Despite setbacks, election denial continues to thrive in Republican Party

Phoenix, Arizona – For nearly three decades, Buster Johnson served with little fanfare as a member of the Board of Supervisors in Mohave County, a deep-red section of western Arizona.

Even as former President Donald Trump pushed the false claim that widespread fraud was to blame for his loss in the 2020 election, the idea that such malfeasance had taken place in Mohave seemed laughable: Trump had carried the county by more than 50 points.

But that did little to stop the rise of election denialism in Mohave Country — and in the Republican Party at large.

Johnson, a lifelong Republican who previously was the vice chair of the party’s state chapter, said he was perplexed by the sudden pressure to implement new measures such as hand-counting each ballot.

That demand is common among election deniers, but experts say that technique for tallying votes is more error-prone, less efficient and more expensive.

Acceding to the wishes of his constituents, Johnson voted in favour of a measure to switch to hand-counting, but he tried to explain to voters in the county that such steps made little sense.

“This kind of thing never happened before 2020,” he said of the wave of new demands to overhaul the voting system.

“We’re a strong Republican county. We’ve always voted red.”

Johnson lost his re-election bid in the Republican primary in July to Sonny Borrelli, a state senator who had championed Trump’s false claims of widespread election “rigging” in 2020.

Borrelli, however, won an endorsement from Trump, the current Republican presidential candidate, who credited him with being “on the front line of fighting against corrupt elections since day one”.

Poor record

Following Trump’s defeat in 2020, many Republican officials and candidates across the country — especially in swing states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Nevada — embraced his false allegations of rampant election fraud.

In several cases, election deniers ran for statewide positions that would give them substantial influence over the electoral process.

Some also voiced support for Trump’s alleged efforts to nullify the will of the voters through schemes to derail the election certification process.

Trump and his allies are accused of having recruited state officials to submit false Electoral College certificates after the 2020 race, and he faces a federal criminal indictment in Washington, DC, as a result.

However, for Republican candidates up and down the ballot, putting election denial front and centre in a campaign was a useful way to secure an endorsement from the former president.

Voters have also been receptive to election denialism. In October, a poll from the Marist Institute for Public Opinion found that a majority of voters, 58 percent, were concerned about the possibility of fraud at the ballot box.

That number was even higher among Republicans alone. An estimated 88 percent expressed worry over election fraud.

Patrice, a voter in Tucson who recently moved to Arizona from the East Coast, said he understood the need to implement new measures to ensure election security. He asked to withhold his last name, in order to speak freely about his election-related doubts.

“If you doubt something, don’t you want to check into it and question it?” said Patrice. “There are things happening, and they do deserve to be questioned.”

A sign points the way to an early voting station in Tucson, Arizona, on October 28 [Brian Osgood/Al Jazeera]

But adopting Trump’s narrative about stolen elections has backfired for some Republican candidates seeking public office.

During the midterm elections in 2022, many high-level supporters of election denial who had won Trump’s endorsement lost their races in the general election.

That included gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake and secretary of state candidate Mark Finchem, who fell short against Democratic rivals.

Doubling down

Some political observers assumed that, after the setbacks of 2022, Republican officials might move away from election denial for fear of alienating moderate voters.

Instead, many Republicans, including Trump, have continued to push false claims about US elections and cast doubt on previous results.

“They should do paper ballots, same-day voting, voter ID and be done,” Trump said as he cast his vote on Tuesday, casting doubt on widely used electronic voting.

A few days earlier, on November 2 in Salem, Virginia, he falsely accused Democrats of undermining the vote, sowing further uncertainty into the electoral process.

“I’d love to win the popular vote with them cheating. Let them cheat,” he said.

Some of his allies have since adopted his strategy of questioning election results that do not fall in their favour. Lake, who is now running to represent Arizona in the Senate, never conceded her loss in the 2022 elections.

“It’s definitely a trend that concerns me,” Kim, a voter at an early-voting station in the city of Tucson, told Al Jazeera. She asked to use only her first name in order to speak freely.

“I feel like the process is legit, and it works. I’m a teacher also, so it sort of feels like the sore-loser mentality, where you say, ‘It didn’t go my way, so the system must be wrong.’ Instead of figuring out what you need to do better, it’s someone else’s fault.”

She added: “It’s ridiculous.”

Experts warn that spreading unsubstantiated claims of election fraud can undermine faith in the overall democratic process and serve as a pretext for limiting access to voting in the name of election security.

“The anti-democracy movement has spent the past four years strategizing how to undermine our election system,” Joanna Lydgate, CEO of States United Democracy Center, which tracks election denial across the US, told Al Jazeera in a statement.

“Election deniers are trying to throw sand in the gears of every step in our election process, so they can claim things went wrong and throw out election results that they don’t like. But ultimately, our elections are free, fair, and secure.”