Even with new ‘election integrity’ laws, Republicans may not accept losing outcomes
During a recent interview, CNN’s Dana Bash asked Kari Lake, Arizona’s Republican gubernatorial nominee, whether she would accept the outcome of November’s election. “I’m gonna win the election, and I will accept that result,” Lake said. When Bash rephrased her question — “If you lose, will you accept that?” — Lake said, “I’m gonna win the election and I will accept that result because the people of Arizona will never support and vote for a coward like Katie Hobbs who won’t show up on a debate stage.”
With the forced sunniness of someone who spent decades as a TV news anchor, Lake trashed her Democratic opponent — and exposed the lie behind all those “election integrity” bills passed after the 2020 presidential election.
Lake’s refusal to say whether she would accept a losing outcome next month proves what many of us already knew — that Republicans care only about protecting their political power at any cost. Those bills pushed in Republican-led legislatures were voter suppression tactics gussied up as “election integrity” laws and sold as safeguards of American democracy.
Yet if those Jim Crow 2.0 efforts still don’t yield the desired results at the polls, Republicans, especially the most vocal acolytes of Donald Trump’s Big Lie, probably won’t accept them.
Republicans claimed that the new laws enacted in nearly two dozen states were intended to broaden voting access and erase doubts about an election’s validity. Fueled by Trump’s historic loss to Joe Biden in 2020 and the former president’s fallacious claims about a rigged election, these legislative moves were designed to achieve the opposite effect — to sow confusion and mistrust in the electoral process.
Even William Barr, Trump’s former attorney general, has disputed Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud. That hasn’t stopped candidates like Lake from spreading his twisted gospel.
Lake has consistently lied about the 2020 presidential election. She has branded it “corrupt” and “stolen” though she has yet to produce a shred of credible evidence to back up her claims. In the weeks leading up to her primary, Lake shamelessly claimed she and her team were “already detecting fraud” and made mysterious claims about working with “cyber folks” and “lots of attorneys.”
And it’s not just Lake. November’s elections are infested with other Republican candidates who are also 2020 election deniers. That includes Doug Mastriano, the Pennsylvania’s GOP gubernatorial nominee, who attended the Jan. 6 rally at the nation’s Capitol prior to the Trump-incited insurrection. When asked whether he would accept his election’s outcome, Mastriano declined to answer. But he’s had more to say about what he would do, if elected, about his state’s future election results.
“As governor, I get to appoint the secretary of state. And I have a voting reform-minded individual who’s been traveling the nation and knows voting reform extremely well,” Mastriano told Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, in an interview. “That individual has agreed to be my secretary of state.”
Lake is in a unique position. It was Arizona, her home state, that Fox called for Biden on election night in 2020. That infuriated Team Trump as well as some of the president’s most ardent devotees at the network. A month later, as Gov. Doug Ducey was about to certify the state’s election results, his phone rang and played a “Hail to the Chief ” ringtone. Ducey later confirmed that
Trump was the caller. Trump, meanwhile, claimed that Ducey “betrayed the people of Arizona.”
Of course, that’s exactly what Lake is doing with her refusal to say whether she would accept the outcome of the gubernatorial election. According to The New York Times, reports of voter intimidation in Arizona have already been sent to the U.S. Department of Justice. In June, the Brennan Center for Justice, a law and policy institute, called that state “the epicenter of the fight for voting rights today” with some of the nation’s “worst voter suppression laws.” In other states, so-called “election integrity” activists are mobilizing ahead of the midterms with Bannon promising to “adjudicate every battle.”
Yet even armed with draconian rules of their own making, Republicans still aren’t taking any chances. That reporters have to ask GOP nominees whether they will accept losing their elections — and are left waiting for a definitive answer — shows just how much damage has already been done to our democracy. It’s also a distressing signal that Jan. 6 never ended and that each Republican refusal to recognize the will of the voters is a possible prelude to the next insurrection.
Renée Graham is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at renee.graham@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @reneeygraham.