House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) tried to back up former President Donald Trump's claims that non-citizens were voting in presidential elections during a Wednesday news conference — but his claim was accidentally revealing in a way that is bad for the former president, wrote Aaron Blake for The Washington Post.
This comes as Johnson has also suggested that if he were in a position to block election certification in 2024, under the same "circumstances" as 2020, he would do so.
“'We all know intuitively that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections, but it’s not been something that is easily provable,' Johnson said. 'We don’t have that number."
This comment is "at least somewhat transparent," Blake said — but it "undercuts the leader of the Republican Party, former president Donald Trump, who has ridiculously pegged the number of illegal votes by undocumented immigrants in the 2016 election at 3 million to 5 million (just enough, as it happens, to explain away his 2.9 million-vote loss in the popular vote).
"After the 2020 election, Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani also ridiculously pegged the number of such illegal votes in Arizona alone at between 40,000 and 250,000 — as many as 1 out of every 14 votes cast.
"Johnson, at the very least, is implicitly acknowledging that Trump’s and Giuliani’s numbers are pulled out of thin air. It’s part of a broader and long-standing effort in the GOP to water down Trump’s false voter-fraud claims and repackage them," Blake continued.
"But, given that — and given the continued GOP focus on this issue — it’s worth noting how much Republicans have found or come to admit that actual evidence of widespread voter fraud simply isn’t there."
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This includes Trump ally Rudy Giuliani admitting that there are "lots of theories" but they "don't have the evidence," far-right groups like True the Vote confessing that there's no proof of ballot stuffing when their claims went up in court, and a 2022 report from longtime Republican officials concluding that “there is absolutely no evidence of fraud in the 2020 Presidential Election on the magnitude necessary to shift the result in any state, let alone the nation as a whole."
Ultimately, concluded Blake, "Despite the lack of evidence and the abject failure of Trump’s post-2020 voter-fraud lawsuits, some lawmakers apparently feel compelled to construct a boogeyman to toe Trump’s line on combating voter fraud — even as they freely acknowledge they can’t say what the boogeyman is made of."
