In a little over a week, voters in 24 states will choose their next top election official, setting up the people who will help run the 2028 presidential election. Those races, along with five more states where the chief election official is on the ballot through another office, will decide who oversees elections in states worth 325 electoral votes.
That is why searches for when is the next presidential election are landing on down-ballot contests that do not usually draw this much attention. The answer matters now because the 2026 elections will not just fill state offices. They will determine who writes the rules, manages election systems and helps shape how the next presidential contest is run in the states that matter most.
Georgia shows how high the stakes are. Brad Raffensperger, who became known in the 2020 election for resisting President Donald Trump's attempt to overturn the result in Georgia, is retiring. Whoever replaces him will be in charge of implementing a new voting system for 2028. The Democratic candidate is Penny Brown Reynolds. The Republican candidate is Tim Fleming.
Georgia is not alone. In Iowa, four-term incumbent Paul Pate is facing Democratic challenger Ryan Peterman. In Kansas, Jennifer Day is the Democratic candidate and Pat Proctor is the Republican candidate. Those races are part of a broader cycle in which 13 states will definitely have new chief election officials starting next year because of open seats, while others are leaving incumbents in place. The result is a map full of turnover, but not an even one.
Polling has generally pointed toward a good election cycle for Democrats, yet some of the most consequential secretary of state races are in Republican-held states. That mismatch matters because state election officials usually, though not always, are the secretary of state, and they can set rules that fill gaps in state election law, decide how aggressively to clean voter rolls, and choose whether to emphasize voter access or penalties for voting illegally. They also decide how closely to work with the federal government.
That is why the next round of results will reach far beyond state capitols. The people chosen this year will be the ones standing at the controls when the 2028 presidential election arrives, and the central question is not whether these offices matter. It is which states are about to hand them over to someone new.
