It seems the Democrats are going to try their hand at pushing the blame on Republican voters in the coming election. They are trying to state that Trump’s loyal supporters are committing voter fraud so that he can win.
As former President Donald Trump prepares for a visit to Arizona, there has been renewed scrutiny of fake electoral vote certificates sent by Trump supporters in the aftermath of the 2020 election.
Trump was originally set to hold a press conference on the first anniversary of the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, but said he would instead address the election and the riot at the Jan. 15 rally in Florence, Ariz. He has claimed that the 2020 election was stolen from him, with some prominent Arizona Republicans pushing the same conspiracy theory.
While Republican Gov. Doug Ducey certified the election with Joe Biden as its winner in December 2020, other members of the party, including Kelli Ward, chairwoman of the Arizona Republican Party. Democrats are claiming she pushed a fake electoral certificate stating that Trump had won the state. The document was sent to the National Archives, which processes Electoral College certificates before sending them on to Congress.
The Arizona GOP’s official social media accounts promoted its false document and those of other states with a tweeted video captioned “The signing” on Dec. 14 and a YouTube video posted the following day in which Ward said that the “true electors for the presidency” had met the previous day to cast their votes.
“Congress is adjourned,” she tweeted a few weeks later as pro-Trump rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 in an attempt to block certification of the election. “Send the elector choice back to the legislatures.”
Democrats are also saying in addition to Arizona, fake electoral certificates were sent by Trump supporters in Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The certificates were published by the watchdog group American Oversight last March, and began circulating again this week after reporting from MSNBC and Politico, as the House committee looking into the events of Jan. 6 continues its investigation into how much state-level efforts to subvert the election were coordinated.
One of the 11 Republicans who signed the Arizona document was supposedly Jake Hoffman, who had just won a state Legislature race. While Hoffman was running for the seat in 2020, he was banned from Twitter and the marketing firm he ran was banned from Facebook for participating in what was referred to as a pro-Trump “troll farm” where teenagers posted in favor of Trump and promoted conspiracy theories about the election and the coronavirus. The effort was reportedly affiliated with Turning Point USA, a major conservative youth organization based in Arizona.
With the documents receiving renewed scrutiny this week, Arizona NBC affiliate KPNX asked Hoffman on Wednesday about signing Arizona’s certificate.
“So in unprecedented times, unprecedented action is … there is no case law, there is no precedent that exists as to whether or not an election that is currently being litigated in the courts has due standing,” Hoffman said. “Which is why we felt it appropriate to provide Congress and the vice president with dueling opinions.”
A second group, identifying itself as “The Sovereign Citizens of the Great State of Arizona,” also sent a slate of fake electoral votes to the National Archives, prompting a cease-and-desist letter from the office of Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs for its use of the official Arizona seal.
Arizona has been ground zero for election-related conspiracies, with a partisan “audit” of the vote in populous Maricopa County dividing Republicans in the state. At an October hearing in the U.S. House on the much-maligned Maricopa ballot inquiry, Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., refused to say Biden had won the election.
The belief that Biden is not a legitimate president is now mainstream among most Republicans, as a Yahoo News/YouGov poll released last week found that a vast majority of Trump voters (75 percent) falsely believe the election was “rigged and stolen,” while just 9 percent of them think Biden “won fair and square” — down from 13 percent last January.
Whether the light will shed the truth or not, I think most Republicans and even some Democrats can say Biden was a poor choice for president at this point.
