Kari Lake’s election fraud claims get a boost from Joe Rogan

Kari Lake’s claims of election fraud in her failed 2022 election bid are getting new life from popular podcaster Joe Rogan.

On the August 3 edition of his podcast, Rogan echoed a series of debunked claims about the integrity of Arizona’s elections system perpetuated by Lake after her defeat in the 2022 gubernatorial race, including claims of concentrated voting machine errors in Republican-leaning areas of the state that had previously been disproven in fact checks by outlets like the Associated Press.

But he also lent credence to the case Lake and her campaign continued to lay out in the wake of her roughly 17,000 vote loss to Democrat Katie Hobbs, and continues to push despite several defeats in court: that the election was systematically stolen from her—a claim she has so far failed to demonstrate—and that a rigged system of faulty machines and potentially forged or invalid signatures on the envelopes of submitted absentee ballots deprived her of victory.

Rogan agreed—though he largely declined to provide specific evidence of why. Only that he believed it was possible.

“I don’t think [the amount of fraud] is zero,” Rogan claimed. “I think we could all agree it’s not zero. And we know that these voting machines can be f***ed with.

“All that Kari Lake stuff in Arizona they tried to dismiss, it doesn’t look like that’s invalid. It looks like there’s real fraud there. It looks like there’s some real shenanigans there. At the very least there were voting machines that weren’t working properly. And it seems very suspicious that a lot of them were in Republican areas.

“There’s a lot of shenanigans,” he added. “And I think there’s coordinated efforts to make sure that certain people get elected. I don’t know how far they go, but I know it’s not zero.”

Rogan, at least on his last point, was correct: According to a database managed by the conservative Heritage Foundation, Arizona itself saw seven convictions for voter fraud in the 2022 election cycle, though nearly all applied to charges related to older elections. However, several of Lake’s claims he echoed were demonstrably false.

Reporting by the Associated Press and others found there was no statistically significant disparity between the number of Republican-leaning precincts and Democratic precincts impacted by malfunctioning machines on election day. And a later independent review in April 2023 led by former Arizona Supreme Court Chief Justice Ruth McGregor ultimately found that machine error—not human error or outside interference—was the primary factor for the failures of ballot printers that contributed to widespread confusion on election day 2022. (Lake’s team would later go on to rip the report as “bogus.”)

Still, Rogan said what he said, and Team Lake rejoiced.

“Our election was stolen in broad daylight,” she wrote on Twitter. “Even @joerogan knows it. That’s why I’ve traveling across the country advocating for election reforms that will ensure what happened to Arizonans never happens to anyone again.”

Newsweek has reached out to Rogan’s team via email for comment.

Rogan’s comments come as the popular podcast host has faced increasing scrutiny for his appeals to conservative talking points. After gaining notoriety during the COVID-19 pandemic for hosting conspiracy theorists and pushing disinformation about medical treatments connected to the virus, Rogan has regularly gained attention for bombastic claims made by himself and his guests.

Earlier this week, Rogan repeated unproven claims U.S. intelligence agencies were directly involved in provoking people into entering the U.S. Capitol building during the Jan. 6, 2020, riots at the U.S. Capitol and revived a popular conspiracy theory about Trump-supporting protestor Ray Epps being a government-recruited catalyst to stoke discontent among the crowd.

Similar claims have since prompted a defamation lawsuit by Epps’ family against conservative network Fox News and former host Tucker Carlson, who promoted them uncritically on his show.

By echoing them, Epps’ attorney claimed Rogan was only adding fuel to the fire.

“Joe Rogan’s recent comments show the staying power and consequences of Fox‘s and Tucker Carlson’s lies about Ray Epps,” Epps’ attorney Michael Teter said in a statement to the Daily Beast earlier this week.

“For years, Fox targeted Ray and spread falsehoods about him, and Fox’s viewers used the lies as a basis to harass and threaten Ray,” he added. “The absurdity of the conspiracy theory does not stand in the way of it being spread and weaponized to harm Ray. If Mr. Rogan is truly interested in focusing on who instigated the attack on the Capitol, he would find more truth in looking at the mirror than he does in focusing on a wedding venue owner from Arizona.”