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LINCOLN — A new era is coming to Nebraska elections, as voters rejected the state’s top election official and set the table for new leadership, regardless of which candidate wins in November.
Scott Petersen, an Omaha businessman, comfortably beat incumbent Republican Secretary of State Bob Evnen in last month’s GOP primary, a challenge from Evnen’s right that his seven years of service in the office couldn’t survive.
Nebraska Democrats nominated Plattsmouth school nutrition director Sarah Slattery to challenge him. She says she feels the “weight of the world” of standing between “voting rights” and Petersen, who has said he wants to overhaul how the state runs elections.
Local politicos have also whispered not so quietly about a possible nonpartisan jumping into the race, rumors fueled in part by a recent text poll.
Slattery said Evnen did a “good job” of running the state elections. She originally thought she was going to face him, so her messaging was focused on how she could do things “a little better” than Evnen. Now, she said she has to rethink her campaign because the candidate she’s running against is “not the same.”
“It’s somebody who wants to get in there and make drastic … radical … sweeping changes to the way that we vote … it’s scary to me,” Slattery said. “I think it can be scary to a lot of people.”
Nebraska Democratic Party Chair Jane Kleeb posted on social media about the race after the GOP primary, calling the secretary of state’s race a pickup opportunity for Democrats. Her post shared a screenshot of retiring Republican 2nd Congressional District U.S. Rep. Don Bacon criticizing Petersen.
But in a state where Republicans outnumber Democrats 2-to-1, despite a growing number of nonpartisans, Petersen is favored to take the reins of state elections. He described his GOP primary victory as a referendum on election integrity issues raised by President Donald Trump and others. Another factor, he said, is people’s lack of confidence in state leaders.
Petersen told the Examiner that his race came down to decreased public “confidence” in election systems, doubts he said haven’t been resolved since 2020. He has questioned whether ballot-counting machines the state uses can access the internet and be hacked.
Election officials in Lancaster County, Douglas County and Hall County, to name some, have said the machines cannot access the internet and that an office computer used to upload election results is only connected online when it is time to upload the vote-count data transmitted to the device via flash drive.
Petersen also argues, like Trump, that voting by mail should be restricted, used only by military personnel, people with disabilities and people who live far from their polling site. He argues that Nebraska has a “big problem.” Petersen said he wants the Legislature to bring back a “one-day election and true absentee voting.”
Some populist parts of the GOP have pushed for additional election security measures as a part of a national framing of the electoral process that some election experts have warned could undermine public trust. Historically in Nebraska, Republicans tend to fare better than Democrats on Election Day.
“We have 35 days of mail-in balloting, and the corruption … it encourages outside money to come into Nebraska and send people and money into Nebraska and harvest ballots … we need to … reform it a little bit and get back to that one-day election and true absentee voting,” he said.
More than a third of the Nebraska electorate has voted by mailin recent primaries. In some elections, that number climbs north of 40% or 45%.
A day after his victory, Petersen, who helped a wing of the Nebraska Republican Party take over in 2022 from a team more loyal to then-Gov. Pete Ricketts, now a U.S. senator, told former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s War Room that “we elected leaders. They go to Washington D.C. … they go to our state Legislature, and they do nothing.”
Scott Petersen of Omaha, 2026 Republican candidate for Nebraska secretary of state. (Courtesy of Petersen campaign) Former Nebraska Republican Party Chair Eric Underwood told the War Room in a separate interview that “the easier fruit [of incumbents] to pick off the branch was the secretary of state.”
“This was one of the most fundamental changes that had to happen in the State of Nebraska, and it’s sending shock waves through the establishment … Petersen put principles on the ballot,” Underwood said.
