WASHINGTON – Republicans in Tuesday’s California government re-election are already laying the groundwork to argue that the election was stolen, even before a single vote was announced or a winner was declared, an increasingly common tactic in conservative circles.
Republican Larry Elder on Monday appealed to his supporters to use an online form to report fraud, claiming he had “detected fraud” in the “results” of the “California withdrawal election” that led to the reinstatement of the Governor Gavin Newsom as Governor “.
The only problem: on Monday, when the link was live on Elder’s campaign site, the election hadn’t even passed. No results had been published. And Elder was still campaigning to replace Newsom as governor.
“Statistical analyzes used to detect fraud in elections held in third world countries (such as Russia, Venezuela and Iran) have detected fraud in California and led to the reinstatement of Governor Gavin Newsom as governor,” the site says. “The main analytical tool used was Benford’s law and can be easily reproduced.”
The site added a legal notice Monday afternoon that said it was “Paid by Larry Elder Ballot Measure Committee Recall Newsom Committee,” with significant funding from Elder’s government campaign.
More recent polls show that Newsom will survive the attempt to remove him from office in Tuesday’s retirement election. The former and other Republicans have already begun analyzing a possible loss of baseless allegations of election fraud, following the script written by former President Donald Trump.
“This is really becoming the GOP’s standard game book,” said Lee Drutman, a senior member of the New America think tank that studies democracy. “This is democracy 101. If you don’t have accepted and decisive elections, you don’t have democracy, because the alternative is violence or authoritarianism.”
There has been no evidence of election fraud in California.
Elder’s website asks voters to submit sworn statements of evidence they witnessed about election fraud, aimed at those who would support him after election day. He was first reported by Sacramento Bee.
The site was registered anonymously in August. On Monday afternoon, Elder’s campaign did not respond to requests for comment on their inclusion on the campaign site or whether they produced the page. Hours later, on Monday, the disclaimer on his campaign that had funded the site was added.
California has a long history of postal voting, but decided to send each state-registered voter a ballot for the first time in this race, which has sparked false rumors about the ballots and their designs.
In an interview with NBC News on Monday, Elder repeatedly declined to say whether or not he would accept Tuesday’s election results.
“We are all working together to find out whether or not tomorrow’s election is a fair election,” he repeated several times when he was pressured.
Concerns about electoral fraud have plagued for decades among conservatives. But after Trump lied about a Republican Party focus on the 2020 election, it seems other candidates are trying to exploit the Conservative base’s predisposition to believe in a massive conspiracy between Democrats, media and election officials to launch elections, until and all in races that are not particularly close or where Republican officials are in charge.
A recent NBC News poll found that 60 percent of Republicans living in blue states do not trust their state to be able to administer elections fairly. And 59 percent of Republicans say believing Trump won the 2020 election is an important part of being a Republican, according to a new CNN poll, even though, of course, Trump lost.
“No one should be surprised by the allegations of vote fraud, this is the Holy Grail of the Republican Party right now,” said Jason Cabel Roe, a Republican strategist who has worked in California. He was the executive director of the Michigan GOP until he was forced to leave the job to say the 2020 election was not stolen, but that Trump “exploited it.”
They haven’t just been Republicans. This year, in the New York Democratic primary for mayor, Eric Adams, who eventually won, tried to lay the groundwork during the campaign to claim election fraud.
In California, registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans by almost 2 to 1, and Elder only has the support of a quarter of the electorate. Therefore, it would not be particularly surprising for a Democratic governor to survive an attempt to remove him from office.
But most California Republicans think Newsom will be remembered, according to a recent survey by the University of California, Berkeley, the Institute for Government Studies.
So in the first major state election since 2020, Republican opinion leaders are already preparing to call themselves bad if things don’t go the way they expect, setting a precedent that others could follow in the future.
“Does anyone really think the California withdrawal election isn’t ready?” Trump said in a statement Monday.
“They’re going to fool you, we know that,” Elder said last week in Santa Barbara.
Elder, the controversial radio host who runs a field of 46 candidates vying to replace Newsom, tells fraud-stricken supporters to go to his website to report “anything suspicious.”
The homepage of the Seniors Campaign under the heading “Stop Fraud” links to the StopCAFraud.com website. The site is soliciting donations for him and is asking supporters to sign a petition “requiring a special session of the California legislature to investigate and improve the broken results of this 2021 withdrawal election.”
The site appears to be predicting the outcome of the race, claiming that election fraud has already been detected and that Newsom won, although election day is not until Tuesday.
The page suggests that voters can turn to the “ammunition box” if they can’t trust the polls.
“They say there are four freedom boxes in America. The soap box, the ballot boxes, the jury box and the ammunition box, ”says the website, pledging to file legal cases. “Will we now have to fight the California jury box, hoping the final box, the most similar to Pandora’s, will remain closed?”
Elder, an Ivy League-licensed lawyer, initially denied Trump’s allegations of voter fraud, but reversed course after the Conservative reaction.
“I think Joe Biden won the election fairly and directly,” Elder told the Sacramento Bee editorial board in August.
Trump allies who are otherwise aligned with Elder he scraped it over the embers for the comment. In a few hours, Elder he tweeted, “I think there were messes in the 2020 presidential election? Yes.”
Since then, Elder has repeatedly claimed that the 2020 election was full of “cheaters” and has warned “that they will try in this election right here,” as he told Fox News Sunday earlier this month.
These unproven claims have been echoed by conservative commentators such as Fox News’ Tomi Lahren, who told the conservative cable network: “The only thing that will save Gavin Newsom is voter fraud.”
Neither Trump nor Elder have presented evidence of fraud and election officials in California say there is none.