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Bill Gates, opinion contributor Published 6:00 a.m. MT May 14, 2021

Opinion: True Republicans would never dream of hiring an unknown cybersecurity firm with no experience auditing elections to chase insane rumors of fraud.

As a lifelong Republican, Im worriedthatmyparty of small government and balanced budgets is being overtaken by conspiracy enablerswhose primary purposeis to promote the Big Lie about the 2020 election.

It doesnt have to be this way.

Strong politicalparties are what make our republic work. Ideas, policies and direction filter up from the left and the right,colliding in thehalls of democracy across the country,andculminatingas the lawof the land.Without two strong parties,onepartydominatesandhalf the populationfeelsunheardandunrepresented. Thelong-termhealth of arepublicrequiresabalance.

Internal party politics always pull to the fringes.As history has shown,humankind finds comfort in their small tribes.But peace and prosperity demandbig tents.

Our best leaders whether Republican or Democrat promote a vision and a set of policiesthat canappeal to most Americans, not just rabid party loyalists.Partiesthatleadwith all citizens in mindcan win independents,win elections and get things done.

I am a Republican. I always have been. In highschool,I started the first Deer Valley High School Young Republicans Club.In college, I was a state officerfor the National College Young Republicans.Later, I worked asa Republicanelection integrity attorney.

My formative teenage political years cameduring the Reagan presidency. My demographic of male,45-55 in age, will showon anypolitical science chart to be one of the most conservativegroups on the spectrum due to Reagans influence.

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Im for small government, balanced budgets,efficient processes and just about anyinitiativethat makes the most out ofthe taxpayerdollar.

These beliefs used to defineconservatism.Now, only one thing matters to many Republicans:adherence toany and alltheories that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump.

Maricopa County ballots from the 2020 general election are examined and recounted by contractors hired by the Arizona Senate, May 5, 2021, at the Veterans Memorial Coliseum, Phoenix.(Photo: Mark Henle/The Republic)

As a member of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, I helped oversee and then certify results for three major elections in 2020.I saw the detailed planning done by our elections team, saw themexpertlypivot to make sure people could vote when and how they wanted during a pandemic, and askedtough questions in my oversight roleoncethe results had come inand the protests had begun.

I can say with confidence the election was safe, secureand fair.

There was no foul play.

There was no vote switching.

The November electionwas one of thebest weve ever run.

For certifying and then defending the results of the 2020 general election, Ive been sued, subpoenaed and chastised,primarilyby Republicans.For embracing reality, Ive had my conservative credentials questionedand even my integrity challenged.

I take comfort in knowing that I am doing the moral thing by telling the truth to my constituents.I alsohappen to believetelling the truthaboutthe 2020 electionis good politically.

If Republicansbecome the party of the BigLie if we encourage this madness much longer wewill lose credibility withthe majority ofAmericans on issues where I believe we have better ideas.We will dolasting damage to our republic.

True Republicans would never dream of wasting taxpayer money to hire an unknown cybersecurity firm with no elections auditing experience to audit an election that hasalready been audited.This is what the Arizona Senate is doing with their Cyber Ninja audit.

True Republicans would notstand idly by while auditors paid with taxpayer dollarschasedinsane rumors that ballots were flown in from South Korea to change the outcome of the presidential race, orthatsecret watermarkson the ballotsrevealed by UV lightswouldexpose fraudonce and for all.

This is what the Arizona Senate is doing with their Cyber Ninja audit.

True Republicans wouldinsteadsupport what the Board of Supervisors did to address constituent questions following the November election:

We need more Republicans to return to dealingin truth and reality.

We have been elected to lead, not to appease conspiracy theorists.

We have been elected torestore faith in democracy, not sowendlessseeds of doubt imperiling it.

To save our party, and to save our republic, we need to stop the Big Lie.

Republican Bill Gates represents north Phoenix District 3 on the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors. On Twitter: @billgatesaz.

Read or Share this story: https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/2021/05/14/arizona-republicans-like-bill-gates-must-stop-big-lie-election/5080733001/

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Elected Republicans like me must stop the Big Lie about the 2020 election - The Arizona Republic

Georgias new voting restrictions dominated headlines in March, for numerous reasons: It was one of the closest states in last years presidential election and the focus of former President Donald Trumps pressure campaign to get Republicans to overturn the results; the legislation was written in such a way as to have a disproportionate impact on voters of color; and the law inspired an unusual amount of backlash from corporate America, even spurring Major League Baseball to move its All-Star Game out of the state.

But Georgia is hardly the only state thats made it harder to vote this year. Republican lawmakers have now enacted new voting restrictions in a total of 11 states Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Montana, Utah and Wyoming.

As we wrote in March, Republican state legislators inspired by Trumps baseless claims of voter fraud have introduced hundreds of bills this year that would make it harder to vote. Based on the latest data from the Brennan Center for Justice and our own research, at least 404 voting-restriction bills have now been introduced in 48 state legislatures. Whats more, nearly 90 percent of them were sponsored primarily or entirely by Republicans.

Of course, not all of those bills will pass. Of those 404 bills, we count 179 that are already dead either because they were voted down or werent passed before a key deadline. Another 137 bills have not yet progressed beyond the committee stage, and at this point, that inaction bodes poorly for their chances of passage. On the other hand, 63 bills are still worth watching, having passed at least one step of the legislative process (with those that have passed two chambers closer to passage than those that have just passed committee). That leaves 25 bills that are already law (back in March, this number was only six); four states have even enacted multiple such laws.

The highest-profile voting restriction that has been enacted since Georgias is Senate Bill 90 in Florida. Among other things, the law requires proof of identity for absentee voting, restricts ballot drop boxes to early-voting sites or election offices (where they can only be used if a staff member is physically present), limits how many absentee ballots a person can deliver for non-family members, and makes absentee-ballot requests good for only one election cycle (previously, they were good for two cycles). Critics also fear that the law could allow Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis to stack local election boards with political cronies and intimidate campaigns from giving food and water to voters within 150 feet of a polling place (based on the laws expanded definition of vote solicitation). DeSantis also signed the bill last Thursday at a signing ceremony that was closed to all members of the press except Fox News, contributing to the partisan acrimony over the legislation.

Of course, as in Georgia, its not clear whether Floridas new law will actually boost Republicans chances of winning elections in the perennially competitive state. By making it less easy to vote absentee, the law discourages a voting method that was used overwhelmingly by Democrats in 2020 but was also a source of Republican strength in elections before that.

Other new voting restrictions havent gotten as much attention as Florida and Georgia, but they could still affect voting for millions of people and underscore just how widespread Republicans push to tighten voting laws has been.

In less than five months, 25 new voting restrictions have already been enacted in 2021. Thats a notable uptick from recent years: The Brennan Center tracked only 14 voting restrictions that became law in 2019 and 2020 combined. Its likely, too, that that number will continue to grow. Republicans are expected to add even more laws restricting voting access to the books in the coming months with an omnibus bill in Texas likely to be the next voting restriction to experience the glare of the national spotlight. Stay tuned as we continue to track these bills and explore their implications.

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Where Republicans Have Made It Harder To Vote (So Far) - FiveThirtyEight

Erica Newland serves as counsel for Protect Democracy, a nonprofit organization founded in 2017 to fight democratic breakdown in America. Before Joe Bidens victory was officially confirmed in January, she researched some of the ways that Donald Trumps allies in Congress might sabotage the process. She came to a harrowing conclusion.

It occurred to me, she told her colleagues then, as I dug into the rules and watched what happened, that if the current Republican Party controls both Houses of Congress on Jan. 6, 2025, theres no way if a Democrat is legitimately elected they will get certified as the president-elect.

Liz Cheneys removal from Republican House leadership is the latest sign that Newland is probably right. Todays Republican Party has no political philosophy in the normal sense; it is, rather, organized around fealty to Trump and the stab-in-the-back myth that the election was stolen from him. Cheney had to go because she rejects that lie, recognizing it as inimical to democracy, which she continues to value. Her defenestration is one more indication that the party is preparing to do in the next election what it could not do in the last one.

Absent an overwhelming mobilization by Democrats, Republicans have a good chance of winning the House in 2022. Redistricting alone will probably give them several new seats. They could win the Senate as well. If Biden or another Democrat prevails in 2024, a House run by Kevin McCarthy, the craven minority leader who helped push Cheney out, seems likely to collaborate in right-wing schemes to change the result.

Trumps attempt to steal the 2020 election revealed how much our democracy depends on officials at all levels of government acting honorably. Republicans on state boards of election, like Aaron Van Langevelde in Michigan, had to certify the results correctly. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger had to resist Trumps entreaties to find enough missing votes to put him over the top. Republican state legislatures had to refuse Trump campaign pressure to substitute their own slate of electors for those chosen by the people. Congress had to do its job in the face of mob violence and count the Electoral College votes. Trumps rolling coup attempt didnt succeed, but it did reveal multiple points at which our system can fail.

Since the election, Republicans, driven by the lie that is now their partys central ideology, have systematically attacked the safeguards that protected the last election. They have sent the message that vigorous defense of democracy is incompatible with a career in Republican politics. (Besides losing her leadership role, Cheney could easily lose her House seat.) Michigan Republicans declined to renominate Van Langevelde to the Board of State Canvassers. Raffensperger will most likely face a tough primary challenge in 2022. As Politico reported, in the next election, there will be secretary of state races in five of the 10 closest battleground states. Republican candidates for those offices will have an incentive to pretend to believe that a great injustice was done to Trump in 2020, and pledge to help rectify it.

Republicans in states like Arizona have proposed laws that would allow state legislatures to override the popular vote and choose their own electors. Right now, these bills have little chance of passing, but other measures to involve state legislatures in vote counting and election certification are being enacted. Georgias new voting law, for example, gives the legislature the power to choose the head of the State Election Board a position formerly held by the secretary of state. The board, in turn, will be invested with the power to investigate and replace local election officials.

Think about what 2020 would have been like if Trump loyalists had controlled the local and state level counting and certification process. Raffensperger did a tremendous job communicating throughout the vote-counting process his confidence in the processes, his confidence in the results, said Jess Marsden, another lawyer for Protect Democracy who researches state laws. You could imagine that a different person in that role could have very much clouded the public perception of the vote-counting process, in a way that would have validated later efforts by legislators to undo the certification to the extent that state law allows.

Some legislatures, she said, might even be prepared to go beyond state law in a way that invites litigation and uncertainty and delay that then invites Congress to step in. Weve already seen how the accretion of lies and confusion about the last election has justified political purges and restrictive new voting laws. Such lies could also give a Republican-controlled Congress a pretext to object to the counting of state electors.

Our current system, Newland told me, provides lots of opportunities for bad actors to claim there are ambiguities and to exploit those claims of ambiguities. They have to believe in the process in order for the process to actually work. Otherwise, they can purposely gum up the works so thoroughly that its impossible to declare a winner.

If that happens, the election would be tossed to the House, with each state delegation getting one vote. Even now, with the House as a whole controlled by Democrats, there are more states whose representatives are predominantly Republican. With enough procedural mischief, politicians representing a minority of the country could hand the presidency to a candidate who got a minority of both the popular and Electoral College votes. If this has never been an evident danger in the past, its because both parties were at least outwardly committed to liberal democracy, and probably thought their voters were, too.

That is no longer true. The Republican electorate, believing that Democratic victories are by their nature illegitimate, demands that everything possible be done to subvert them. For rejecting the anti-democratic turn in her party, Cheney a right-wing extremist in many other regards has been cast out. Republicans are showing us exactly what they expect of their officials. Theyve made it clear that while American democracy was given a reprieve in 2020, the work of repairing it has barely begun.

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Opinion | How Republicans Could Steal the 2024 Election - The New York Times

Republicans will say all kinds of nonsense but theres one phrase mysteriously absent from their vocabulary, comedian Roy Wood Jr. notes in his latest spoof segment for The Daily Show With Trevor Noah.

In the parody Unsolved Mysteries: MAGA edition bit, the correspondent examines why Republicans cant bring themselves to say that President Joe Biden won the 2020 election fair and square.

Republican mouths are unable to formulate these words, Wood says, airing a montage of conservatives swerving questions about the legitimacy of the vote.

Instead, they simply acknowledge Biden is the president in apparent deference to ex-President Donald Trumps election conspiracies.

Republicans seem to know that Joe Biden is the president but not how that happened, said Wood. Do they think a stork delivered Joe Biden to the White House? Do they think he tunneled into the White House, like some sort of reverse Shawshank? Do Republicans believe in an immaculate inauguration where Biden became president without achieving an election?

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Supercut Shows The Phrase Republicans Just Cant Bring Themselves To Say - HuffPost

The fossil fuel industry is effectively a public-private partnership. It depends on generous subsidies in the form of long-standing tax breaks and preferential leasing, but also on all manner of infrastructural support and diplomatic maneuvering to make the world friendly to U.S. fossil fuels. The concept of energy independence is itself the result of dedicated, state-led industrial policy first unveiled by the Nixon administration in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis, meant to boost domestic energy production. Even the ownership of the Colonial Pipeline itself shows just how much public capital makes oil flow. Shell and Koch Industries are both major owners, alongside private equity firms. Yet also behind the pipeline are companies that manage public pension funds in Australia and Quebec, as well as South Koreas state-run National Pension Service.

If energy independence were McCarthys real concern, it would make sense for him to favor temporarily halting fuel exports, which he instead wants to expand. It would make sense for him to urge refinery operators to invest more in being able to process the light, sweet crude flowing out of the Permian Basin. Needless to say, the Midwestern Keystone XL pipeline expansion McCarthy and other Republicans have used the cyberattack to pitch would not have either prevented a ransomware attack or alleviated fuel shortages among the East Coast gas stations the Colonial Pipeline supplies.

While the industry has cast just about any climate policy as a radical intervention into the economy, most of what Democrats have proposed so far amounts to either withdrawing some small portion of the mountains of state support oil companies currently enjoy or providing similar, much more modest benefits to the clean energy sector. The fossil fuel companies have trained plenty of attack dogs to make their case.

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The Republican Response to the Colonial Pipeline Hack Is Bananas - The New Republic