In battleground Ohio, the president took credit for Republican Troy Balderson’s performance, calling it “a great victory,” even though the contest could be headed to a recount. Democrats could also celebrate their showing in a district that has gone Republican for decades.

“We’re not stopping now,” Democrat Danny O’Connor told cheering supporters. He’ll reprise his campaign against Balderson from now through November’s general election.

In deep-red Kansas’ Republican gubernatorial primary, the candidate Trump backed on the eve of the election, Secretary of State Kris Kobach, was neck and neck with current Republican Gov. Jeff Colyer.

The day’s races in five states, like many before them, tested the persistence of Trump’s fiery supporters and the momentum of the Democratic Party’s anti-Trump resistance.

The results were helping determine the political landscape — and Trump’s standing within his own party — as the GOP defends its House and Senate majorities this fall.

In Kansas, Republicans were fighting among themselves in an unusual battle for governor in which the president sided with the incumbent’s challenger.

Should the polarizing Kobach win the primary, some Republican operatives fear he could lose the governorship to Democrats this fall. The race could become further disrupted if Kansas City-area businessman Greg Orman makes it onto the November ballot. He submitted petitions Monday with more than 10,000 signatures for what could become the most serious independent run for Kansas governor in decades.

Trump made his preference clear for Kobach.

“He is a fantastic guy who loves his State and our Country – he will be a GREAT Governor and has my full & total Endorsement! Strong on Crime, Border & Military,” the president tweeted on the eve of the election.

Republicans were hoping for Democratic discord in Kansas’ 3rd Congressional District, a suburban Kansas City district where several candidates were fighting for the chance to take on Republican Rep. Kevin Yoder in November.

The five-way Democratic primary featured labor lawyer Brent Welder, who campaigned recently with self-described democratic socialists Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and ascending political star, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York congressional candidate.

Also in the race: Native American attorney Sharice Davids and former school teacher Tom Niermann.

In Ohio, the script for the special election was somewhat familiar: An experienced Trump loyalist, Balderson, was fighting a strong challenge from O’Connor, a fresh-faced Democrat, in a congressional district held by the Republican Party for more than three decades. As voters were going to the polls, Trump said Balderson would make a “great congressman.”

The winner takes the seat previously held by Pat Tiberi, a nine-term incumbent who resigned to take a job with an Ohio business group.

Balderson and O’Connor will reprise their race in the general election in just three months. There were at least 3,367 provisional ballots left to be reviewed. That’s enough for O’Connor to potentially pick up enough to force a recount.

The Associated Press does not declare winners in races subject to an automatic recount.

In a special election season that featured nearly a dozen congressional contests, Democrats claimed just a handful of wins, but they may have cause for optimism this fall. In virtually every special election test dating back to the spring of 2017, Democratic candidates performed significantly better than their party in those same places two years earlier.

Trump won Ohio’s 12th Congressional District, for example, by more than 11 points in 2016; on Tuesday night, Balderson and O’Connor were separated by less than 1 point.

There are 79 House races this fall considered more competitive than the Ohio district — at least looking at Trump’s 2016 performance — according to data compiled by the Democrats’ national campaign committee.

Despite the deadlocked race, the specific Ohio returns suggest considerably higher Democratic enthusiasm less than 100 days before the midterms.

O’Connor’s total of nearly 100,000 votes far exceeded what the district’s former Republican congressman Pat Tiberi’s Democratic opponent got in 2014. Balderson’s total — just more than 101,500 votes — is barely two-thirds of Tiberi’s 2014 mark of about 150,000.

The two will face off again in November to see who holds the seat in 2019 and 2020.

“Over the next three months, I’m going to do everything I can to keep America great again, so that when we come back here in November — get ready, we gotta come back here in November — I have earned your vote for a second time,” Balderson told supporters.

It’s unclear how much Trump’s support helped or hurt Balderson. Described by campaign operatives as a “Whole Foods” district, the largely suburban region features a more affluent and educated voter base than the typical Trump stronghold.

Ohio Gov. John Kasich, a leading voice in the GOP’s shrinking anti-Trump wing, once represented the district in Congress.

At times, the race centered on Trump’s tax cuts as much as the candidates.

O’Connor and his Democratic allies railed against the tax plan, casting it as a giveaway for the rich that exacerbates federal deficits and threatens Medicare and Social Security. Balderson and his Republican allies have backed away from the tax plan in recent weeks, training their fire instead on top House Democrat Nancy Pelosi.

O’Connor dominated Balderson on the local airwaves. His campaign spent $2.25 million on advertising compared to Balderson’s $507,000, according to campaign tallies of ad spending. The Republican campaign arm and its allied super PAC were forced to pick up the slack, spending more than $4 million between them.

In Michigan , three mainstream Democrats in suburban Detroit were among those vying for a chance at retiring Republican Rep. Dave Trott’s seat in November. The field included Fayrouz Saad, who would be the first Muslim woman in Congress.

And in suburban Seattle, three Democrats vied in a jungle primary for the seat held by another retiring Republican, Rep. Dave Reichert.

The field was set in two Senate contests as well.

In Missouri, Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill claimed her party’s nomination, while state Attorney General Josh Hawley will represent the GOP.

And in Michigan, Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow will take on military veteran and business executive John James, who won the Republican nomination. He would join Tim Scott of South Carolina as the only black Republican senators if he wins in November.

Hours before polls opened, Trump again weighed in on Twitter, casting James as “a potential Republican star.”

___

Peoples reported from Washington. Associated Press writers John Hanna in Topeka, Kansas, and Angie Wang in Westerville, Ohio, contributed.

___

Sign up for “Politics in Focus,” a weekly newsletter showcasing the AP’s best political reporting from around the country leading up to the midterm elections: https://bit.ly/2ICEr3D

Chief of Staff John Kelly, who installed her in the job, jumped in to defend her.

The two men then sparred over Nielsen as she silently watched. At one point, Trump noted the border numbers were lower under Kelly and wondered aloud why Nielsen could not perform as well, according to these officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the private meeting.

As illegal crossings are once more on the rise and Trump hears a cascade of criticism from conservative allies, Nielsen finds herself on the receiving end of the president’s visceral anger about immigration, seeing the issue as the reason he won in 2016 and a key to his politicking ahead of the midterm elections.

The president has chastised her on several occasions this spring, including a much-publicized meeting earlier this month when he attacked her in front of the entire Cabinet. He has grown furious because his administration has made little progress building the border wall, and his most ardent supporters have blamed Nielsen for not doing more to halt the caravan of Central American migrants whose advance Trump saw as a personal challenge.

He has also seen her as a proxy for Kelly, whose relationship with the president has frayed in recent months. Trump has decided, according to several aides, that Nielsen is a George W. Bush kind of Republican, the worst in his view.

Nielsen has complained that it is almost an impossible task working for Trump, according to administration officials and others familiar with her thinking, and that he doesn’t understand the nuances of immigration law.

It remains unclear, according to several people familiar with the situation, how much longer the relationship can last, but the strains illustrate the difficulty faced by Trump subordinates who are tasked with delivering policy solutions to match his most soaring promises.

“The president has a very rudimentary understanding of what the border is all about and how you secure it,” said a former DHS staffer who worked closely with Nielsen. “And she’s also not one of the border fire-eaters that have his ear right now. She’s in an impossible, no-win situation.”

Tensions between the two could soon flare again – the Border Patrol’s May arrest numbers are due to be released early next month, and immigration hawks, including the president, now treat them as a kind of barometer for Nielsen’s performance.

“Secretary Nielsen is vigorously advancing the president’s agenda to secure this nation’s borders against uncontrolled migration, drugs, gangs, terrorism, crime and the theft of taxpayer dollars and American jobs,” White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller said in a statement. “She knows the threat, understands the threat, and is undertaking bold action to confront it head-on.”

Tyler Houlton, a DHS spokesman, said the two are “on the same page,” adding “any accusations to the contrary are simply false.”

– – –

Nielsen brings a lawyerly, technocratic approach to an issue that animates the president like no other, with a passion dyed into the blood-red MAGA caps of his supporters.

The night before Trump delivered his first speech to Congress in February 2017, he huddled with Jared Kushner and Miller in the Oval Office to talk immigration. The president reluctantly agreed with suggestions he strike a gentler tone on immigration in the speech.

Trump reminded them the crowds loved his rhetoric on immigrants along the campaign trail. Acting as if he was at a rally, he then read aloud a few made up Hispanic names and described potential crimes they could have committed, like rape or murder. Then, he said, the crowds would roar when the criminals were thrown out of the country – as they did when he highlighted crimes by illegal immigrants at his rallies, according to a person present for the exchange and another briefed on it later. Miller and Kushner laughed.

A senior White House official said that while the president did discuss the “crowd enthusiasm for crackdowns on criminal aliens,” the official disputed that Trump used Hispanic names to illustrate the point.

Around the same time, Nielsen was complaining to colleagues – and her then-boss, DHS secretary Kelly – about how the administration botched its travel ban. She panned the president’s statement about the border wall, saying it was unlikely to ever be built. Kelly agreed. The two sometimes joked about it.

In early 2017, Nielsen told at least two colleagues that the president’s rhetoric made it more difficult to run the agency.

Now, five months into her tenure as Homeland Security secretary, the measures Nielsen has implemented – separating families, boosting arrests, increasing prosecutions – have made her a villain to many Democrats and immigrant rights’ groups.

But they have not delivered the immediate results the president demands. In April, the number of illegal border crossers arrested by U.S. agents topped 50,000 for the second consecutive month. The increase has stripped the president of one of his proudest accomplishments – the sharp drop in illegal migration in the months immediately following his 2016 win.

Trump has been in no mood to hear that migration patterns have returned to historic, seasonal norms this spring, a trend occurring in part because the American economy is buzzing and U.S. farms, factories and businesses are desperate for workers.

Instead Trump has fumed at Nielsen, telling her to “close the border” and growing impatient at her explanations of why that’s not possible. He has also blamed her, at times, for not securing enough money to finish the border wall – even though she was not part of the spending deal struck by senior White House aides and that the president signed, current and former administration officials said.

Allies of Nielsen note that some of the president’s gripes are with immigration judges that cannot process people quickly enough, caravans that cannot be immediately stopped by DHS due to asylum laws and international agreements.

In fact, Trump has grown more agitated when she has tried on several occasions to describe why she cannot do what he wants – and what laws and budget mandates might prevent it.

Mark Kirkorian, head of the Center for Immigration Studies, the Washington think tank whose ideas about the benefits of restricting immigration have broad influence in the administration, said Trump wants Nielsen to deliver a crackdown that looks like “the Iraq War.”

“He wants to do Shock and Awe,” said Kirkorian. “He doesn’t realize this is World War I. It’s trench warfare.”

– – –

Calling Nielsen “a Bush person” is a label that casts doubt at both her loyalty to the president and his immigration agenda. But Nielsen’s real problem, current and former colleagues say, is that she is a Kelly person – and that she has few other allies in the White House except for the diminished chief of staff.

“It’s the same thing we’ve seen happen with General Kelly. My suspicion is there are rogue people in the West Wing and former officials who got pushed out who are running disinformation campaigns,” said Blain Rethmeier, an ally of both.

When Kelly became White House chief of staff, he only presented Trump with Nielsen’s name, according to three current and former White House officials. He pushed Trump repeatedly to pick Nielsen – even though the president had barely spent time with her and she was a polarizing figure inside the White House. Others pushed candidates like Kris Kobach, who the president liked but was told could not be confirmed.

Trump brought Kelly in to tame a wild West Wing in July 2017. Kelly asked Nielsen to be his deputy and trusted enforcer, and she quickly grated upon White House staffers who viewed her as a humorless scold who did not communicate with aides. For her part, Nielsen told others she could not believe how disorganized and chaotic the place was. Several White House officials said her only ally in the building was Kelly.

She stayed away from Trump, “maybe visiting the Oval Office five times,” according to a former senior administration official. Other aides frequently bad-mouthed her to the president.

Soon after Trump picked her to lead the department in October, he came to regret it, threatening to renege on her nomination. In an Oval Office meeting last fall, Trump complained about Nielsen to Kelly even as she sat nearby, officials familiar with the meeting said.

“Nobody likes her,” he said, telling Kelly he had heard from friends, West Wing aides and TV personalities. He then asked Kelly why the chief had pushed Nielsen so hard and whether he had to stick with the choice, according to the officials.

Kelly jumped in to defend Nielsen, citing her work ethic and knowledge of the agency. Trump decided to stick with her nomination.

Many senior staffers at DHS were stunned when Nielsen was appointed to lead the department. She had never lead a large organization, let alone one as unwieldy as DHS.

Nielsen, 46, worked as a Homeland Security adviser and DHS staffer under George W. Bush, then spent the Obama years remaking herself as a cybersecurity expert. Her high-level management experience was thin.

When Trump was elected in 2016, Nielsen was running Sunesis Consulting, a firm whose online profile listed her as its lone employee. The company’s business address was a condo in Alexandria. The firm’s phone number, still visible online, is Nielsen’s personal cellphone.

Nielsen quickly impressed Kelly with her breadth of knowledge, discipline and willingness to work hard, former colleagues said. When Nielsen fell ill that winter with a respiratory infection, she continued putting in long hours for Kelly, coughing so hard that she cracked a rib.

The Marine Corps general valued her toughness and soldierly sacrifice. Kelly’s wife called her “a pit bull.”

She has struggled to win support from senior officials at the DHS agencies responsible for delivering an immigration crackdown. One high-ranking DHS official called her leadership style “insular and insecure,” saying she has made few allies outside a small circle of trusted advisers, including DHS chief of staff Chad Wolf, and Jonathan Hoffman, her communications director. Aides say a number of DHS employees have been offended because she micromanages and even grows testy with staff over small matters, like a misspelling in an email.

During immigration negotiations with congressional leaders earlier this year, she did not invite the heads of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS), all officials with extensive career experience. They viewed it as a slight, according to current and former DHS officials, and when the immigration negotiations failed to produce a deal, it meant even more of the blame fell on Nielsen.

Nielsen has faced the same staffing shortfalls that have afflicted other agencies under Trump, but in the past two months, DHS has filled 10 senior staff-level positions, an official at the agency said.

Still, Nielsen has few friends in the White House besides Kelly and has clashed with Miller, the influential immigration adviser.

When President Trump’s advisers were writing a report on terrorism earlier this year, Miller had a suggestion. Language saying that children of foreign-born nationalists were more likely than non-foreign born nationals to commit acts of terrorism should be inserted into the report and the accompanying press materials, according to three people with knowledge of his wishes.

But Miller’s move was opposed by Nielsen and her top aides, these people said. They said such language was not substantiated in fact and that a report wouldn’t go out from her agency claiming such.

– – –

Nielsen got a glimpse of Trump’s intense anger over immigration last June when she was present for part of a meeting where Trump, Kelly, Miller and then Secretary of State Rex Tillerson all began yelling and insulting each other, according to former and current administration officials. Miller was pushing for tighter immigration and refugee controls. At one point during the meeting, Miller heavily criticized Tillerson, drawing a rare rebuke from the laconic Secretary of State, who said he deserved respect.

Trump sided with Miller and loved his performance, saying Tillerson needed to be tougher, according to these officials.

Nielsen, present for the meeting, was booted by Kelly – who said staff did not need to see such a spectacle.

Kelly grew so angry during the June meeting because he thought the president was uninformed, and he later told associates that it was a staffing problem and a reason he was willing to become the next chief of staff. “The president deserves better,” a White House official said, describing Kelly’s reaction.

As Trump harangued Nielsen for more than 30 minutes in front of the Cabinet this month, other aides grimaced and fidgeted. Nothing she said seemed to calm the president, according to people familiar with the meeting.

“We’re closed!” Trump yelled at one point, referring to the border.

This time, Kelly did not leap to her defense.

That record makes it tough to jam Wayne Williams into a Trumpian mold. But as the Colorado Springs Republican seeks a second term in the November election against Democratic challenger Jena Griswold, election watchers say he faces a potential threat in the volatile politics of 2018: Colorado voters may not care.

Voters dissatisfied with Trump — whose first-year job performance ��— could take it out not only on Republican congressional candidates but also on those running for state office.

Democrats are fired up at the prospect of a blue wave, which gives them more confidence in the party’s chances of winning the Secretary of State’s Office for the first time in nearly six decades. And Griswold, while a political newcomer, has built up a 2-to-1 fundraising advantage over Williams�������Գ��� announcing her candidacy last summer.

The Louisville attorney, a former��member of Gov. John Hickenlooper’s administration, breezed through the state assembly last month, making the secretary of state’s race the only statewide contest that won’t depend on the outcome of the June 26 major-party primaries.

But Floyd Ciruli, a longtime political analyst in Colorado, cautioned against discounting Williams’ chances.

“If there’s a strong wave, I think it could go up and down the ballot and give (Griswold) a bit of a push, some momentum,” Ciruli said. Still, he added, “Wayne Williams will be the hardest person on the ballot to beat, just generically, because he is a very popular incumbent in an office that is seen as less partisan.”

Also filed for the race are unaffiliated candidate Blake Huber of Denver and Libertarian Bennett��Rutledge of Centennial.

Williams, 55, came up through local politics in heavily Republican El Paso County as the elected clerk and recorder and as a county commissioner, but in state office he’s tried to dull any partisan edge — with varying success.

Last summer, Williams’ decision to cooperate with a voter data request from Trump’s later-disbanded voter fraud commission drew scorn from Democrats, including Griswold. Thousands of Colorado voters canceled their registrations after the commission issued its request.

Williams has defended his decision to supply information that already was public under the law, and he’s also publicly questioned Trump’s assertions that rampant voting fraud occurred in 2016: “I think there are instances of vote fraud,” Williams said recently, “but I don’t believe there were 3 to 5 million of them in the last election.”

Such comments distinguish him from Republican counterparts such as , who was vice chair of Trump’s commission and has pushed for more restrictive voting laws.

But Griswold disputed Williams’ handling of the data request. It’s an issue that, nearly a year later, she brings up frequently to contrast her views and Williams’ on how best to safeguard Coloradans’ voting rights.

“Wayne was one of the only secretaries of state in the nation who thought that handing over voter information to the Trump voter commission was a good idea,” Griswold said. “I thought that decision was rash, and I don’t like rash decisions with our constitution and constitutional rights.”

More recently, Williams faced a brief grand jury investigation initiated by the Denver District Attorney’s office over his office’s handling��of several campaign finance complaints. He characterized the matter, which was initiated by a frequent filer of finance complaints, as politically motivated, and the DA’s office soon dropped the investigation after reviewing documents supplied by Williams’ office.

“From my perspective, doing my job well is the most important thing I can do,” Williams said, noting national attention that his office has received for a first-of-its-kind election audit��and other election security measures. “So that is where a lot of my focus has been.”

Williams’ , as of Thursday, had not yet been updated from the 2014 race, though a campaign spokesman said a relaunch was in the works.

After taking office, he made a point of visiting the clerk’s offices in all 64 counties. He’s also spearheaded initiatives that help smaller counties pay for election-related programs. Both efforts have won him praise from clerks of all political affiliations.

Griswold, 33, worked as a voting rights attorney��for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign before joining the Hickenlooper administration as its Washington, D.C., liaison.��Among other plans, she has called for more stringent campaign finance reporting requirements that would make it difficult for organizations that participate in political campaigns to hide their donors’ identities.

“I believe that Coloradans deserve to know where political spending is coming from,” she said. “I plan to lead the charge on campaign finance reform.”

In new campaign finance reports filed this week, Griswold reported more than $136,000 in donations since Jan. 1, compared to $45,239 collected by Williams. She ended the period with more than $207,000 in her account, compared with $89,052 for Williams.

That gap echoes Williams’ fundraising disadvantage in 2014 against Democrat Joe Neguse, though Williams ended up winning by more than 2 percentage points.

The order stems from a 2016 lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of Kansas voters in federal court against a state voter ID law. The 2013 law requires people to provide proof of citizenship, such as a passport or birth certificate, when they registered to vote for the first time. The ACLU argues that the law violates the federal National Voter Registration Act, which requires state DMVs to offer people the ability to register with only the “minimum amount of information necessary.”

U.S. District Judge Julie Robinson issued a preliminary injunction in 2016 that blocked the law, and asked that the registrations of some 18,000 people whose materials had been held be notified with a postcard confirming their registration and polling place, as other voters are in Kansas.

But the ACLU recently charged that many voters had failed to receive the postcard; one man who has joined the lawsuit, Charles Stricker, who had been affected by the law, testified that even after the injunction he had been told that the legal issues about the right of people like himself to vote were “up in the air.”

Robinson sided with the ACLU’s January motion to hold Kobach, Kansas’ secretary of state, in contempt for the failures, as the court had ordered him previously to comply.

In her ruling, in which she said twice that Kobach acted “disingenuously,” Robinson wrote that she found “clear and convincing evidence” that he had disobeyed the preliminary injunction.

“Kansans have come to expect these postcards to confirm their registration status, and Defendant ensured the Court on the record that they had been sent prior to the 2016 general election,” Robinson wrote. “They were not, and the fact that he sent a different notice to those voters does not wholly remove the contempt.”

Robinson also wrote of evidence that Kobach “willfully failed to make sure that the county election officials were clearly and effectively trained to enforce” the voting rules enforced by the injunction.

“The official training manual for the counties continued to instruct that all voter registration applicants were required to submit DPOC [documented proof of citizenship] and his efforts to revise these instructions informally and in a piecemeal way led to confusion and misinformation.”

The ruling was another blow for Kobach, a Trump ally and candidate for governor of Kansas, who led the president’s “election integrity” panel that was dissolved earlier this year after bipartisan rebukes from states and multiple federal lawsuits. Kobach was also fined $1,000 in connection with the case because of what another federal judge termed a pattern of “misleading the court” in voter ID cases.

Spokesman Moriah Day said in a statement that Kobach declined to comment.

“The Secretary of State’s Office will be appealing this decision,” the statement said.

The preliminary injunction blocking the 2013 law will be in effect until the resolution of the trial in the case, which began in March.

According to the complaint ACLU filed with the court, some 22,000 Kansas voters were suspended or purged from the registration system because of the citizenship documentation requirement, stymying nearly 14 percent of new registrants.

Two of Kobach’s witnesses have said that since 2000 Kansas has identified 127 people who are believed to be non-citizens when they registered or attempted to register, the ACLU said. The ACLU said that only 11 are believed to have actually cast a ballot.

“Republicans have understood the importance of the office,” said iVote president and founder, Ellen Kurz. “There isn’t a single Democratic swing state secretary of state. And dozens of states have taken away opportunities to vote, purged voter rolls and disenfranchised certain voters every year.”

This year, iVote will focus on electing Democrats as the chief election officials in seven swing states: Arizona, Colorado, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, and Ohio. Only one of those states, New Mexico, has a Democratic secretary of state.

Two of the states, Arizona and Michigan, have not elected Democrats to the office since the 1990s; Colorado has not elected a Democratic secretary of state since John F. Kennedy was in the White House.

“This isn’t a coincidence,” said Kurz. “The Republican party targeted these offices two decades ago along with state legislatures, for redistricting purposes. They understood the power of the office and the they knew their path to winning was shrinking. In these contested states – except Iowa, where it’s students they are after – there are great numbers of people of color. These are the people that Republican campaigns target to stop certain people from voting.”

Kurz’s iVote is not the first Democratic group designed to win secretaries of states’ offices. In the run-up to the 2006, some wealthy donors funded a 527 group, the Secretary of State Project, to boost Democrats in races where their candidates had been struggling to raise money. In a good year for the party, the project was a success; its biggest coups came in Ohio, where Democrats warned that voter suppression had been costing them support, and Minnesota, where two-term Secretary of State Mark Ritchie presided over a complicated recount that helped elect former senator Al Franken.

The project folded after 2008, just before Republicans mounted comebacks across the South and Midwest. In 2012 and 2016, Democrats found themselves in 11th hour lawsuits against Republican secretaries of state who tightened early voting periods, restricted the use of provisional ballots, or purged voter rolls. In 2017, the party was thrown into a panic after Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R), who has crusaded against the specter of voter fraud, was tapped to run a federal electoral commission; it fell apart last year after states declined to supply it with voter data.

“They’ve systematically invested in candidate recruitment and support. They’ve coordinated across offices on policy through things like ALEC – see Kris Kobach,” said Kurz. “They’ve used the office to create a bench – see [Ohio’s Jon] Husted this year for example. And the results are stunning.”

This is not the first time iVote has tried to assist Democrats in downballot races. In 2014, the group spent money in Iowa to back Brad Anderson, the Democratic nominee for secretary of state, who ran 20 points ahead of his party’s gubernatorial candidate and nearly won.

“They ran negative ads against Paul Pate, and they definitely helped,” said Anderson, referring to the Republican who won the election. “And the Republican I was running to replace was infamous, which helped with money. It was just a bad Democratic year.”

No Democrat, and no Republican, expects 2018 to create as many Republican openings as 2014. The issue now, said Kurz, was whether Democrats knew they could run real, well-funded campaigns.

“We would have won Brad Anderson’s race even in a Republican landslide if we had a small amount more money to talk to voters,” said Kurz. “Great candidates often do not even run for this office on the Democratic side because the idea of having to raise the money for a statewide election which costs money is daunting.”

Kris Kobach, Kansas’ secretary of state, announced Thursday that��Bailey Ann McCaughey and��Que J. Fulmer are facing accusations involving voter fraud.

McCaughey allegedly��voted in Colorado and Finney County, Kan., where Garden City is located, and is facing charges of��election perjury and voting more than once.

Fulmer is accused of voting in Colorado and just across the border in Hamilton County, Kan. Fulmer has been charged with two counts of voting without being qualified, one count of voting more than once, and one count of advance voting unlawful acts, Kobach’s office says.

The Colorado Secretary of State’s Office says it has notified the county clerks in Douglas and Adams counties about the cases for possible referral to local prosecutors for further investigation after tying��McCaughey and��Fulmer’s voting records there. A spokeswoman for the office said both appear to have registered as Republicans in Colorado.

“Stopping voter fraud is one of the most important things the Secretary of State’s office can do,” Kobach said in a written statement. “These prosecutions will help deter voter fraud in the future.”

On Wednesday, Trump announced that he was disbanding his Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity — headed by Kobach — following a wave of tumult enveloping the panel. The president created the commission after alleging that in the 2016 presidential election, despite a lack of evidence.

In Colorado, the commission prompted thousands of voters to rather than have their identifying information��sent to the Trump administration.

Trump convened the commission to investigate the 2016 presidential election, after alleging repeatedly and without evidence that voting fraud cost him the popular vote. Trump won the electoral college.

The White House blamed the decision to end the panel on more than a dozen states that have refused to comply with the commission’s demand for reams of personal voter data, including names, partial Social Security numbers, voting histories and party affiliations.

“Rather than engage in endless legal battles at taxpayer expense, today President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order to dissolve the Commission, and he has asked the Department of Homeland Security to review its initial findings and determine next courses of action,” White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement.

Critics saw the commission as part of a conservative campaign to make it harder for poor people and minority voters to access the ballot box, and to justify Trump’s claims of voter fraud.

Trump has repeatedly alleged, without evidence, that 3 million to 5 million people voted illegally in the 2016 election, delivering the popular vote to his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton. Clinton received 2.8 million more votes than Trump nationwide.

While there have been isolated cases of voter fraud in the U.S., past studies have found it to be exceptionally rare.

Critics also viewed the commission as part of an attempt to distract from the ongoing investigations into Russian election meddling and potential collusion between Moscow and Trump campaign aides. The intelligence community concluded that the Russian government mounted a campaign to help Trump win, hacking email accounts and spreading false stories.

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, the commission’s vice chairman, characterized the decision to dissolve the bipartisan group as a “tactical change” and argued DHS can pursue an investigation of election fraud more quickly and efficiently.

“The Democrats, both on and off the commission, made very clear that they were not interested in determining the scope and extent of voter fraud and, indeed, they were trying to stop the commission in its tracks,” Kobach said. “The Democrats lost their opportunity, lost their seat at the table, by stonewalling.”

Kobach, a conservative Republican and vocal supporter of tough voter ID laws, alleged Democrats wanted no investigation. “Their motto is, ‘Nothing to see here,'” he said.

One of the members of the commission, Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap, sued the commission in federal court, alleging it had violated federal law by refusing to provide him documents available to other members, among other charges.

Dunlap on Wednesday said Kobach and his allies “were the ones that were stonewalling,” saying they had “very definite ideas of what they wanted this commission to come up with.”

Three Democratic senators — Michael Bennet of Colorado, Cory Booker of New Jersey and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota — had also asked the U.S. Government Accountability Office to investigate the commission, which it agreed to do in October.

Kobach said he intends to work closely with DHS and the White House, and expects the bulk of the DHS investigation to be done by midsummer.

Dunlap questioned if the plan all along was for the commission to be disbanded. “They’re going to abandon the public process and they’re going to do it behind the scenes,” he said. “Much more efficiently means no more public input.”

More than a dozen states, as well as the District of Columbia, had rebuffed the commission’s request for voter data, citing privacy concerns and a fear that complying would legitimize the idea that voter fraud is widespread.

While there have been isolated cases of people voting illegally, and many voter rolls contain outdated data, there is no evidence voter fraud is a widespread problem in the United States or has impacted election results.

A study by a Loyola Law School professor found that out of 1 billion votes cast in all American elections between 2000 and 2014, there were only 31 known cases of impersonation fraud.

During the commission’s first meeting, Trump had questioned the motives of states that refused to comply with the commission’s request, suggesting they had something to hide.

Voter advocacy groups and Democrats applauded Wednesday’s decision.

“It is no surprise that a commission founded on a lie of widespread voter fraud proved to be a fraud itself,” said California Secretary of State Alex Padilla, a Democrat, who had refused to comply with the commission’s request for voter data. “No taxpayer dollars should have been wasted on Mr. Trump’s voter suppression crusade.”

Dale Ho, director of the American Civil Liberties Union Voting Rights Project, accused the commission of engaging in “a wild-goose chase for voter fraud, demonizing the very American voters whom we should all be helping to participate — with the not-so-secret goal of making voting harder with unnecessary barriers.

“President Trump has tried and failed to spread his own fake news about voter fraud,” Ho said.

The commission prompted a great deal of ire in Colorado where rather than have their identifying information sent to the Trump administration. Colorado Secretary of State Wayne Williams sent voter data to the commission in August.

“Thousands of Coloradans cancelled their registrations because they knew this voter fraud commission lacked any objectivity or credibility,” U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, a Colorado Democrat and fierce opponent of the commission, said in a tweet.

U.S. Rep. Jared Polis, D-Boulder, said: “Good news here, but the President should have stated the actual reason for dissolving the commission — there is no credible evidence of massive voter fraud, and the commission was an attempt to disenfranchise voters.”

Thousands of Coloradans cancelled their registrations because they knew this voter fraud commission lacked any objectivity or credibility. should end this taxpayer-funded fishing expedition aimed at validating 's conspiracy theories about the 2016 election.

— Michael Bennet (@SenatorBennet)

Williams, a Republican, reiterated in a statement Wednesday night that��his office only sent the commission information��that is public record��and available under state law to anyone who requests it, including names, addresses, birth years and party affiliations.

“The commission requested states’ public voter roll data,” he said in a statement. “As we said in our��July 14 letter to the commission, there are far better��ways to effectively assess the accuracy of��voter rolls and voter integrity than looking at publicly available data. We are always happy to work with other states, which have the authority over elections, on voter roll accuracy.”

Williams also reiterated that he feels confident that the state’s elections are safe and secure.

Updated Jan. 4, 2017 at 8:45 a.m.��The following corrected information has been added to this article: Because of a reporter’s error, this story inaccurately characterized some of the voter information sent by the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office to the Trump administration. The office sent voters’ birth years.

Denver Post staff writer Jesse Paul contributed to this report.��Hanna reported from Topeka, Kansas. Associated Press writer Ken Thomas contributed to this report.