“Last summer, Idaho officials received demand after demand to investigate extraordinary claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, NBC News reports (here). “In a state where … Trump won by more than 30 points, people claimed a vast conspiracy cheated the former president out of an even greater margin of victory.”
Eh? What’s the point? In electoral vote terms, it doesn’t matter whether Trump won the state by 30.75 points, or 33.45 points.* Four electoral votes is four electoral votes.
There’s gotta be something else going on, something cult-like. The Baghwan, in this instance, is Mike Lindell (photo, left), a Trump pal and election-conspiracy peddler.
“Across the country, election officials have had to contend with a vocal election-denial movement,” promoted in no small part by Lindell, “that has targeted the results not only in places President Joe Biden narrowly won but in states and counties Trump carried overwhelmingly,” NBC News says, including Idaho.
And when Idaho’s top election officials — never mind they’re Republicans, too — debunked Lindell’s baseless claims of election fraud, that “only seems to have made supporters of his fraud narrative angrier.”
Here’s what I think: These people are being groomed for political violence.
“I’ve had counties that have had individuals come into county commissioner meetings and threatened … they were going to be unseated,” one of the Idaho election officials said. He continued, “And if they couldn’t do it through bureaucratic means, then they’re going to do it through physical means.”
That, of course, is what we saw on Jan. 6, 2021, at the U.S. Capitol. We’re seeing it in death threats against election workers and their families by Trump supporters. The GOP has become a cult with an authoritarian leader. And some of his followers are preparing to seize political supremacy by violence if they can’t win at the ballot box.