There are still many folks who are not satisfied by
the outcome of the 2020 election.
And when you have candidates and powerful voices within the
party, namely former President Trump, are continuing to push conspiracy,
these elections are rigged.
Our elections are totally rigged.
It does do real damage to how a a segment
of the country views our elections process.
Nobody will ever convince me that the election wasn't stolen.
I will never ever accept that the election wasn't, wasn't
stolen.
That's something that should be pretty non partisan.
The, you know, integrity of our elections has become a
partisan issue.
Overall, 61% of Americans think that Joe Biden was legitimately
elected in 2020.
Republicans disproportionately believe that he wasn't legitimately elected.
Even of the entire public.
That's 38 percent, 38% of people thinking that the person
who sits in the White House is illegitimate.
That's, that's a big concern.
We're interested to see exactly how this all plays out
in 2024 because there are still folks, despite the fact
that we know that there was no widespread election fraud
in the 2020 election, are still holding on to that.
The feedback loop that's been happening is that Donald Trump
says the 2020 election was stolen.
His voters believe him, and then that is filtering down
to other races like Senate, House and governor.
Americans instinctively know there was something wrong with this election.
Over 400,000 mail in ballots were altered, switched from President
Trump to Vice President Biden.
They know that this election is not right and as
a representative, I am sent here to represent them.
We have 538.
We canvassed all Republican candidates for Senate, Governor, House, Attorney
General and Secretary of State in 2022, and we found
that 36% of them fully denied the results of the
2020 election.
Additional 11% kind of were casting doubts on it.
So basically, in total, about half of Republican nominees that
year were people who at least questioned or outright denied
the results of the election.
But Democrats really have not engaged on the issue of
election integrity in the same way that Republicans have.
There is a feeling that our elections were already secure,
that the 20 20 election was one of the most
secure elections that we've ever had.
All of this conversation about the what we need to
do is to make voting a secure.
It was secure.
We going to make voting safe.
It was safe.
We don't have aliens coming to vote in Michigan and
other parts of the country from the Democrat side of
things.
What I'm seeing more is talk of the idea of
voter access.
So after the 2020 election, we saw a record-breaking number
of voting restrictions that passed, 52 new voting restrictions passed
in 2021.
And so this included things like restrictions on absentee voting,
new voter ID laws that has continued here in 2023.
For example, we've seen 16 states tighten their voting laws.
But the interesting thing is 26 states have actually made
it easier to vote here in 2023.
And that includes things like automatic voter registration was before
the pandemic, there were only five states that voted predominantly
by mail.
And now there are eight states that do that.
You have seen both an expansion and a restriction of
voting laws.
Voting laws were already very different state to state, but
we've seen that diverge even more.
So, you know, blue states really do vote pretty differently
now from red states in terms of like, the method
of the vote.
The notion of a large segment of our electorate, a
large segment of America, not having faith that the elections
were fair, that the elections were free, is something that
we have not confronted before.
This sort of conspiracy about how our elections work can
do real damage to, to to the fabric of our
democracy, right?
If folks don't trust the outcomes of our elections, how
can we get them to participate?
How can democracy truly function?