The GOP’s New Election Rule: Voter Fraud Is Only Real When We Lose to Democrats

One of the most hilarious parts of Donald Trump and company’s plot to overturn the 2020 election, insomuch as there’s anything funny about a stunted man-child’s fascist attempt to burn democracy to the ground, was the elected officials who insisted the presidential results were invalid due to fraud but accepted their wins further down the ballot. A short, noncomprehensive list of such people included representatives Stephanie Bice, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Lauren Boebert and senators Roger Marshall, Tommy Tuberville, and Cindy Hyde-Smith, all of whom helped Trump further his baseless election-fraud claims while never once suggesting that the results of their own races were suspect. Now, with the 2022 midterms on the horizon, you might be wondering if Republicans will once again be trotting out the same claims of fraud for races that don’t turn out the way they want—while being all “nothing to see here!“ when things go their way. And the answer is yes, they undoubtedly will be, but before we get to that, let’s take a look at the incredible acts of hypocrisy and contortion that have been on display during the primary season.

Take Representative Mo Brooks, for example. As The New York Times notes, Brooks spent much of his campaign for Senate bragging about having “proudly stood with President Trump in the fight against voter fraud.” Indeed, Brooks played a role in Trump’s plot to steal a second term, urging the crowd at the “Stop the Steal” rally that preceded the January 6 insurrection to “do what it takes to fight for America.” But when he came in second in the Alabama Republican primary last week, leading to a runoff, he claimed possible voter fraud was the furthest thing from his mind. “If it’s a close race and you’re talking about a five- or 10-vote difference, well, then, it becomes a greater concern,” Brooks told the Times. “But I’ve got more important fish to fry. And so, at some point, you have to hope that the election system is going to be honest.” What changed? According to Brooks, who has spent much of the last 16 months claiming the 2020 election was rife with “massive voter fraud and election theft,” such concerns don’t apply to his primary because unlike Democrats, Republicans don’t commit voter fraud. “I’m in a Republican primary, and noncitizens don’t normally vote in Republican primaries,” Brooks explained.

In fact, as the Times points out, “noncitizens do not vote in federal elections in significant numbers, in Alabama or elsewhere,” whether they are ideologically aligned with one party or the other. Meanwhile, in the rare cases in which there have been recent “broad fraud schemes,” they’ve been undertaken by Republicans, like when the campaign of a GOP candidate in North Carolina financed an absentee ballot scam in 2018.

Brooks, of course, is not alone in his “logic.” Per the Times:

Brooks was one of 147 Republican members of Congress who voted on January 6, 2021, to object to the results of the 2020 presidential election. Hundreds more Republican state legislators across the country took similar action in their own capitals. President Biden’s victory, they said, was corrupted by either outright fraud or pandemic-related changes to voting. Now many of those Republicans are accepting the results of their primaries without complaint.

Already this year, 55 of the lawmakers who objected in 2020 have run in competitive primaries, contests conducted largely under the same rules and regulations as those in 2020. None have raised doubts about vote counts, even as Mr. Trump has begun to spread unfounded claims. No conspiracy theories about mail ballots have surfaced. And no one has called for a “forensic audit” or further investigations of the 2022 primary results. Most Republicans’ easy acceptance of a voting system they once slammed as broken exposes a fundamental contradiction in their complaints about the 2020 election. Claims about fraud and stolen elections are often situational—used in some races (against Democrats) but not others (against other Republicans), and to challenge some outcomes (losing) but not others (winning).

That Republicans would accept primary results in races against their own, in the absence of having a heathen, anti-American Democrat to blame, is in no way surprising, Trey Grayson, Kentucky’s former Republican secretary of state, told reporters Reid J. Epstein and Nick Corasaniti. “They’re thinking it’s a primary, it’s our side. We didn’t lose to somebody on the other side who is evil, who’s going to change policy more dramatically,” Grayson said. “There’s a tribal, ‘my side’s always right, your side is always wrong. We’re not stealing elections, your side is stealing elections.’”

Naturally, as Republicans have accepted their defeats without issue, those who’ve emerged victorious in primary races have not had a peep to say about the type of fraud they were screaming their heads off over when it came to Trump. In Pennsylvania, gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano—one of the ex-president’s biggest election-denial supporters—saw his victory as completely legit. Mastriano, who believes the state’s legislature has the authority to dismiss the will of voters and pick its own electors if the election is “compromised,” could help the GOP steal the 2024 presidential election.