“Don’t fuck us,” Lara Logan, the former CBS News anchor turned to me and said. “If you use the word conspiracy theorist in your story, I’m going to haunt you when I die.”
It was the third day of the Republican national convention and Logan was standing in the atrium of a hotel that was once the old Pabst Brewery in Milwaukee. She was there to moderate a presentation by Jim Hoft, the founder of the far-right website Gateway Pundit, and his twin brother, Joe, who is also a contributor to the site.
The site, which has become a launchpad for misinformation, has been in hot water recently. The site declared bankruptcy in April in order to delay civil suits from two Georgia election workers and a former Dominion Voting Systems employee who say the site defamed them. The site denies publishing libelous claims against the women.
The event billed as a “blockbuster interview” on the site’s “legal challenges and new beginnings” underscored how doubts about the outcome of the 2020 election continue to grip Republicans (a PRRI poll from January found that 63% of Republicans believe the 2020 election was stolen).
Inside and outside of the convention hall, it was clear in speeches and interviews with attendees throughout the week that doubts about the 2020 election remain, and the possibility of another “stolen” vote looms.
The most direct reference to a stolen election in 2020 came in a pre-recorded video from Donald Trump that aired on the jumbotron each night. It was only one of two videos that repeated (the other was a goofy video of Trump doing a wiggle-type dance to the song YMCA).
“The most important thing we have to do is protect the vote. You have to keep your eyes open because these people want to cheat and they do cheat, and, frankly, it’s the only thing they do well,” Trump said in the video.
Republican speakers steered clear of the 2020 election results directly, and instead repeatedly emphasized the threat of non-citizen voting, which is exceedingly rare and yet nonetheless has become a central part of the party’s messaging around elections. Just as Trump pointed to mail-in ballots to seed doubt about the 2020 election, experts believe that the emphasis on non-citizen voting is an effort to seed doubt about the election results in 2024.
At the Gateway Pundit event, there was little new information. Jim Hoft walked the 20 or so attendees – the event was also livestreamed on X – through video footage that purported to show Georgia election workers running ballots through tabulator machines several times. “We think this is important because in my world anyway where I grew up, you kind of count ballots two or three times,” Jim Hoft said. He insisted that nothing the site had published had been disproven.
The claim that ballots were scanned multiple times in Georgia has been debunked repeatedly and the women have both been cleared of any wrongdoing. If there’s an issue scanning a single ballot within a batch – a jam or a smudge on a ballot – it’s common practice for election workers to delete the incomplete batch to rescan the entire group until they have the correct total. The state also conducted a hand recount of every single vote cast in the presidential race in Georgia that confirmed Joe Biden’s win there.
At the convention, there was little doubt that the next election could be rigged. The struggle of the Biden campaign and Trump’s strong standing in the polls only increased the belief that any Democratic victory would be illegitimate. Speaking at an Axios event on the sidelines of the convention, Donald Trump Jr said that if Trump lost it would be because of “cheating”.
“We’re going to have to make sure we have people watching [the election] very closely,” he said at the event. “I don’t think that Joe Biden over-performed only in Philadelphia, Atlanta, Detroit, Milwaukee – I just don’t believe that’s real,” he said.
As part of their messaging around non-citizen voting, Republicans recently passed legislation in the US House that would require anyone who registers to vote to show proof of citizenship. Speakers at the convention picked up the mantle by suggesting that Democrats had opened the borders to allow non-citizens to vote.
Kari Lake, who is running for a US Senate seat in Arizona, falsely accused her opponent, Representative Ruben Gallego, of voting to “let the millions of people who poured into our country illegally cast a ballot in this upcoming election”.
Imagining a second Biden term, Senator Rick Scott of Florida said: “It was easy for Democrats to rig the elections – they simply allowed all the non-citizens to vote.”
“[Democrats] want illegals to vote now that they opened the border,” Steve Scalise, a top Republican in the US House, said in his speech.
Republicans also made concerns about the election a formal part of their platform. “We will implement measures to secure our elections, including voter ID, highly sophisticated paper ballots, proof of citizenship and same-day voting. We will not allow the Democrats to give voting rights to illegal aliens,” the document says.
Republicans say they are building an army of poll watchers and observers to watch over the vote this year. They’ve also appointed Christina Bobb, a lawyer facing criminal charges in Arizona for her involvement in the fake electors scheme, to head the party’s litigation efforts.
Asked whether he would accept the results of the election if Biden won, Kieran Brown, a 24-year-old from Staten Island who runs the website finddeadvoters.com, where he compares voter rolls to death records and other public information, paused for a second and then said: “I’ll give you the controversial answer and say no.”
“There’s no shot he’s gonna win. There’s no way that he’s gonna have enough votes to get him across the finish line,” he said. There are similar efforts to scrub the rolls in other places in the country, and voting rights groups have expressed concern sloppy practices could lead to many eligible voters being challenged or removed.
Several lawsuits filed in recent months have been aimed at creating the impression that states are not doing enough to maintain their voter rolls. But many of these lawsuits are based on unreliable methodologies and some have been tossed out of court.
“We’re accustomed to thinking that lawsuits get filed when there are serious problems, and sometimes that’s true. But not always,” Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, wrote in a blogpost on Monday, explaining why he was skeptical of a recent RNC lawsuit. “To reprise a lesson of the 2020 cycle: a lawsuit without provable facts showing a statutory or constitutional violation is just a ‘tweet’ with a filing fee.”
Experts have been particularly alarmed by efforts to try and halt certification at the local level – something that could cause delay and chaos after the presidential vote in November. But Joe Hoft said after the Gateway Pundit event that instances in which officials didn’t certify were “healthy”.
“We need to have people with courage to stand up in our next election and say, “No I’m not gonna certify it. I don’t care if you throw me in prison or threaten me, I’m not going to certify it,” he said.
On the convention floor and outside the convention hall, several attendees said they would accept the results of a free and fair election, even if Trump lost. But they believed the 2024 election could be stolen.
“I think the last election was stolen. I believe that. And I don’t think a majority of our elected officials have given enough credence to the threat,” said Duke Lowrie, a delegate from Louisiana. “If they do it again, I don’t believe the reaction will be the same. I think we’re gonna be in a dark time if the same thing happens. People are not gonna take it.”
Joe Neglia, an Arizona delegate who received national attention for wearing a makeshift bandage over his right ear in tribute to Trump, said Republicans “will certainly accept the results of a free and fair election. We’re doing our best to make them free and fair.”
He added: “If they’re not free and fair, of course, that would be the next question.” Ideal evidence of a fair election, he said, would include moving to all-paper ballots, requiring voter ID, and adequate monitoring of drop boxes and vote centers.
“I think one of the problems is that people take it as axiomatic that the elections are free and fair because we’ve assumed that for a long time. But I don’t think that’s necessarily a good assumption any more,” he said.
