Jim Jordan conveniently ignores all the Republicans who rejected election fraud lies

During an appearance on Fox News Tuesday, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) falsely blamed Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 presidential election on “Democrat-controlled” supreme courts and Democratic governors and secretaries of state in key swing states.

Jordan said the state courts and officials had bypassed the legislatures to change voting laws. In fact, many of the officials who rejected Trump’s claims of a stolen election were Republicans.

“This is real important: Here’s what the Democrats did in the last election,” Jordan told Fox host Laura Ingraham. “They knew they couldn’t beat President Trump without changing the rules, so at the last minute they changed the rules, but because they didn’t control state legislatures in the key states, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, they had to do it in an unconstitutional fashion. So they had partisan, Democrat-controlled supreme courts, Democrat secretaries of state.”

While their governors are Democrats, Michigan’s state House and Senate are both Republican-controlled, as are Pennsylvania’s and Wisconsin’s. Georgia has both a Republican governor and a Republican majority in the state House and Senate.

Jordan’s claims of “Democrat-controlled supreme courts” are equally misleading. While Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court has a liberal majority, the courts in other states that rejected Trump’s various baseless lawsuits seeking to overturn the election are dominated by conservatives.

The conservative-majority Wisconsin Supreme Court, for instance, rejected as “unreasonable in the extreme,” by a vote of 4-3, Trump’s efforts to throw out some 220,000 ballots in the state.

Conservative Justice Brian Hagedorn wrote for the court, “Striking these votes now — after the election, and in only two of Wisconsin’s 72 counties when the disputed practices were followed by hundreds of thousands of absentee voters statewide — would be an extraordinary step for this court to take. We will not do so.”

Michigan also had a Republican-majority Supreme Court at the time Trump launched efforts to overturn the election results. Republicans lost their majority in the Nov. 3 election, but the new judges didn’t join the court until Jan. 1, 2021 — by which time the Republican-controlled court had already rejected several Trump election challenges.

And despite Jordan’s claims about “Democrat secretaries of state,” contested swing states Nevada and Georgia both have Republicans serving in the role.

Nevada’s Republican Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske rejected claims of widespread voter fraud and has defended the integrity of the state’s election.

After the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 by Trump supporters seeking to overturn President Joe Biden’s election, Cegavske said, “What transpired January 6, 2021 was not only devastating but heartbreaking. Nevada’s election officials performed their duties with integrity and fairness, and to have the results be rejected by many Americans is disheartening and clearly of great concern.”

Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger defended the integrity of Georgia’s election processes from the beginning, despite widespread calls from other Republicans for his resignation, threats of retaliation from Trump and his supporters, and phone calls from Trump himself allegedly trying to persuade Raffensperger to “find” more Republican votes.

“By all accounts, Georgia had a wildly successful and smooth election,” Raffensperger wrote in an op-ed published in USA Today in November. “This should be something for Georgians to celebrate, whether their favored presidential candidate won or lost. For those wondering, mine lost — my family voted for him, donated to him and are now being thrown under the bus by him.”

On Fox News Tuesday, Jordan said that the only way to overcome Democrats’ supposed voter fraud is to elect more Republican governors.

“The only way to beat it back is you have to elect Republican governors in those key swing states,” Jordan said, so Republicans can “make sure we can change it back to a fair election like it has always been in our country.”

But Georgia and Arizona, states in which Trump contested election losses, both have Republican governors already in Brian Kemp and Doug Ducey.

And blue states were not the only ones to bypass state legislatures in amending election laws during the pandemic: Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott did the same.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.