Latest polling suggest that California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) might survive a Republican-backed effort to remove him from office in a recall election on September 14. Now, Republicans are setting the stage to dismiss the results of the election by claiming that there was fraud.
According to the Los Angeles Times, California “conservatives talk about the recall effort through the lens of Trump’s lies that he won the 2020 election.”
Ed Brown, a 67-year-old Trump supporter selling ‘recall Newsom merch believes that the outcome of the recall election is not in doubt because Newsom supporters will cheat.
“They’ll probably do something to cheat,” he said adding that he will vote for Larry Elder because “he’s more like Trump; he’s for the people.”
In other majority-Republican areas conservatives refuse to cast their ballots by mail believing Donald Trump’s lies that mail-in voting leads to widespread voter fraud.
Vince Destigter, chairman of the Amador County Republican Party said he voted for Elder and dropped his ballot off at a drop box instead of mailing it.
“We’re very fussy about that,” he said. “We believe that there were a lot of shenanigans done with the voting” in the presidential election.
According to the LA Times, two conservative Republicans walked past a ballot drop box and carried their votes into the registrar’s office in Placerville last week. They wanted to hand-deliver the ballots because they did not trust mail-in voting.
“I think our elections are rigged,” one of the men said.
Larry Elder, the leading Republican candidate in the recall election is taking a page from Trump’s playbook and is already signalling how he might respond if he losses the election.
“The 2020 election, in my opinion, was full of shenanigans,” Elder said. “And my fear is they’re going to try that in this election right here and recall. So I’m urging people to go to ElectElder.com. Whenever you see anything, hear anything suspicious, go to my website. We have a battery of lawyers. We’re going to file a lawsuit in a timely fashion this time.”
