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It was a story that should have earned banner headlines for weeks: “Get rid of the ballots,” said Donald Trump, and “there won't be a transfer” of power. "There will be a continuation." You heard the man right: Do away with voting and he gets to be in charge as long as he likes. You’d think an American president speaking out in favor of slaughtering democracy would be a stop-the-presses moment. Instead, it’s been treated as just another ho-hum day in the Trump era.

But not by us. We know with crystalline clarity that Trump wants to shred our hallowed republic and replace it with a foul autocracy. He’s proved it again and again both by his words and his deeds.

That’s why Daily Kos is endorsing two staunch defenders of democracy who are running to safeguard the vote in a pair of blue states where, right now, Republicans still run the elections: Shemia Fagan in Oregon and Gael Tarleton in Washington. Both will protect voters—and voting—from the depredations of Trumpism and, as secretaries of state, ensure that representative government flourishes no matter how badly the GOP wants to undermine it.

It may seem surprising that Oregon and Washington, which reliably elect Democrats to statewide office, both have Republican secretaries of state, but that’s partly because this extremely important job often does not receive the attention it deserves. We’re here to help change that by casting a bright spotlight on these two races.

Washington has twice elected Kim Wyman, who has put herself forward as a supposed “moderate” Republican but is anything but. Last year, when House Democrats were poised to pass the landmark bill known as H.R. 1, which would expand voting rights and end gerrymandering, Wyman headed to D.C. to testify against the measure. What’s more, she ran the Republican committee to elect secretaries of state in 2018, meaning she helped notorious voter suppression crusaders like Georgia’s Brad Raffensperger win office and wrongfully purge 200,000 voters, many of them people of color.

Enter state Rep. Gael Tarleton. She wants to end unjust voter purges, expand automatic voter registration, and end felony disenfranchisement, including for those currently incarcerated. As a former Pentagon security expert, she’s determined to protect our elections from foreign interference, and she’s fighting to take corporate money out of politics by providing free TV advertising to candidates. And in the legislature, she was the chief architect of a clean energy bill that Vox called the “best” in the country.

The matchup in Oregon is just as imbalanced. Republican state Sen. Kim Thatcher, who was a 2016 delegate for Trump, has opposed expansions to voting at every turn, including automatic voter registration and pre-paid postage on mail ballots, and willingly parrots Trump's lies about non-existent voter fraud to suppress turnout. She’s also repeatedly walked off the job in a tantrum in order to stop legislation to address climate change, even as the coronavirus pandemic was taking root.

That’s why state Sen. Shemia Fagan is opposing her. She was a leader in the effort to make Oregon the first state in the nation to adopt automatic voter registration and helped pass the pre-paid postage for ballots that Thatcher resisted. She’s also championed a law that requires dark money groups to reveal their donors and will ensure voting is safe and secure during the pandemic. Crucially, if Republican lawmakers go AWOL again, the secretary of state will draw new maps for the legislature—a task Fagan will perform fairly, and one we don’t want Thatcher to get anywhere near.

Trump’s assault on our democracy is only going to escalate in the coming weeks, and after Election Day, it will reach depths as ugly as we can imagine. That’s why it’s so vital we elect impartial guardians of our right to vote like Tarleton and Fagan. Republicans know that when they directly control the machinery of our elections, they can readily suppress the vote and lock in minority rule. It’s long past time we give them the boot and ensure our government heeds the will of the majority.

Please donate $6 now to elect two champions of democracy who will protect our elections from Donald Trump and the GOP!