President Donald Trump’s efforts to cast doubt on the California election results are fueling a renewed fight on Capitol Hill over election integrity — and raising Democratic concerns about how Trump and Republicans might respond to unfavorable results in November.
Trump’s unfounded claims of election fraud aren’t exactly new. He’s practically made his assertions that the 2020 election was “rigged” or “stolen” from him a personal catchphrase. (An MS NOW analysis on Wednesday found that, once every four days for the last five months, Trump has falsely claimed he won the 2020 election.)
But Democrats say Trump’s insistence that Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt was pushed out of a runoff by fraudulent ballots could foreshadow broader efforts to challenge election outcomes this fall. And while some Republicans maintain that the issue is a confidence-shattering vote-counting process that simply takes too long, other Republicans are outright siding with the president and his unfounded claims — including the Speaker of the House.
“Some of these efforts are so diabolical and so far upstream it is impossible to prove,” Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., told reporters Monday.
And when pressed for actual evidence of fraud, Johnson turned the question on a reporter, saying, “You tell me.”
“Everybody knows instinctively something is wrong here,” Johnson said.
Democrats are increasingly concerned that kind of rhetoric is a sign of things to come during the midterms, particularly when Republicans are alleging election fraud without evidence.
“What they are doing is they are laying the groundwork to challenge the lawful count of ballots this November,” Chair of the Democratic Caucus, Rep. Pete Aguilar, D-Calif., said.
“They will say anything to hold power,” Aguilar continued. “That’s what this is about. The redistricting efforts that they undertook in Texas, their advocacy to dilute Black representation in eliminating the [Voting Right Act]. They will do anything to add seats here in Congress.”
Trump’s election fraud claims have centered around Pratt’s seeming second place finish in the mayoral race getting erased as mail-in ballots were counted in the days after the election. (The mail-in ballots were sent in before Election Day, but the counting has taken days — a typical situation in California.)
For Trump and some Republicans, Pratt moving into third place, and out of the runoff for mayor, has been proof enough that something is amiss — even though Republican Steve Hilton advanced to the November election despite Democratic hopes of keeping a GOP candidate out of the race.
But Democrats maintain that Pratt doing worse with mail-in ballots than Election Day voters was to be expected.
“The score at halftime is different than the score at the end of the game,” Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., said. “Doesn’t mean there’s fraud; it just means the game was completed, and that’s what we’re seeing right now.”
And Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., told MS NOW that it should be expected that Trump would “deny the results of any election that he loses because he can’t really bear the thought with his identity — like his idea of himself — of the idea that he actually lost.”
“When you lose fair and square,” Ocasio-Cortez continued, “you have to understand that that’s what happened, and we have to respect the will of voters, just like when Democrats lose, you have to respect the will of voters as well.”
Ocasio-Cortez said Democrats should “absolutely be worried” about Trump weaponizing the Department of Justice and potentially trying to interfere with elections in November.
That was a point echoed by the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif.
Garcia emphasized the importance of keeping elections run by local officials, rather than allowing the Trump administration to nationalize elections in the name of securing the contests. “They’re safe, they’re secure, and there’s no fraud that’s happening in California right now,” Garcia said.
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“We should be very concerned about what we think the administration is going to do, as it relates to voting, putting possible ICE agents or federal agents at polling locations,” Garcia said.
While few Republicans offered evidence of fraud, several argued that California’s slow vote-counting process erodes confidence in election outcomes.
“I think it has too many concerns,” Rep. Mike Bost, R-Ill., said of the LA mayoral race. “And even if it isn’t fraudulent, there’s a look that it is fraudulent, because you’re counting votes so long after the fact.”
He added that he wondered where the influx of votes for current LA mayor, Democrat Karen Bass, and progressive challenger Nithya Raman had “come from.”
“And the general public is really — or at least my constituents are — are very concerned about the possibility of the possibility of fraud,” Bost said.
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., wasn’t willing to go as far as the speaker. But he did say, “whether you can prove fraud or not,” the fact that the election results have taken so long to tabulate “does undermine voter integrity in the vote.”
“I think it’s raised a lot of skepticism among voters when they see these wide changes days and weeks after the election, and you still can’t get a result two, three weeks after an election happened,” Scalise said.
Rep. Kevin Kiley, I-Calif. — who changed his party affiliation from the GOP in March — said there are valid concerns around the administration of elections in California. But he said he had seen “no evidence” of fraud.
Kiley told MS NOW it’s “not helpful” when officials echo unfounded claims of election fraud.
“When that gets mixed in with a bunch of other stuff that, you know, may or may not be grounded in reality, then that’s not helpful,” Kiley said.
Kiley said California’s election system deserves scrutiny, particularly when it takes weeks to finalize results. But he said the “broad, bipartisan agreement” that the system needs reforms shouldn’t be conflated with allegations of fraud.
“I’d prefer that we focus on the problems that clearly do exist, which is the administration of our elections leaves something to be desired,” Kiley said.
Syedah Asghar and Jack Fitzpatrick contributed to this report.
Lillie Boudreaux