VANCOUVER, Clark County — On a Thursday night in early September, 500 people paid $15 to hear an ex-Army captain and a high school math teacher regale them with tales of secret algorithms and suspicious voting trends.
Clicking through slides on an overhead screen, Seth Keshel, the ex-military officer from Texas, and Douglas Frank, the bow-tie sporting Ohio teacher who advocates “Nuremberg trials” for elections officials, spread the lie that Donald Trump, not Joe Biden, was the legitimate winner of the 2020 presidential election.
Mixing dead-voter jokes, Bible verses and Founding Fathers’ quotes with ballot data, Keshel and Frank portrayed a 2020 election corrupted by a vast and secret conspiracy that is simultaneously readily exposable by looking at public election results.
Their assertions, honed at hundreds of appearances across the country — including several in Washington — have been debunked by elections experts as complex-sounding statistical mumbo-jumbo. But the duo found a receptive audience in Southwest Washington, where the crowd applauded their calls to abolish vote-counting machines and mail ballots.
The well-attended weeknight event underscores how the election-denial movement, encouraged by Trump after his loss, has increasingly permeated mainstream Republican thought, echoed in Washington state by leaders of some county GOP organizations and candidates for Congress.
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