Kristina Karamo’s sole claim to fame is that she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.
That might be enough to turn her into Michigan’s top elections official.
During the 2020 election, when a tumultuous mob tried to force its way into a Detroit elections office, Karamo thought an election worker counted a ballot marked for both presidential candidates as a vote for Biden.
That didn’t happen, and was based on her stupid assumption and uninformed interpretation of what she observed (details here).
Karamo, who has ties to the religious right, is now famous in “Stop the Steal” circles. Being wrong, and making a baseless accusation of election fraud, shot her to fame.
Now she’s running for Michigan secretary of state. While she seems unlikely to win (she has to win the GOP primary, then unseat an incumbent who won in 2018 by a comfortable margin, see results here), there’s at least an outside possibility she could win.
Karamo has no qualifications whatsoever. She has no training or experience for the job, she’s very sloppy with facts, and is not impartial as election administrators must be. She doesn’t view the job as making democracy work, but as helping her party win.
The current holder of that office sees her as someone who would “violate their oath, the law, and the principles of our democracy in service of their party and their private agenda,” and says electing her “would be akin to putting an arsonist in charge of the fire department.”
The point is, Republican voters can’t be trusted not to do that. That’s why it’s so important for everyone else to turn out and vote, to make sure that doesn’t happen.
Maybe you don’t vote in Michigan (I don’t), but this applies everywhere, to every office, right down to local city council and school board positions. We now have to be very careful about who gets elected to all offices, extra-vigilant to keep crazy people who embrace wild conspiracy theories from gaining control of government functions, because such people are now running for public offices (see related article here).
