Are Republicans and conservatives ever going rejoin the rest of civilized society, or nah? Sounds like the wacky right doesn't want to play by the rules. Perhaps Republicans simply don't want to be a part of America no more. Maybe you followed former guy down the election fraud rabbit hole...and are gone, forever. Hope you packed a lunch.
"We truly are in uncharted waters," one expert said, calling the efforts more than six months after the 2020 election "unsustainable" for U.S. democracy.
www.nbcnews.com
"We truly are in uncharted waters," one expert said, calling the efforts more than six months after the 2020 election "unsustainable" for U.S. democracy.
Republican-led efforts to re-examine last fall's vote are spreading as experts and election officials warn that the proliferation amounts to a grave threat to U.S. democracy.
At the center of the push is Arizona, where the private company hired by the Republican-controlled state Senate continues its review of more than 2 million Maricopa County ballots, despite prior audits finding no evidence of fraud. With former President Donald Trump and others on the right following that count closely — despite it having no legal ability to overturn the result — GOP officials and voters have pushed for similar probes in at least five other states.
In Georgia, a judge last month awarded a group of plaintiffs, led by a known conspiracy theorist, a limited review of mail-in ballots in Fulton County. (That effort is still being litigated.) In
Wisconsin, the Republican state House speaker recently hired a team of retired police officers and an attorney to probe the 2020 election.
In
Michigan, state elections officials have warned local clerks in two counties that county commissioners have no authority to require further auditing or third-party reviews of election records and equipment. In New Hampshire, the audit of a single statehouse race — which officials said found
no evidence of fraud or malfeasance — was seized upon by the former president and his supporters, who've pushed for its expansion. And in Pennsylvania, a trio of GOP state lawmakers
visited the site of the Arizona ballot review and
called for a similar probe in the Keystone State.
"I think that people in other parts of the country should be looking at what's going on in Arizona as an example of what not to do," Bill Gates, a Maricopa County supervisor who helps oversee elections, told NBC News. A lifelong Republican, Gates is among the review's most outspoken GOP critics.
Tammy Patrick, senior adviser to the elections program at Democracy Fund, a nonpartisan foundation aimed at bolstering the U.S. democratic system, said she's been a longtime advocate of post-election audits. But she hesitates to label what's happening in Arizona and what is being considered elsewhere as "audits."
"We truly are in uncharted waters," she said, calling the efforts more than six months after the 2020 election "unsustainable" for U.S. democracy.
Part of the political calculus for the GOP is the widely held belief among Republican voters that President Joe Biden's win was illegitimate. Last week, a
Quinnipiac University poll found that while 64 percent of Americans say Biden's win was legitimate, two-thirds of GOP voters feel it was not. Meanwhile, Trump himself is "increasingly consumed" with the ballot reviews,
The Washington Post reported Wednesday. Banned from his social media platforms, he's pushed out statement after statement about Arizona's audit and repeating the lie that the election was stolen from him.
"This is not going to go away," Steve Bannon, Trump's former chief strategist, said in a recent interview. His
"War Room: Pandemic" podcast has hyped the Maricopa County ballot review and other similar efforts pushed across the country.
"The Nov. 3 effort will reach white hotness by the summer," he predicted, adding that he thinks no Republican will be able to win a primary next year unless they vigorously push for similar ballot reviews.
"You've seen already in Pennsylvania, you've seen things happening in Michigan, in Wisconsin," he said. "It is going to build in momentum and heat by August and then into the fall. It'll be the central issue."
Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, said the partisan ballot review in her state is effectively creating a roadmap for Republicans elsewhere to undermine election results they don't like.
"They are definitely writing the playbook here in Arizona to bring this type of, I don't want to call it an audit, but to other states," Hobbs said. "And it's dangerous. It's continuing to undermine the integrity of our elections. We are now more than six months past the 2020 election. We know that it was secure and that the results reflected the will of voters accurately."
Hobbs,
who announced a gubernatorial bid Wednesday, said those "calling the shots" in Arizona's review "know that they're not going to do anything to overturn the election."
"But they have many, many followers and believers who believe otherwise," she continued. "Look what happened on Jan. 6. And this is just inciting further situations like that. It's very dangerous."
Voter fraud in American elections is exceedingly rare. Trump's top cybersecurity official called the 2020 election "the most secure in American history," while then-Attorney General William Barr said the Justice Department found no evidence of widespread malfeasance.