Meet the stars of the
ATTACK Of the Clown Show zombies
H. Brooke Paige
GOP Candidate for
Vermont Secretary of State
Headline: CNN, 8/11/2022
H. Brooke Paige, a conservative activist in Vermont, ran unopposed for the Republican nomination for secretary of state while also running unopposed for the party nominations for state attorney general, auditor and treasurer. He plans to turn down the latter three nominations and focus on his secretary of state campaign, the Vermont website VTDigger reported.
The day after a mob of Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol in 2021, Paige falsely claimed on his Facebook page that the left "stole" the election through a "subversive plan" involving "stuffing the ballot box and corrupting the tabulation of the election results." He made other false election claims in subsequent posts.
Audrey Trujillo
GOP Candidate for
New Mexico Secretary of State
Headline: CNN, 8/11/2022
Audrey Trujillo, a conservative activist whose campaign biography says she has operated a daycare, falsely claimed in a Facebook interview in March that the 2020 election was "a huge, huge, I would say coup, to really unseat a president." On her own Facebook page, she falsely wrote in June that "Trump's election was stolen."
Trujillo, who ran unopposed in New Mexico's Republican primary, falsely claimed in the March interview that votes were fraudulently switched from Republicans to Democrats in 2020 races at "all levels," including a New Mexico US Senate race that was, in reality, won handily and fairly by a Democrat. She also falsely claimed in the interview that the US is "no better than any other communist country like Venezuela or any of these other states where our elections are being manipulated."
Kim Crockett
GOP Candidate for
Minnesota Secretary of State
Headline: CNN, 8/11/2022
Kim Crockett has said of the 2020 election in Minnesota: "I don't think the word 'lawless' is too strong." When an interviewer told her that he believes Minnesota's election was "illegitimate," she said she agreed.
Crockett, a lawyer who won Minnesota's Republican primary on Tuesday, has been particularly focused on state Democrats' changes to election rules amid the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. But she has also promoted a right-wing film that makes dubious claims about supposed 2020 cheating. She baselessly called absentee voting "frankly insecure." And she questioned whether mail workers -- who carry millions of ballots every federal election with very few problems -- can be trusted to carry ballots given that "the postal union is a partisan player" in politics.
"Makes you kind of go: 'Huh.' After 2020, you start looking at everything," Crockett said in a June interview.
Rayla Campbell
GOP Candidate for
Massachusetts Secretary of State
Headline: CNN, 8/11/2022
Rayla Campbell, a radio host who is running unopposed in the Republican primary in Massachusetts, falsely declared in November 2020 -- after media outlets had called the election for Biden -- that Trump was the actual winner.
"Our great president is the President elected for the next four years. We know it. They're trying to steal an election because they can't win or do anything right," Campbell said on a November 2020 radio show during which she also promoted so-called "stop the steal" events.
On another November 2020 radio show, Campbell endorsed false conspiracy theories about election software and wrongly declared that "there's no way, with all of the Trump rallies and the support that we had out there, that our candidates didn't get more votes." She also called for Republicans to adopt "dirty" tactics to combat the cheating she inaccurately claimed Democrats had done.
Time for a history lesson, Rayla.
Janet Folger Porter
Loser in GOP Primary for US House
Loser in GOP Primary for US House
Headline: PolitiFact, 8/16/2022
But a postcard blitz won’t change these facts: Biden beat Donald Trump. States certified the votes. Congress accepted the results. Biden was sworn in as the president. Voter fraud was minimal — not enough to change the outcome of the election. Judges rejected dozens of lawsuits alleging fraud or seeking to change the outcome.
The post was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed.
The website calls on people to send in postcards by Sept. 4 because a federal law, the Civil Rights Act of 1960, says that election offices must retain ballots cast in federal races, including for president, for 22 months.
Harriet Hageman
Wyoming GOP candidate for US House
Headline: New York Times, 8/16/2022
As her campaign gained momentum this year, she grew bolder in embracing Mr. Trump’s false claims that he was robbed of re-election. “Absolutely the election was rigged,” Ms. Hageman said recently at a forum in Casper. “What happened in 2020 is a travesty.” (There is no evidence of widespread fraud in 2020.)
At the single debate of the campaign, in June, Ms. Hageman bristled after the first two questions zeroed in on Mr. Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 breach of the Capitol, the subject of the House investigation whose prime-time hearings have prominently featured Ms. Cheney.
Chuck Gray
Winner of WYoming
GOP Secretary of State Primary
Headline: The Hill, 8/172022
Wyoming has no lieutenant governor, making secretary of state the second most powerful statewide office and first in the line of succession. [emphasis added]
The secretary of state of state also oversees elections in Wyoming, as well as business licenses.
Gray defeated two other Republicans in the primary, state Sen. Tara Nethercott and lesser-known candidate Mark Armstrong.
Helping Gray’s primary bid was the endorsement of former President Trump and his frequent insistence that the results of the 2020 presidential election were fraudulent. Last year, he traveled to Arizona to observe a partisan audit of the presidential election results. That audit reaffirmed President Biden’s victory.
Nethercott, meanwhile, aligned herself with Buchanan in insisting that the 2020 election in Wyoming was both fair and secure
Trump won 69.9% of the vote in 2020, up from 68.2% in 2016.
Kelly Tshibaka
GOP candidate for US Senate
Headline: FiveThirtyEight, 8/15/2022
Murkowski’s main opponent is Kelly Tshibaka. Tshibaka has repeatedly questioned the results of the 2020 election, and on a podcast with former Trump staffer Steve Bannon, she said that President Biden’s win in Arizona should never have been certified. Tshibaka is all but guaranteed to make the top four as well, meaning this election-fraud fight won’t be over until November.
Dominic Rapini
Connecticut GOP candidate for
Secretary of State
Headline: CNN, 8/11/2022
Dominic Rapini, who won Connecticut's Republican primary on Tuesday, formerly served as board chair for a group called Fight Voter Fraud, Inc., which has had its baseless allegations about the 2020 election proven inaccurate by Connecticut's elections enforcement commission. The Connecticut Post reported that the commission admonished Fight Voter Fraud in 2021; the commission said the group had wasted the commission's limited resources and should "educate themselves" on the facts and the law before filing complaints.
While chairing Fight Voter Fraud, Rapini at least indirectly promoted false claims that there was massive fraud in the 2020 election. He was listed as the author of a web post linking to a document that recommended various reports that falsely alleged the election had been stolen, falsely claimed that statistics cast doubt on Biden's win, or falsely suggested something was amiss in 2020 with voting machines. (Rapini has said he left his role at Fight Voter Fraud, Inc. in August 2021.)
Wes Allen
Alabama Gop candidate for
Secretary of State
Headline: CNN, 8/11/2022
State representative Wes Allen, who won Alabama's Republican nomination in a June runoff election, endorsed the Texas-led legal effort to get the Supreme Court to overturn Biden's victories in four states -- tweeting in December 2020 that Alabama's attorney general should "stand firm" in support.
Allen has vowed to withdraw Alabama from a 31-state consortium that helps member states keep their voter rolls up to date, baselessly alleging that the consortium, which is funded and run by member states, is a "leftist" entity. Alabama's departing Republican incumbent secretary of state, John Merrill, has called Allen's claims "patently false" and defended the consortium as an important election security tool.
John Biggs
Michigan candidate for congress
Political newcomer John Gibbs, also a Michigan Republican endorsed by Trump, beat the incumbent Republican Rep. Peter Meijer last week.
Earlier this summer Gibbs falsely claimed that the 2020 election results weren’t accurate, telling a local NBC station, “I think when you look at the results of the 2020 election, there are anomalies in there, to put it very lightly, that are simply mathematically impossible.”
Donette Erdmann
Tim Ramthun voter from
Sheboygan, Wisconsin
New York Times, 8/8/2022
At a campaign stop here last week, one voter, Donette Erdmann, pressed Ms. Kleefisch on her endorsement from former Vice President Mike Pence, whom many of Mr. Trump’s most devoted supporters blame for not blocking the counting of electoral votes on Jan. 6, 2021. “I was wondering if you’re going to resort to a RINO agenda or an awesome agenda,” Ms. Erdmann said, using a right-wing pejorative for disloyal Republicans.
Ms. Kleefisch’s startled answer — “don’t make your mind up based on what somebody else is doing,” she warned, defending her “awesome agenda” — was not enough. “
I’m going to go with Tim Ramthun,” Ms. Erdmann said afterward.
Alexander Hamadeh
Arizona GOP AG Candidate
New York Times, 8/5/2022
There’s also Abraham Hamadeh, the Republican nominee for attorney general, along with several candidates for the State Legislature who are all but certain to win their races. It’s pretty much election deniers all the way down.
[snip]
What’s your sense of whether these Republicans are capable of pivoting to the center for the general election? And what might happen if they did?
[snip]
So even if these candidates do try to tack toward the center, expect their Democratic opponents to point to those statements and other past comments to portray them as extremists on the right.
I do wonder how much the Republicans will continue to focus on the 2020 election in the final stretch of this year’s campaign. More moderate Republican officials and strategists I’ve spoken to in Arizona have repeatedly said they worry that doing so will weaken the party’s chances in the state, where independent voters make up roughly a third of the electorate.
Donald Trump, Hasbeen
Headline: New York Times, 8/2/2022
After months of toying with Robin Vos, who as the speaker of the Wisconsin Assembly is the most powerful Republican in state politics, former President Donald J. Trump endorsed Mr. Vos’s long-shot primary challenger on Tuesday in a futile effort to push the state’s Republicans to decertify the results of the 2020 election.
Mr. Trump backed Adam Steen, a largely unknown and underfunded far-right Republican who said he would aim to claw back the state’s 10 Electoral College votes from 2020 — a legal impossibility — and enact sweeping changes to the state’s voting laws.
Mr. Steen’s far-right views are not limited to elections. He is opposed to all abortions under any circumstances and he said in an interview on Monday that he would seek to make contraception illegal in Wisconsin.
“This is way deeper than a political discussion. This is a moral issue,” he said. “To me, you’re ending a life. Yes, I would definitely outlaw contraception.” [emphasis added]
Mike Brown
Unsuccessful GOP candidate for
Kansas Secretary of State
Headline: PBS Hews House, 8/3/2022
Schwab has repeatedly vouched for the safety of Kansas elections and touted new GOP-pushed laws, including ones that restrict the delivery of ballots by third parties. He’s also said he can’t vouch for other states’ elections.
The message worked well for him in his primary against Mike Brown, a construction contractor and former county commissioner in the Kansas City area. Brown embraced election conspiracy theories and promised to rid the state of ballot drop boxes.
Tudor Dixon
Michigan GOP Candidate for Governor
Headline: CNN, 8/1/2022
Dixon, a conservative commentator, has falsely claimed that Trump won the 2020 election. She is also backed by Michigan's GOP establishment, including former US Education Secretary Betsy DeVos' family, the state Chamber of Commerce and Michigan Right to Life.
Shawnna Bolick
Arizona State Legislator
Headline: Wisconsin Public Radio, 7/29/2022
Shawnna Bolick, a GOP state representative, proposed a bill last year that would have allowed the legislature to override the will of the voters in choosing presidential electors (a tactic embraced by Donald Trump's team following the 2020 election).
Meet Richard Vaughn
Grayson County Virginia Sheriff
Headline: New York Times, 7/25/2022
Some sheriffs from rural Trump-voting counties said they hadn’t observed major problems to fix in their own counties but supported more sheriff involvement overall. Richard Vaughn, a sheriff in rural Grayson County in Virginia, said he wanted officers to be involved in observing vote counts, and would support election investigations “in areas where there are allegations.” “A lot of people are losing confidence,” he added.
More on Grayson County, where Trump received 80% of the vote in 2020.
Meet Mark Lamb
Pinal County Arizona Sheriff
Protect America Now, founded by Sheriff Mark Lamb of Pinal County, Ariz., and Republican operatives, was announced shortly after the 2020 election. Its principles closely align with many of the constitutional sheriffs association’s, but it has employed more traditional political methods such as running ads.
Attempts to interview Mr. Lamb, who has not announced local investigations into election issues, were unsuccessful. Discussing his partnership with True the Vote at a Trump rally in Arizona on Friday, he said sheriffs would do more to hold people accountable for violating election laws. “We will not let happen what happened in 2020,” he said.
Pinal County is located north of Phoenix.
Meet Calvin Hayden
Johnson County Kansas Sheriff
Headline: New York Times, 7/25/2022
And the sheriff of Johnson County in Kansas, which includes suburbs of Kansas City and is the most populous county in the state, has said he is broadly investigating the county’s 2020 election. At a recent meeting with election officials, he questioned their procedures and integrity, according to a written account from the county’s top lawyer, who sent him a letter expressing concern that he was interfering in election matters.
The Johnson County sheriff, Calvin Hayden, said in an interview that sheriffs faced a learning curve.
“We don't know anything about elections,” he said. “We’re cops. We have to educate ourselves on the system, which takes a long, long time.”
Hayden was elected to a 4-year term as a Johnson County Commissioner and was first elected to the sheriff's office in 2016.
Related reading:
7/27/2022 update starts here
Meet Dar Leaf
Barry County Michigan Sheriff
Headline: New York Times, 7/25/2022
But at least three sheriffs involved in the effort — in Michigan, Kansas and Wisconsin — have already been carrying out their own investigations, clashing with election officials who warn that they are overstepping their authority and meddling in an area where they have little expertise.
“I’m absolutely sick of it,” said Pam Palmer, the clerk of Barry County, Mich., where the sheriff has carried out an investigation into the 2020 results for more than a year. “We didn’t do anything wrong, but they’ve cast a cloud over our entire county that makes people disbelieve in the accuracy of our ability to run an election.”
Dar is also the clown who attempted to seize Dominion voting machines in a county where Trump received 65.3% of the vote in 2020.
Related series of posts:
No comments:
Post a Comment