Trump’s voter fraud claims test Republican candidates

Mr. Trump has told advisers the issue will help the party win control of Congress next year and win back the White House in 2024. He has privately floated the possibility of an early presidential campaign announcement to underscore the message to conservative voters.

Many Republican candidates have fallen in line. Some have refused to concede defeats from 2020—and, like Mr. Trump, used fraud claims to raise money. Others seeking office have tailored their campaign messages to echo Mr. Trump’s claim that he won to avoid facing a backlash from his supporters.

Still other Republicans, including Glenn Youngkin, who won the Virginia governor’s race earlier this month, have aimed to navigate the issue by sidestepping many of Mr. Trump’s election-fraud claims without disavowing the man himself. Meanwhile, several of the former president’s most persistent Republican critics, such as six-term Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, have said they aren’t running for re-election.

On the local level, some election chiefs have been harassed and subject to intimidation for refusing to say the vote counting isn’t secure. A wave of election officials and longtime professional staff have left their jobs under pressure.

The message appears to be contributing to eroding confidence in the nation’s election systems—similar to the long-running decline of faith in civic institutions such as the government, the criminal justice system and the media. In October, a Grinnell College poll found that 58% of Americans were very or somewhat confident that the 2022 vote will be counted fairly. Confidence among Republicans was at just 38%, down from 85% in March 2020.

In the wake of last year’s election, Mr. Trump’s campaign and his allies lost dozens of lawsuits around the country that challenged the 2020 results. The Justice Department said there were no signs of widespread fraud. A bipartisan consortium of local, state and federal election officials declared the 2020 race the most secure U.S. election in history.

But Mr. Trump never conceded, and a year later continues to press his case. Last month he sent a letter to The Wall Street Journal editorial board making multiple false claims about the results in Pennsylvania. In a recent interview, he raised doubts about the coming elections. “A lot of people are worried that if we don’t take care of that issue, you’re going to have a problem in ’22 and ’24," Mr. Trump said. “They don’t want the same thing to happen where the election is rigged. I’m very concerned that the elections are going to be rigged."

Following his example, some other Republican candidates haven’t conceded their 2020 losses.

In Pennsylvania, Republican Sean Parnell hasn’t conceded in a western Pennsylvania House race he lost last year by 2.3 percentage points—a narrow defeat but more than four times the margin required to trigger an automatic recount in the state. Mr. Trump cited unfounded claims about irregularities in Mr. Parnell’s race when he endorsed the candidate, an author and former Army Ranger, in a crowded primary for the state’s Republican Senate nomination next year. Mr. Parnell quit the race Monday.

In Washington state, Republican Loren Culp refused to concede after failing to unseat Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, a Democrat, in 2020. Mr. Culp is one of several primary challengers for Rep. Dan Newhouse who, like Mr. Kinzinger, is one of 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Mr. Trump on charges that his election-fraud claims incited the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.

Mr. Trump’s campaign and support across the party has further inflamed state and local battles over voting rights and regulations. Republicans have sponsored more than 100 new state laws this year making changes to elections and election procedures, saying wider embrace of tactics such as mail-in voting and expanded hours—in some cases introduced during the pandemic—call for new rules to prevent fraud or abuse. Mr. Trump has often praised the new proposals.

Democrats have called the wave of measures a restrictive assault on voting rights and a threat to democracy that are driven by Mr. Trump’s fraudulent claims. The Democratic National Committee has said it would invest in voter turnout efforts to counter the new restrictions and the Justice Department has sued Georgia and Texas over their new, Republican-backed voting laws. Democrats in Congress have proposed federal standards for voting access with legislation that has been blocked by Senate Republicans.

The battles over election security reflect sharpening political divisions. In five of the last six presidential elections over the last 20 years, the popular vote margin has been less than 5 percentage points—as many times as in the previous 100 years. In three of those five elections, moreover, the results have been publicly questioned.

In 2000, Democratic nominee Al Gore conceded the race to Republican George W. Bush after a bitter battle and a Supreme Court ruling. He said he disagreed with the ruling to end the decisive recount in Florida, but would abide by the verdict.

Some of Mr. Gore’s allies—including Terry McAuliffe, the Democrat who lost to Mr. Youngkin in Virginia this month—have said the recount in Florida that year was rigged.

After Mr. Trump won in 2016, Democrat Hillary Clinton conceded—then later raised doubts about the legitimacy of the results based on Russian interference. Some House Democrats challenged Mr. Trump’s victory in the joint session of Congress to ratify the election—but the effort failed when no senator joined them. At least one member from each chamber is required to bring a challenge to a vote.

After the closely fought 2018 gubernatorial race in Georgia, Democrat Stacey Abrams didn’t concede to Republican Brian Kemp, accusing him of trying to suppress minority voters in his role as Secretary of State, which he denied. A voting group founded by Ms. Abrams challenged the state’s election rules in court, and she has declined to call Mr. Kemp the legitimate governor. Many Democrats have voiced support for her stance; last month, Mr. McAuliffe reiterated that he believes Ms. Abrams should have won the Georgia governor’s race in 2018 but lost because of voter suppression.

This past year, Mr. Trump has supercharged the trend. In private conversations, he has said Mr. Gore was wrong to concede the race in 2000, people familiar with the remarks said. He has also told allies that his polling shows voter fraud motivates his base and argued that an announcement sometime next year that he would run for president would boost Republican turnout for the midterms, people familiar with the conversations said.

Fellow Republicans have dissuaded him from that strategy for now, the people said. But the disagreement was over whether Mr. Trump’s presence in the midterms would be a better motivator for Democratic voters than Republicans—not over the use of voter fraud as an issue, they said.

In Washington, some top Republicans privately say they don’t believe voter fraud tilted the 2020 election away from Mr. Trump—but rarely acknowledge Mr. Biden’s victory in public. Still, there is broad consensus that the former president has tapped into voter frustration by using election security issues to motivate their votes.

Three out of four Republicans said Mr. Trump was right to question whether the election was rigged because there were “real cases of fraud that changed the results," in an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll conducted last month.

Many of the former president’s supporters interviewed in Virginia recently said raising questions about the electoral process doesn’t undermine democracy and instead could help bolster it.

“I have to believe that all the elections in the country are fair, but there is always room for improvement," said Jeff Johnson, 56 years old, from Stafford, Va. The retired police officer heard Mr. Youngkin speak there at an early-voting site for the recent election. He said he supports strict photo ID laws to vote and said the U.S. shouldn’t try to support fair elections in other countries without making sure they are trusted at home.

“Since I was a kid, there was cheating in elections," said Republican voter Tim Bussing, a retired defense contractor from Fredericksburg, Va. “It was never to this scale."

Republican candidates seeking Mr. Trump’s endorsement have aggressively pushed the former president’s claims. Eric Greitens has taken his Missouri Senate campaign to Arizona to tout allegations of wrongdoing in a state where the former president has repeatedly blamed his loss on election fraud.

Josh Mandel has sought to strengthen his candidacy in a crowded Ohio Republican Senate primary by saying Mr. Trump won more votes than Mr. Biden.

In August, Alabama Senate candidate Mo Brooks was booed at a Trump rally in his home state when he cautioned the massive crowd against remaining despondent over election fraud accusations. “Put that behind you," the congressman said.

Later that night, Mr. Brooks said on social media that he remained convinced that Mr. Trump had won the 2020 contest.

In Virginia’s race for governor, the most hotly contested campaign of 2021, Mr. Youngkin successfully executed a more nuanced approach. The former private-equity executive said Mr. Biden legitimately won the White House, but that the presidential election showed voting security needed improvement. Earlier this month, he defeated Mr. McAuliffe, halting recent Democratic gains in the state.

In the closing days of his campaign, Mr. Youngkin focused on local issues, emphasizing public education. Even so, some Republican voters said in interviews they were motivated by Mr. Trump’s claims of fraud or anecdotal reports of irregularities published in conservative media.

At a campaign event last month, 57-year-old pizza shop manager Diana Qura shouted back to Mr. Youngkin in a Manassas parking lot when he urged supporters to bring friends with them to the polls.

“But legal!" said Ms. Qura, who said she emigrated from Jordan in the 1980s. “Legal votes!"

Republican strategists who have explored these issues in focus groups have found that voters’ complaints about fraud are often rooted in frustration with emergency changes made to election procedures approved during the pandemic and lockdowns instead of certainty about rampant criminal wrongdoing.

One target of their ire has been longtime election officials—even in states that Mr. Trump won—who have insisted that the election wasn’t stolen.

In Arizona, half of the staff in the secretary of state’s elections division have left their jobs since the election, with most taking jobs in other fields, said a spokeswoman for Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs.

Ms. Hobbs, a Democrat, said that armed protesters gathered outside her home after the 2020 race and threatened her and her family and that she has at times had to have police protection. “I fear that many more will reach a breaking point and decide that this line of public service is no longer worth it," she told a Senate committee in written testimony last month.

In Texas, Hood County Elections Administrator Michele Carew resigned in October after local Republicans publicly accused her of not following election procedures. Mr. Trump won the county by 64 percentage points, roughly the same as his 66-point margin in 2016. Ms. Carew, who had worked in elections for 14 years, said she did nothing wrong.

“After basically a year of it, I just didn’t want to do it any more," she said.

In Pennsylvania, approximately 30 senior election officials have departed since last year. Some were planned, but others stemmed from frustration with a lack of resources, state officials said. Philadelphia Commissioner Al Schmidt, who serves as vice chairman of the city’s election board, said that he and his family received threats after Mr. Trump criticized him on Twitter over Pennsylvania’s election results, which went to Mr. Biden.

“What was once a fairly obscure administrative job is now one where lunatics are threatening to murder your children," Mr. Schmidt, a Republican, told senators in written testimony at the October hearing.

Meanwhile, Mr. Trump and his supporters are working to install allies in state offices that oversee elections and would be in charge of certifying the state’s presidential results in 2024.

The former president has backed secretary of state candidates in Arizona, Georgia and Michigan—all states that flipped to Democrats in 2020 and where he personally lobbied officials to overturn results or block certification of his defeat.

In Georgia, Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is facing primary challengers in his bid for re-election. Mr. Raffensperger was a target of Mr. Trump’s anger after his narrow 2020 loss in the state. Mr. Trump alleged Georgia had produced fraudulent results and tried to pressure Mr. Raffensperger to overturn Mr. Biden’s victory there. Georgia law-enforcement officers investigated claims of fraud and didn’t find any problems that could have put in doubt the presidential election result.

“You’re seeing this issue on both sides of the aisle, and people need to understand that what it destroys is voter confidence in the process," Mr. Raffensperger said in an interview.

Mr. Trump has endorsed Jody Hice, a U.S. congressman from the state who has opened a primary challenge against Mr. Raffensperger. Mr. Hice, who led the objection in the House to Electoral College results from Georgia, said in a statement that he would investigate allegations of fraud if elected. “The election should not have been certified without an unbiased investigation and President Trump’s case regarding the election should have been heard in court," Mr. Hice said in the statement.

In Michigan, Mr. Trump has endorsed Kristina Karamo,a Republican candidate for secretary of state. Ms. Karamo previously supported a lawsuit that sought to block Mr. Biden’s victory from being certified.

Ms. Karamo said in an interview that she would act in a nonpartisan manner if elected as secretary of state. She said she couldn’t answer whether Mr. Biden fairly won last year’s election because she still had concerns about how the election was run.

In Nevada, the state Republican party censured Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske—the only Republican in statewide office—for failure to investigate fraud and “dismissive public statements regarding election integrity concerns."

Ms. Cegavske said her job was to “carry out the duties of my office as enacted by the Nevada Legislature, not carry water for the state GOP or put my thumb on the scale of democracy."

Republican Jim Marchant, a former state lawmaker, is running to replace Ms. Cegavske, who is term-limited from running again. Mr. Marchant lost a congressional race last year and unsuccessfully sued to challenge the outcome.

Mr. Marchant said he didn’t know whether Mr. Biden won the election. “I would not have certified it," he said in an interview. “And I would have searched for alternatives to make sure that everybody that voted had their vote counted, and properly and fair and transparent."

Attempts to prove otherwise have mostly backfired. In Texas, Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick offered up $1 million in bounties for information that led to voter fraud convictions anywhere in the country. After a year, Mr. Patrick has paid one tipster: a progressive Pennsylvania poll worker who helped uncover illegal voting by a registered Republican.

In Nevada, Republican officials last year pointed to a ballot cast by Rosemarie Hartle—who had died in 2017—as evidence of fraud after the 2020 election. A state investigation concluded in October that her husband, Donald “Kirk" Hartle, cast both his ballot and that of his deceased wife.

Mr. Hartle is a registered Republican, public records show. He’s also an executive at Ahern Rentals, Inc., whose owners were fined for Covid violations after hosting an indoor Trump rally at another business in September 2020.

Last week, Mr. Hartle pleaded guilty to voting more than once in the same election. He will pay a $2,000 fine.

 

This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text