The Utah state legislators and others who are demanding a forensic audit of elections in a couple of Utah counties are coming across as a little kooky. They aren’t doing themselves any good and they are hurting their Republican Party and the conservative cause.
They are even hurting the chances of Donald Trump to win the presidency again. He won big in Utah in 2020, but attacking the integrity of Utah’s elections, as Trump is doing in states all over the country, won’t help him with mainstream Republicans and especially moderates and independents. The Utah legislators are drawing even more attention to Trump’s nonsensical assaults on 2020 voting results in states across the country.
I believe that the vast majority of mainstream Utahns are fully confident in their election systems. They especially like mail-in balloting. To the extent these silly audit demands are associated with the Republican Party, GOP candidates are put on the defensive. They have to spend time explaining they don’t support this nonsense. Chasing these apparitions is tantamount to committing political suicide.
Of course, the Democrats’ hands aren’t clean on this topic, either. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger recently wrote an article in Real Clear Politics about how Democratic darling Stacey Abrams has for many months spread “stolen election conspiracy theories.” Much like Donald Trump in 2020, Abrams has refused to concede her 2018 gubernatorial election loss (by 55,000 votes), and has alleged election irregularities.
Raffensperger, a Republican, has a lot of credibility on this issue because he has been villainized by Trump for standing up for the integrity of Georgia’s election last year. Trump narrowly lost Georgia, and two Democratic U.S. Senate candidates narrowly won. Trump mounted a ferocious campaign against Raffensperger, challenging Georgia’s election results.
Raffensperger wrote: “Since November 2018, Abrams has alleged repeatedly that her election was “stolen.” She filed a lawsuit against Georgia’s elections officials that continues to this day, though a federal judge appointed by President Obama has thrown out the most headline-generating allegations. She has raised millions of dollars off of her stolen election claims and has since built a national profile based on lies about the integrity of Georgia’s elections. She has referred to Republicans as domestic enemies.”
Raffensperger also wrote that Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe insisted that the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections were stolen by Republicans. “In 2019, McAuliffe spread conspiracy theories about voting machines being hacked by the Russians during the 2020 election. In May 2020, McAuliffe alleged Georgia’s voting machines were vulnerable to hacking and talked about “powerful” voting machine companies that were supposedly pulling the strings.”
The point is, attacking election integrity with little or no evidence of irregularities is wrong and hurtful to our state and country. That’s true whether it’s a couple of Utah state legislators, or Donald Trump, or Stacey Abrams.
