RAPID CITY, S.D. — On the night President Donald Trump walked into the East Room of the White House and once more undermined faith in elections, many of the people responsible for running those contests were standing at Mount Rushmore, waiting for four famous faces to light up against the dark.

Few offices in the Trump era have proved as consequential, or as politically exposed, as that of a state’s chief election official. And it was by chance that most of the nation’s secretaries of state were in South Dakota for a long-planned conference on the same day Trump spoke — trading notes on their work, then scrambling to navigate the latest turn from the man who has fundamentally remade it.

Faces of former presidents offered them a brief distraction in granite, after the current one threatened to upend their work all over again.

“There’s a disconnect between the White House’s obsession with old grievances and the real facts and reality on the ground among those who actually oversee elections,” said Steve Simon, Minnesota’s Democratic secretary of state. “That’s the bottom line to me. There’s a real disconnect. It’s unfortunate. It’s ugly. It’s political.” 

In a naked political sense, whatever Trump had said would be derided by Democrats and navigated with differing amounts of unease and acquiescence within Republican circles.  

Election officials don’t have that luxury. Once the rhetoric comes down from on high, they are the ones left trying to convince voters that their ballots still count — a case each of them is eager to make in their own state, about their own system.

“There’s no third world country that has elections like we have,” Trump said in his speech. 

“We’ve got the best elections anywhere in the world. People come to the U.S. and marvel at how we carry off our elections,” Kris Warner, West Virginia’s Republican secretary of state, said the morning after the president spoke. 

It’s a strange time to be responsible for the levers of democracy. And it may get stranger yet. 

A decade after he upended American politics by winning the White House, Trump’s habit of spreading falsehoods about elections has become a bedrock feature of his presidency. His first term began with him as a sore electoral college winner, insisting he would have taken the popular vote, too, if the millions of people he baselessly claimed voted illegally were subtracted from the count.

Even before Trump lost in 2020, he’d laid the groundwork to claim the election had been taken from him. The ensuing fallout, and his lies of a rigged contest that carried a mob of his supporters to storm the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 and attempted to overturn the outcome of a free and fair election, were rooted in what he’d started saying long before. 

Which is why, to some of the officials gathered here, this week’s speech reads less like a grievance about the past than a preview of things to come.

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“What is the reason for this? Is it because he sees his party as having a big loss at the midterms, and so he is sowing doubt in the American public, like he did leading up to the 2020 election,” said Steve Hobbs, Washington’s Democratic secretary of state. “And that’s what I’m worried about.”

Republicans are at risk of losing the House this fall, and possibly the Senate. The ambitions of Trump’s final years in office hinge on the outcome.

“We have very important elections coming up. We want those elections to be honest,” Trump told the country hours before.  

America’s system of elections does not emanate from Washington. The system is decentralized by design, left to the states — and there’s a sense among those involved that this is for the better. 

Few Republican elected officials, if any, are rushing to pick a fight with the president. And against that backdrop, his allies saw the logic in what he was trying to do, even as some GOP-led states have pushed back against his administration’s wishes.

“The president basically said out loud what many of us think, that hey there are some things that we could do better and President Trump definitely has a louder voice than any individual secretary of state,” said Denny Hoskins, Missouri’s chief election official. 

The afternoon before Trump spoke, a group of outgoing secretaries of state took the stage together at the conference — a valedictory panel for officials whose time managing elections is nearly up. Among them was Monae L. Johnson, whose re-election run was derailed by another Republican earlier this year. 

She joked to the luncheon crowd about her reputation as an election denier. Then she offered a piece of advice to whoever fills roles like hers next, while chiding the MyPillow man — a leading 2020 conspiracy theorist still enjoying Trump’s favor. 

“Remember that you are the election expert,” Johnson said. “Not Mike Lindell.”

Hunter Woodall

Hunter Woodall covers politics for MS NOW. He’s reported on politics and presidential campaigns for The Associated Press and CBS News and reported on Congress for The Minnesota Star Tribune.