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 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.
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%, with 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 switch from President
Trump to
Vice President Biden. They know that this election is not
right and as their representative I am sent here to
represent them.
We at 5:38, we canvassed all Republican candidates.
It's 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.
An 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 2020 election was one of the most secure
elections that we've ever had.
All of this conversation about what we need to do
is to make voting
secure. It was secure. We're 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 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 8 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.
Some would say that democracy is really on the line.
I know that that's something that
President Biden has continued to to campaign on.
We can't let the integrity of our elections be undermined,
for that is a path to chaos.
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?