That was 2016. He accepted the results although he went on to say that he also won the popular vote but was cheated out of it because millions of undocumented workers” voted. You know what happened in 2020.
Today the Big Lie is the GOP’s only organizing principle:
Republican Larry Elder appealed on Monday to his supporters to use an online form to report fraud, which claimed it had “detected fraud” in the “results” of the California recall election “resulting in Governor Gavin Newsom being reinstated as governor.”
The only problem: On Monday when the link was live on Elder’s campaign site, the election hadn’t even happened yet. No results had been released. And Elder was still campaigning to replace Newsom as governor.
“Statistical analyses used to detect fraud in elections held in 3rd-world nations (such as Russia, Venezuela, and Iran) have detected fraud in California resulting in Governor Gavin Newsom being reinstated as governor,” the site reads. “The primary analytical tool used was Benford’s Law and can be readily reproduced.”
The site added on Monday afternoon a disclaimer saying it was “Paid For By Larry Elder Ballot Measure Committee Recall Newsom Committee,” with major funding from Elder’s gubernatorial campaign.
The most recent polls show Newsom is likely to survive the attempt to remove him from office in Tuesday’s recall election. Elder and other Republicans have already started chalking up a potential loss to baseless allegations of voter fraud, following the script written by former President Donald Trump.
“This is really becoming the standard GOP playbook,” said Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at the New America think tank who studies democracy. “This is democracy 101. If you don’t have elections that are accepted and decisive, then you don’t really have a democracy, because the alternative is violence or authoritarianism.”
There has been no evidence of voter fraud in California.
Elder’s website asks voters to submit affidavits of evidence they witnessed of voter fraud, targeting those who would support him after Election Day. It was first reported on by the Sacramento Bee.
The site was registered anonymously in August. Hours after NBC News contacted the Elder campaign Monday afternoon about the site, the disclaimer about his campaign having funded the site was added.
“We should all be concerned about election integrity and we all want every proper vote to be counted. We’ve provided a link to an outside website that is providing an avenue for voters to document irregularities they encounter in this election,” Elder spokesperson Ying Ma said in an email sent after the publication of this story.
“With that said, we believe that Larry will win on Election Day, and that whatever shenanigans there are will not stand in the way of him becoming the next governor and rescuing California from the disaster that is Gavin Newsom,” she added.
California has a long history of voting by mail, but decided to send every registered voter in the state a ballot for the first time in this race, which has stoked bogus rumors about the ballots and their designs.
In an interview with NBC News on Monday, Elder repeatedly refused to say whether or not he would accept the results of Tuesday’s election.
“Let’s all work together to find out whether or not the election tomorrow is a fair election,” he repeated several times when pressed.
What a fatuous comment. There’s no evidence of fraud and no reason to suspect there will be. But I’m sure Elder and his benefactors will spend a lot of money and time pretending that there was. And millions of people will believe it because they want to believe. They love believing it. I don’t know what to do about that.