Lindsey Graham: We have to stop people from voting so Republicans can win

Sen. Lindsey Graham demanded on Monday that the nation get rid of voting by mail to make it easier for Republicans to win in the future.

Graham also made the baseless claim that Democrats only win elections by cheating.

On Fox News, the newly reelected South Carolina Republican embraced conspiracy theories positing that Joe Biden had not legitimately defeated Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election.

“The social media censors conservatives when we want to talk to each other, get our point of view out,” he dishonestly charged with zero evidence, ignoring the fact that social media algorithms often boost conservative content and disinformation. “The state of play in America in 2020 for Republicans is not good. We need to fight back. We win because of our ideas. We lose elections because they cheat us.”

“Mitch McConnell and I need to come up with an oversight of mail-in balloting. If we don’t do something about voting by mail, we’re gonna lose the ability to elect a Republican in this country,” Graham added. Democrats have won the popular vote in all but one presidential election since 1992, or seven of the past eight.

There is no evidence to support either his suggestion that Democrats cheated or his claim that absentee voting rigs the election for Democrats.

Donald Trump spent the 2020 campaign claiming that mail-in voting was dangerous and vulnerable to fraud — except when he voted that way.

“Republicans should fight very hard when it comes to state wide mail-in voting. Democrats are clamoring for it. Tremendous potential for voter fraud, and for whatever reason, doesn’t work out well for Republicans,” he tweeted in April.

But there is no evidence that mail-in voting inherently favors Democrats; the deeply red state of Utah adopted an all vote-by-mail system in 2012 and has not elected a Democrat statewide since. Trump appears to have won the state by more than 20 points this year.

Studies have found that voting by mail is no more vulnerable to fraud than voting in person.

There is also zero evidence of any widespread cheating in this year’s voting. Trump and his campaign have repeatedly claimed that the election was stolen, but have been unable to provide any actual evidence of fraud.

Moreover, Republicans performed better than the polls suggested they would in House, Senate, and state legislative races — meaning that if Democrats rigged the elections, they did so very poorly. Trump noted the results last week, bragging, “We did a fantastic job with the Senate, and I think we’re very proud of what’s happened there,” and incorrectly stating that “for the first time ever, we lost zero races in the House.”

Graham himself prevailed over his well-financed Democratic challenger Jaime Harrison last week by more than 10 points. More than 400,000 South Carolinians voted by mail — more than 170,000 of them for him.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.