It’s telling that, in an interview with ABC News on Sunday, Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake invoked untrue “facts” in defense of her efforts to undermine confidence in her state’s elections.
As she did the week prior, she told ABC’s Jonathan Karl that three-quarters of a million votes in Arizona’s largest county should have been thrown out because they “violated chain of custody requirements" — an argument that is both false and bizarre: because someone moving ballots from a dropbox to a counting facility didn’t sign a form, thousands of votes should be tossed? When Karl pressed her on this, she insisted that it was a “fact" that this had happened, when it didn’t.
That tracing Lake’s efforts to overhaul voting in her newly blue state back upstream leads to misinformation about voting isn’t a surprise. The GOP’s long acceptance of false claims about voter fraud — an acceptance rooted in part on blocking expansions of voting access to Democratic-voting constituencies — tilled the soil for Donald Trump’s enthusiastic, multiyear effort to shred confidence in American elections. Republicans in particular, but not exclusively, now have little confidence in elections and, relatedly, in democracy itself, thanks in part to constant misinformation about election security.
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