House Minority Leader said no one is 'questioning the legitimacy of the presidential election.' But more than two-thirds of Republicans do not believe President Joe Biden legitimately won the 2020 election.
Donald Trump and the Republican Party have been lying about the 2020 election for months, making baseless allegations of voter fraud and falsely saying the election was stolen.
And after being fed those lies over and over again, GOP voters have now accepted them as truth, with 67% of Republicans believing President Joe Biden did not legitimately defeat Donald Trump, according to a CBS News poll published Sunday.
What's more, nearly half of Republican voters — or 47% — believe that making changes to election laws is the solution to the fake problem.
The poll comes days after House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy claimed that no one is "questioning the legitimacy of the presidential election" — a comment that's proved wrong by the results of this survey.
The poll shows why Republican-controlled state legislatures across the country have passed a barrage of voter suppression laws that either purge registered voters from the rolls, make it harder to cast absentee ballots, or give more power to administer elections to partisan lawmakers.
Democrats and voting rights activists have compared the effort to Jim Crow laws, which systematically disenfranchised Black voters before the Civil Rights movement.
Voting rights activists say many of the new laws — passed in states like Georgia, Florida, and Arizona — target voters of color, who back Democrats in large margins.
Not only are Republican lawmakers passing voter suppression legislation, but they are also continuing to push lies of voter fraud.
For example, the GOP-run state Senate in Arizona is conducting an audit of the votes in the state's largest county.
The audit is being slammed even by Republicans in the state as an embarrassment and a joke. It's being run by a Trump-supporting conspiracy theorist who spread lies that the 2020 election was stolen.
And those working for the audit have lied about what the audit has found — lies that are being amplified by Trump himself, who believes the shoddy audit will prove his claims of fraud.
A Republican official who ran the election in Maricopa County, the subject of the audit, attacked his party and called out Trump, who released a statement over the weekend that spread falsehoods borne out of the audit itself.
"We can’t indulge these insane lies any longer," Stephen Richer, the county's recorder, tweeted, adding that Trump's comments on the audit were "unhinged."
Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.
