January 3, 2022 ☼ gop ☼ lies ☼ jan6 ☼ cult
Source: The Washington Post (Link)
“The Texas secretary of state’s office has released the first batch of results from its review into the 2020 general election,” it reported, “finding few issues despite repeated, unsubstantiated claims by GOP leaders casting doubts on the integrity of the electoral system.”
You may not have been aware that Texas was conducting a review of its votes. After all, Trump won the state, and his and his allies’ claims of fraud have been almost entirely centered on states where he lost, as though the “grand conspiracy” of Democratic interference worked flawlessly in states he lost narrowly and didn’t exist in ones where he barely succeeded. But there’s political capital to be earned from repeating Trump’s false claims about fraud, even in red states, so an investigation was launched. And, as usual, it found nothing remarkable.
Over and over. There was that months-long, highly scrutinized audit in one county in Arizona, the one that failed to re-tally the votes cast so they would land in Trump’s favor but instead cobbled together a new set of “questions” (most of which had already been answered). There was the review of Michigan’s votes conducted by a Republican-led committee — which failed to find any evidence of significant fraud in the state’s vote tally. A similar review conducted by a conservative group in Wisconsin came to the same conclusion about that state’s vote. There have been repeated reviews in Georgia, the target of a coordinated effort to overturn the results, as documented by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. But the only reasonable conclusion from the effort is that nothing questionable actually happened there.