Nebraska secretary of state loses GOP primary to challenger questioning election security

Omaha businessman Scott Petersen on Tuesday defeated Nebraska Secretary of State Bob Evnen in a Republican primary election, toppling a two-term incumbent by raising questions on the campaign trail about election integrity and ballot security.

As of Wednesday morning, Petersen was winning with 55% of the GOP vote to Evnen’s 45%, with nearly all of the expected votes tallied.

Petersen will be favored to win November’s general election in Nebraska, a reliably Republican-leaning state.

Petersen’s victory was a major upset, after Evnen had been endorsed by Nebraska Republican leaders including Gov. Jim Pillen and the entire congressional delegation: Sens. Deb Fischer and Pete Ricketts and GOP Reps. Mike Flood, Don Bacon and Adrian Smith.

Petersen gained traction ahead of the primary by raising questions about how Nebraska’s elections are conducted, often promoting false or debunked conspiracy theories about voting equipment.

One of Petersen’s lengthy threads of posts on X claiming that Nebraska’s election system was “not fully verified, not fully inspected, and not held to modern standards,” prompted Bacon to call Petersen “the President of the TinFoil Hat Club.”

Evnen, throughout the primary, claimed that Nebraska’s elections are held to the “gold standard” of election security.

Leading up to Tuesday’s primary election, the two men clashed over the practice of hand-counting ballots, a popular idea in some corners of the Republican Party that is fraught with logistical and accuracy problems.

Petersen, a former chair of the Douglas County Republican Party, called for full hand counts of ballots in elections. Evnen pointed to a hand-count audit system already in place in the state, in which a random selection of 10% of election precincts in the state have hand-count audits after elections.

Petersen also called for eliminating mail voting for all except those who are disabled, serve in the military or live far away from their polling place.

Evnen sought to reassure voters that Nebraska’s voting system was fair and secure.

The secretary of state did not receive an endorsement from President Donald Trump. But Evnen did amplify his MAGA credentials by turning over information about every registered voter in the state to the federal government after a request from the Justice Department.

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