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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 professional chef and small business owner 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.
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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 mail in recent primaries, including in 2022. 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.”
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.
Current Republican Party Chair, Mary Truemper said Petersen listened to rank-and-file Republicans.
“He ran a strong campaign, connected with voters on the issues that matter to them and earned this win,” Truemper said. “After two terms, Secretary Evnen leaves this office in a stronger place than he found it.”
Slattery, the Democratic nominee, said she thinks some GOP voters picked Pettersen over Evnen because of citizen-led medical cannabis petitions that Evnen had questioned. The ballot initiatives passed with more than two-thirds of the vote in 2024. She said some GOP voters might have wanted “new blood.”
Nebraska Attorney General Mike Hilgers, part of a lengthy list of Nebraska Republican elected endorsers of Evnen, told the Examiner that “Scott ran a good campaign, and he got the votes.” Hilgers has since endorsed Petersen for the general election.
“I think Nebraska generally does a very good job in running elections … [but] that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be vigilant and find places where the system is maybe weaker than we would want, and that’s part of my role,” said Hilgers, who has joined recent Evnen-involved lawsuits questioning ballot measures and some procedural steps, including over medical marijuana.
Hilgers said Nebraska conservatives who are fired up about election integrity clearly want something more than someone arguing there’s “nothing to see here,” though he stressed that Evnen had done more.
Evnen had to walk a political tightrope in 2026, after facing significant Republican opposition in 2022: He had to defend his office’s election work while also acknowledging the election security concerns of some primary voters.
The Examiner asked Petersen whether he would certify an election run under the state’s current processes and rules, if the Legislature could not pass or disagreed with him about how voting should be handled.
He also was asked whether he would certify a Nebraska presidential election with a win in the 2nd Congressional District for Democrats, one that would separate an Electoral College vote from the rest of the state for the “blue dot.”
He said he would follow the state’s “laws and whatever the rules are at the time, and whoever wins the election, that’s who gets certified … it doesn’t matter if it’s a Democrat, Republican if the rules are followed absolutely.”
“I don’t think that’s complicated,” Petersen said.
Slattery said she wants to bring “neutrality back” to the state’s top election office. She argued Evnen was “sliding a little bit into some kind of partisan territory” with some of his recent decisions. She said Evnen was likely preparing for a challenge from his right.
“I’m running to make that job kind of behind the scenes, because it’s really just an administrative position,” Slattery said.
The general election is Nov. 3.
