诋毁一场合法的选举，这是没有底线的。”

邻近的民主党国务卿西蒙告诉美国广播公司新闻，包括特朗普支持者在内的所有选民都应该关注选举否认者的趋势。

西蒙说:“无论你最关心什么问题，除非你有自由和公平的选举，否则你不会走得很远。”“你需要公平的人来管理它们。”

Experts warn of 'emergency' as Trump-backed election deniers could win primary races

With the last batches of ballots still being tallied inPennsylvania's Republican Senate primary, Donald Trump weighed in last week to insist his chosen candidate go ahead and "declare victory" even though the counting wasn't complete.

The former president has a long history of insisting elections are fraudulent when he's expecting he won't get the outcome he wants. But historically, election officials around the country from both parties have complied with the law to count up and certify the vote regardless of their politics.

That could change come November: Trump is backing a slate of candidates in battleground states (including Pennsylvania) who have said they support his mistrust in elections, despite any evidence of widespread fraud. If voted into office, these officials would have the power to run elections -- or even try to reject or reverse the results -- as Trump has repeatedly urged them to do.

"We have to be a lot sharper next time when it comes to counting the vote," Trump said in avideo messageearlier this year. "There's a famous statement: Sometimes the vote counter is more important than the candidate. And we can't let that ever, ever happen again," Trump said, referring to a quote from Soviet Union dictator Joseph Stalin.

The next big test of Trump's influence is Tuesday in Georgia, where he's backed election-denier candidates down the ballot to challenge incumbents who wouldn't do as he demanded in 2020 and overturn President Joe Biden's victory. Democrats, and many Republicans, predict based on the candidates' past statements that if they are chosen to represent the GOP and go on to win in the general election, they would interfere with future contests, especially under Trump's pressure in 2024.

"Just a few years ago, this would have been considered a fringe and extreme view," Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat, said of the rising tide of candidates questioning elections. "Now it's been mainstreamed and very much normalized, and that's a big, big problem."

"It's a potential emergency," Simon added, "particularly going into a presidential election."

The secretary of state is usually tasked with overseeing and certifying their local elections. They establish Election Day procedures and play a large role in validating the results, so any refusal to do so -- while likely to face legal hurdles -- could be a vital step in trying to overturn the ballots.

This year, the office is up for grabs in 28 states, including Minnesota, where Simon is facing a Republican who continues to cast doubt on the 2020 results. Simon said that voters in Minnesota and across the country should be able to trust their elected officials -- unless there's evidence of wrongdoing -- to certify the vote of the people, no matter if the outcome is on their side.

"That's what secretaries of state of both parties, to be fair, have done by and large over the last few years," Simon told ABC News. "But this new crop of candidates is really alarming because they seem not to have those same values. They seem to be driven by an outcome."

Some of these candidates have suggested they'll cease absentee and mail-in balloting and continue audits of the 2020 election, among other actions at the position's disposal that risk eroding voters' confidence. Trump and his allies have not provided any proof of widespread fraud in the 2020 election, and more than 40 legal challenges across the country failed.

Former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, a Republican critic of Trump and co-chair of States United Democracy Center, a nonpartisan advocacy group tracking the uptick in election deniers running for office, warned that if Trump were to get his loyalists in place for 2024, it would presumably be much easier to ensure a loss wouldn't happen again.

"People tend to focus just on the federal races and federal elections but forget that they're run by the states. And that's why these elections are so important," Whitman told ABC News, describing the thinking behind their strategy: "We change the laws, so we can change the referee, so we can change the outcomes."

Of the 111 candidates Trump endorsed in the 2022 midterms, more than 70% say they believe the 2020 election was fraudulent, according toFiveThirtyEight research. And as of this month, at least 23 election deniers were running for secretary of state in 18 states, according to theStates United Action.

Trump has officially endorsed three secretaries of state candidates in GOP primary races. Each of those contenders argues it's more important to continue pursuing the possible truth of his debunked claims about 2020, despite the damage to democratic norms and erosion of voter confidence that experts say is well underway.

Here's a brief look at election-denying candidates in six key states where Trump disputed the results in 2020.

Pennsylvania

State Sen. Doug Mastriano, whom Whitman called a "prime election denier," earned Trump's endorsement and handily won the GOP gubernatorial primary. The Pennsylvania governor's office has powerful influence on future elections.

Mastriano chartered buses to the rally at the Ellipse on Jan. 6, 2021, where Trump spoke; was seen at the U.S. Capitol that day (but said he didn't go inside); and he had been involved in a White House meeting with Pennsylvania GOP lawmakers in December 2020, as Trump worked to overturn the results in the state and in other presidential battlegrounds.

While Mastriano is not running for secretary of state, Pennsylvania is one of a handful of states, like Florida and Texas, where the governor appoints the office who serves as the chief elections officer. Democrats fear that Mastriano -- who has been critical of mail-in ballots and called for an investigation of how Pennsylvania conducted the 2020 election, insisting he wanted to "restore faith in the integrity of our system" -- could appoint a secretary of state beholden to Trump. Mastriano has avoided specifying how he would carry out that duty as governor.

Even Republicans are concerned with Mastriano's win, as indicated by GOP candidates dropping out in the final stretch of the primary race to consolidate votes around the Republican candidate who ultimately fell second to Mastriano.

Georgia

The former president backed a slate of candidates ahead of Tuesday's primary, all promoting forms of election denialism in their platforms.

If Herschel Walker and Rep. Jody Hice were to win a Senate seat and the secretary of state's office, respectively, they could theoretically try to overturn future election results -- by refusing to certify the vote and send it to Washington -- as Trump had pushed Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, both Republicans, to do in 2020.

In an infamous January 2021 phone call, Trump asked Raffensperger to "find" nearly 12,000 votes to overtake Biden.

Hice, who is challenging Raffensperger, objected to Georgia's electoral votes being counted for Biden and has said he'd decertify Biden's 2020 win -- a move that election experts say is not possible.

While Georgia has already undergone three separate audits which all confirmed Biden's victory, Hice has said he would appoint a special counsel to investigate.

Arizona

In Arizona, Trump endorsed Mark Finchem, a far-right lawmaker in the state's House of Representatives who attended the rally at the Ellipse on Jan. 6.

Like Mastriano, the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack has issued Finchem a subpoena for "information about efforts to send false slates of electors to Washington and change the outcome of the 2020 election." (Also like Mastriano, Finchem was at the Capitol on Jan. 6 but said he wasn't inside.)

Trump praised Finchem for an "incredibly powerful stance" on election integrity, well in advance of the GOP primary on Aug. 2. Finchem is sponsoring a bill that would treat Arizonians' ballots as public records and make them searchable online, which experts warn could be exploited.

"These folks are supported by Trump, if only for the sole reason that they have said that they would seek ways -- or have demonstrated already to seek ways — to undermine the election or actually return the election results," Semedrian Smith, deputy director at the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, told ABC News. "It's absolutely terrifying to imagine that folks who already claim now that they are willing to overturn the election results, it's hard to imagine that they're not absolutely going to do that down the road."

Nevada

Jim Marchant, a former member of the Nevada Assembly running in the Republican primary for secretary of state on June 14, has said he would not have certified Biden's victory had he been in the office in 2020.

Like Mastriano and Finchem, he was involved with a fraudulent election document attempting to award Nevada's six electoral votes to Trump instead of Biden, which was submitted to Congress and the National Archives. Marchant doesn't have Trump's endorsement but has said Trump allies encouraged him to run.

Marchant's website states that his "number one priority will be to overhaul the fraudulent election system." He has said he supports changes to state law to allow the legislature to override the secretary of state's certification of an election.

Wisconsin

Wisconsin is one of nine states with a board or commission in charge of election oversight instead of just the secretary of state, but conservative leaders there are pushing to dismantle the bipartisan election commission.

State Rep. Amy Loudenbeck, the Republican front-runner for secretary of state, said she supports taking power away from the panel, which she has blasted as "broken," and handing it over to the office she is seeking.

Nearly a dozen other states, meanwhile, have also attempted to diminish secretaries of states' authority over elections or shifted aspects of administration to highly partisan bodies in the wake of the 2020 election.

In a sign of the fractured times, Wisconsin's state GOP on Saturday opted not to endorse any candidates for statewide office ahead of the primary on Aug. 9.

Michigan

Trump, in Michigan, has backed Kristina Karamo, a community college professor who won her party's nomination at a convention last month. She gained prominence after claiming, without evidence, that she'd witnessed irregularities in processing mail-in ballots while working as an election observer in Detroit in 2020.

Karamo will face Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat and former law school dean seeking her second term, whom Trump has attacked as "rogue."

Benson faced an onslaught of criticism in the wake of the 2020 election andtold NBC Newslast week, for the first time publicly, that Trump said in a White House meeting she should be arrested for treason and executed. A Trump spokesperson said Benson was lying, but Benson said the experience showed her "there was no bottom to how far he [Trump] and his supporters were willing to stoop to overturn or discredit a legitimate election."

Simon, a neighboring Democratic secretary of state, told ABC News that all voters, including Trump supporters, should be concerned with the election-denier trend.

"No matter what issue you care about the most, you're not going to get very far unless you have free and fair elections," Simon said. "You want people running them who are going to be fair."