Two far-right United States politicians who want to upend the way votes are cast and counted are tied or leading in races to become top election administrators in their states, according to recent polls.
Republicans Jim Marchant of Nevada and Mark Finchem of Arizona promote wild conspiracy theories about how the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump.
A victory in November could allow them, as secretaries of state, to restrict voting access or block certification of results in these two critical battlegrounds for presidential elections.
Marchant and Finchem want to curtail or abolish early voting, mail-in voting and ballot drop-boxes, claiming without evidence that they breed fraud.
Both advocate banning electronic voting machines and returning to hand-counted paper ballots.
Finchem and Marchant are among the strongest of 13 secretary-of-state candidates peddling election conspiracy theories.
Two, in the Republican strongholds of Wyoming and Alabama, are expected to win easily.
Four others are running competitive campaigns in Michigan, Minnesota, Indiana and New Mexico.
The remainders are long shots.
The movement to seize control of election administration is part of a broader phenomenon that makes November's midterm elections unique in American history.
Election deniers are campaigning in every state, according to politics website FiveThirtyEight.
Out of 552 Republican nominees for Congress, governor, secretary of state and attorney general, 262 have rejected or questioned the 2020 result.
Former Trump White House advisor, Steve Bannon, declared that Democrats "are not going to be winning anymore" because the likes of Marchant and Finchem will be "in the counting room," rooting out ballots they deem illegal or illegitimate.
At a recent Florida conference featuring right-wing secretary-of-state candidates, Marchant cast himself as an outsider and claimed that "vicious" elements of his own party are scheming to help his Democratic rival.
He also claimed Nevada elections have been rigged for the last decade by a "deep state cabal".
Finchem, an Arizona state representative since 2015, dismissed accounts of him being a "far-right fringe" politician as "propaganda crap".
He has been linked to the Oath Keepers, a far-right extremist group, and once accused "a whole lot of elected officials" of being sex-trafficking pedophiles.
Recent polls show Marchant and Finchem doing well. An August Reno Gazette/Suffolk University poll put Marchant ahead by nearly five points, with 31.6 per cent compared to 26.6 per cent for Democrat Cisco Aguilar, and 26 per cent undecided.
A mid-September survey by the Trafalgar Group has Finchem leading Democrat Adrian Fontes by six points — 47.5 per cent to 41.1 per cent, with 11 per cent undecided.
The Florida conference was organised by America First Secretaries of State, a group created by Marchant, and sponsored by a Marchant-led political action committee (PAC) largely funded by The America Project, which was co-founded by millionaire Patrick Byrne. Byrne's America Project donated US$155,000 to Marchant's PAC, Conservatives for Election Integrity.
Before the conference, Byrne met with Marchant and Finchem at a US$500-a-head fundraiser at the same hotel.
Byrne took the conference stage the next day and said the 2020 election "heist" was part of a decades-old plot by communist China to turn the US into a food-producing colony.
In Arizona, Finchem raised more than US$1.2 million, far exceeding the totals in previous Arizona secretary-of-state races and nearly double that of his Democratic opponent, according to his most recent campaign finance disclosure.
Marchant, who built a fortune in the Internet and telecoms industry, financed much of his campaign himself.
The money and notoriety heaped on those candidates also galvanised their opponents, who have generated substantial donations by casting themselves as alternatives to extremists.
Aguilar, Marchant's opponent, said his campaign raised more than US$2 million with help from national groups sounding the alarm about election deniers.
One, MoveOn, said it will spend more than US$1 million to help democratic secretary-of-state candidates this year.
Semedrian Smith of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, a political organisation working to defeat election deniers, said her organisation and an affiliated nonprofit have raised a total of US$16 million.
"If one election denier wins in November, that could easily put us in a constitutional crisis," Smith said.
The writers are from the Reuters news agency