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Even after Trump’s defeat, satisfying the wishes of Republican voters has meant mimicking the president’s own paranoid style of politics by clinging to alleged examples of fraud even after they have been discredited in court.
For example, last month, Mr. Graham said during an interview on “Fox & Friends” that a signature verification machine in Clark County, Nevada, which encompasses Las Vegas, was incorrectly used to accept “all signatures. , whether they were fraudulent or not. ” In the same interview, he shared an allegation that people in the county were seen filling out fraudulent ballots in “a Biden / Harris truck.”
Those accusations were contained in a lawsuit that Republicans filed in the state. Last week, a judge found that the signature machine in question had, in fact, sent 70 percent of the signatures it scanned to poll workers for human verification. “The record does not support” allegations that the machine “accepted signatures that should have been rejected,” wrote Judge James T. Russell. Similarly, it ruled, an eyewitness account of filled false ballots in a Biden / Harris vehicle “was not credible.”
On Friday, a spokesman for Mr. Graham declined to address those findings, saying the senator “continues to have serious concerns about the expanded use of mail on ballots.”
At a hearing on the 2020 Wisconsin election led by House Republicans on Friday, witnesses suggested the state was facing electoral interference from dead dictators Hugo Chávez and Joseph Stalin, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Kanye West. .
Some of the claims were similar to conspiracy theories contained in lawsuits brought by a conservative attorney, Sidney Powell, whose attempts to overturn the election results have been regularly rejected by justices. One wrote that a case he filed on behalf of the Republican plaintiffs appeared to have been “more about the impact of their accusations on people’s faith in the democratic process” as well as “confidence in our government.”
Tom Rath, a former Republican New Hampshire attorney general who backed Biden and opposed his party’s effort on the Supreme Court, lamented what appeared to be political incentives within his party to shake that confidence. “It is very unfortunate,” he said, “that some people tried to live off that chaos, perpetuate it and make it even more difficult for the average citizen to trust what the government is doing.”
