AZ Election Deniers Lake, Finchem Pretty Sure Trump Won 2020 Election, Along With All Future Ones

MAGA loon Kari Lake is a Big Lie promoter who doesn’t consider Biden a legitimate president and has said repeatedly she wouldn’t have certified the election he won if she were governor. She claims that Democrats stole the 2020 election, presumably through votes. Just a few months ago, she tweeted a photo of herself with Trump at the Kentucky Derby. The slavish caption read: “America loves President Trump. America knows the 2020 election was stolen. America knows President Trump was the true winner.”

Facts don’t matter. All Lake cares about is installing her cult leader in office again no matter what voters say.

Arizona state Rep. Mark Finchem is the Republican nominee for secretary of state. He’s also an election-denying conspiracy theorist and a self-described “Oath Keeper” who was part of the mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6. He said that the insurrection was “what happens when the people feel they have been ignored, and Congress refuses to acknowledge rampant fraud.”

During a recent interview with Time Magazine, Finchem ranted about Dominion voting machines and “mules stuffing ballots in drop boxes” before reporter Charlotte Alter asked him directly: If Biden wins Arizona in 2024, would Finchem certify that result as secretary of state?

Finchem chuckled. “If the law is followed, and legitimate votes have been counted, and Joe Biden ends up being the winner,” he told me, “I’m required under the law—if there’s no fraud—to certify the election.” But, he added, “I think you’re proposing something that, quite frankly, is a fantasy.”

Oh, yeah, if we think Biden won Arizona — which he did! — and might win again, we’re the tinfoil-wearing crackpots who see pink elephants casting mail-in ballots.

Alter points out that Biden didn’t miraculously flip Tennessee. The results were consistent with pre-election polls. Kyrsten Sinema defeated Martha McSally in the 2018 Senate race, and she was running as a Democrat at the time. But Finchem insists a Biden victory “strains credulity.”

Isn’t it interesting that I can’t find anyone who will admit that they voted for Joe Biden?

No, it’s not interesting. It’s not even true. The asshole literally works with Democrats who publicly endorsed Biden. He’s not trying to find the Loch Ness monster. He can walk across the aisle.

On the podcast “The Weekly Wrap” with Bruce Wolf, Finchem continued his slide into unhinged solipsism: “[Biden winning Arizona is] nonsense intuitively. Leading up to the election, this would be August, September, October. It first started off that you’d see a Trump train of maybe a dozen cars, and this is in my community. It’s one community, but I think it’s fairly representative of Arizona. You’d see a Trump train of maybe a dozen cars.”

We elect presidents based on actual votes, not the number of cars in an obnoxious caravan. This reminds me of when Peggy Noonan disputed the polls showing Barack Obama beating Mitt Romney because she’d personally seen so many Romney yard signs in her neighborhood. Peggy Noonan is a well-documented dullard but she’s not running for secretary of state in a major swing state on an “I’ll only certify the election if it feels right” platform.

When pressed if it’s possible that people he didn’t personally know had voted for Biden, Finchem dismissively responded, “In a fantasy world, anything’s possible.” This is a dangerous escalation of the Noonan effect, especially in an electorate where (predominately white) Trump voters probably don’t interact much with (predominately POC) Biden voters.

Current Secretary of State and Democratic gubernatorial nominee Katie Hobbs said this week that Lake and Finchem winning is “scary to think about” because they’re “dangerous and don’t know how elections even work.”

Lake and Finchem oppose mail-in voting, which Arizona voters from both parties use, and have filed absurd suits to end the use of tabulation equipment for counting ballots. “We’d be counting ballots until next year if that’s the case,” Hobbs said, “and without a lot of accuracy.”

Of course, election deniers crave such chaos. It provides the basis for further undermining faith in democracy and ultimately imposing their own authoritarian rule. For the Big Liars, voter fraud is simply voters you don’t know or like voting for candidates you loathe.

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