Utah’s Republican lieutenant governor is issuing dire warnings as President Donald Trump and his allies seek to impose their will on states’ election systems.

Much like GOP officials such as Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon, Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson has been awakened to — and outspoken about — the depravity in Trump’s push to effectively launch an authoritarian-style takeover of the election system.

Henderson has used her office to debunk lies that the president and other members of her party have promoted about election fraud, and she has been placed under investigation by Trump’s Justice Department as she — like other state officials — has resisted demands to hand over sensitive voter information.

In a new interview with the Utah News Dispatch, she said federal efforts to intervene in this year’s midterm elections, such as with the Trump-backed SAVE Act, are “despicable.” She also rebuked the notion that widespread voter fraud is a legitimate problem, adding:

Politics is part of our country, but politics is sharing ideas, debating ideas, making sure that your side is articulating what you want to do. Politics should not be messing around with the rules of the game to benefit one side or another. That should never happen, and that gamesmanship keeps me up at night.

Of the GOP’s push to implement the SAVE Act before the midterms, Henderson said “the purpose of that is just to disenfranchise people, and that’s crappy. That should not happen. That’s despicable.”

She added:

It is hard because there are so many forces — forces much greater than me, greater than the Legislature, greater than our state — that are trying to muck things up for our voters. And I take Utahns’ voting rights very, very seriously. They are sacred, and they ought to be protected, and they ought to be preserved, and they shouldn’t be mucked around with for political purposes.

Henderson said the federal government has shown that the Trump administration isn’t interested in facts:

We made a few tweaks and modifications, and there’s no big, huge problem. And that is not a narrative, unfortunately, that the federal government wanted to hear. I learned a long time ago that, like they don’t want to know that we’re doing things OK. They don’t want to know that things are going well, because it goes against a narrative that is being pounded relentlessly of mass fraud or ineligible people voting.

It seems Henderson and a few other outspoken conservative officials are trying to hit the brakes as their party plunges deeper into authoritarianism — and tries to drag the nation with it.

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