David Hilfiker
It is no accident that, according to recent polls, fully one-third of all Americans and two-thirds of all Republicans believe that President Joe Biden only won the 2020 election because of fraud. A recent Washington Post article detailed extraordinary campaigns — financed by wealthy Trump supporters — intended to “document” the lie that vast conspiracies stole the White House in the 2020 election.
The campaigns comprise films (for instance, a live-stream film The Deep Rig that premiered on June 26), podcasts, broadcasts from right-wing media, and social media. While the total monetary investment is unknown, several individual donors have spent upwards of $7 million each, and untold amounts of money have been contributed by smaller donors to nonprofits.
Ex-President Trump is, of course, using speeches, rallies, and his own PAC to disseminate the lies about the “stolen election.”
The campaigns have been extraordinarily effective in spurring wholesale distrust in American election integrity.
The most well-known example is in Maricopa County, which contains 60% of the Arizona population and until 2020 was the largest county in America to vote Republican. According to the Washington Post, after Biden’s victory,
The campaigns comprise films (for instance, a live-stream film The Deep Rig that premiered on June 26), podcasts, broadcasts from right-wing media, and social media. While the total monetary investment is unknown, several individual donors have spent upwards of $7 million each, and untold amounts of money have been contributed by smaller donors to nonprofits.
Ex-President Trump is, of course, using speeches, rallies, and his own PAC to disseminate the lies about the “stolen election.”
The campaigns have been extraordinarily effective in spurring wholesale distrust in American election integrity.
The most well-known example is in Maricopa County, which contains 60% of the Arizona population and until 2020 was the largest county in America to vote Republican. According to the Washington Post, after Biden’s victory,
[a]llegations of fraud or irregularities in Arizona’s vote were rejected … by state and federal judges. Maricopa’s results were confirmed through a number of reviews, including a hand recount of a sample of ballots conducted jointly by both political parties, as well as a forensic audit conducted by federally accredited labs that was ordered by the county and concluded in February.
Nevertheless, in late April, Arizona Senate Republicans commissioned the fourth audit of the 2020 vote and hired CyberNinjas, a company owned by a Trump supporter who had previously promoted conspiracy theories about the election. CyberNinjas had had no previous experience with ballot recounts and many different observers have noticed multiple errors in the process. A scathing letter from all seven Maricopa County election officials (five of them Republicans) declared that the recount was a “sham.” Indeed, fearing that tampering might have occurred to the election machines while under CyberNinjas’ control, Maricopa County will not reuse the expensive hardware in future elections.
Republicans across the country are demanding similar recounts in their states. As has been noted many times, there has been no evidence of significant voter fraud despite multiple recounts and over fifty lawsuits.
Few expect that any of these concentrated, well-funded Republican efforts will lead to overturning the election. (Indeed, there is no legal mechanism available for overturning the election.) What these efforts will do is continue to sow doubt about the integrity of the election process in our country, further increasing the extraordinary percentages of people who already do not trust election results … indeed, who do not trust government at all.
Republicans across the country are demanding similar recounts in their states. As has been noted many times, there has been no evidence of significant voter fraud despite multiple recounts and over fifty lawsuits.
Few expect that any of these concentrated, well-funded Republican efforts will lead to overturning the election. (Indeed, there is no legal mechanism available for overturning the election.) What these efforts will do is continue to sow doubt about the integrity of the election process in our country, further increasing the extraordinary percentages of people who already do not trust election results … indeed, who do not trust government at all.
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