It will never stop being weird that Donald Trump tries to undermine election results that he won but he does. (Recall that he convened a “vote fraud commission” after 2016…) His insistence on audits in Arizona and other state he narrowly lost are ridiculous enough but now he wants Texas and Florida, states he won, to do it as well:
Gov. Ron DeSantis and top Republicans in the Florida Legislature are under mounting pressure from their own party to audit the 2020 election even though former President Donald Trump easily won the state.
The Republican push for a “forensic audit” — and a hand recount of more than 11.1 million votes — could create an awkward moment for DeSantis, who said in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election that Florida has shed its reputation for electoral mishaps and was now the “model” for the nation.
The Republican Party of Lake County near Orlando last week adopted and sent a resolution to the governor, top legislators and other elected officials that demanded a full audit of the entire election. The move dovetails with a bill filed by a GOP legislator from the same county who wants the Florida Legislature to order a review.
“It’s not about margin of victory,” said state Rep. Anthony Sabatini (R-Howey-in-the-Hills), a MAGA-style conservative who sponsored the bill calling for an audit. “The fact is that people want total verification of the election results. They want an independent review of the votes.”
The demand for an election audit follows a push by Trump and others in the GOP to review 2020 election results in key states, including Arizona, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Since the election, Trump has held a near-obsession with the election results and has repeatedly made baseless allegations that he lost the contest to Joe Biden due to fraud.
Most recently, Texas election officials said they would review the results in several counties in the Lone Star State after Trump called on GOP Gov. Greg Abbott to conduct an audit.
The MAGA faithful are just nuts and really think this is a thing. But the Republicans, led by Trump, are simply trying to undermine elections in general so they can contest every vote they lose by saying it was riddled with fraud. And I’m increasingly convinced that they are also trying to undermine faith in the elections for Democrats by putting all these phony rules in place. After all, if Dems lose close elections going forward it’s going to be very difficult to accept the results in states where they fire non-partisan workers, intimidate voters and ban most forms of voting except for standing in line for hours on election day.
In the end, the goal is to destroy our democratic process. And I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to say that the replacement will look a lot more like January 6th than November 8th. This is serious — the fever isn’t breaking.