Top Republicans are already rushing to buy into a new 2024 election fraud narrative sown by ex-President Donald Trump in their zeal to appease their party’s presumptive nominee.
Leading party figures are increasingly warning they will only recognize the result of November’s presidential vote if there is no fraud. But there is no indication that there will be irregularities in the election. And their warnings come despite many Republican state legislatures taking steps to tighten voting rules — based on Trump’s lies about fraud in 2020.
The new Republican trend of casting doubt on the integrity of the 2024 election in advance was exhibited by Sen. Ted Cruz on Wednesday in an interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins. The Texas lawmaker, who in 2016 fell in line behind Trump despite the ex-president’s insults about his father and his wife, falsely stated that the 2020 election was tainted by fraud. Despite Trump’s claims of voting irregularities, multiple courts, including the US Supreme Court, rejected the former president’s claims he was cheated out of power. And Trump’s then-attorney general, William Barr, looked into his claims and decided that there was no widespread fraud that would have changed the result of the election.
But Cruz told Collins that a question about whether he would accept the results of the 2024 election was “ridiculous.”
“So you’re asking, ‘Will you promise, no matter what, to agree an election is legitimate regardless of what happens?,’ and that would be an absurd thing to claim,” Cruz said. “We have an entire election law system: that people challenge elections, elections get overturned, voter fraud gets proven. That happens all the time.” Cruz, who objected to election results in Arizona, which Trump narrowly lost to Biden, on January 6, 2021, went on to suggest there was significant fraud in 2020. And he implied the same could happen this year.
“If the Democrats win, I will accept the result, but I’m not going to ignore fraud regardless of what happens,” Cruz said.