The Big Lie Is a Reality

A Range of Claims About the Legitimacy of American Elections Have Taken Root

Just days after the November 2020 election, an unnamed senior Republican official asked a Washington Post reporter a rhetorical question about the “downside for humoring” then-President Donald Trump’s false claims about election fraud. “It’s not like he’s plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on Jan. 20,” the official said at the time.

Over a year after an attempted insurrection fueled by those false claims and an explicit admission from the former President that he did seek to overturn the outcome, the dangers of the Big Lie remain manifest. But a set of political leaders and commentators continue to attack the legitimacy of American elections, turning the Big Lie into a persistent alternate reality.

False assertions about the legitimacy of the election are so commonly shared by political leaders that a lawyer for Oath Keepers militia founder and leader Stewart Rhodes – who is being held on charges including seditious conspiracy for his role in the January 6 insurrection – argued that Rhodes’ views on the legitimacy of the election should not be held against him. 

On that point, Rhodes’ lawyer is correct. A contingent of the Republican party’s leaders appear to be all in on the Big Lie, which can now be understood to include a number of related positions on the integrity of American elections. According to research by the nonprofit investigative research firm Advance Democracy, over the course of 2021, as many as 132 Republican members of Congress publicly made claims undermining the outcome of the 2020 election or promoting the idea that American elections are plagued by widespread fraud. These claims, Advance Democracy found, typically fall into five categories:

f https://www.justsecurity.org/80324/the-big-lie-is-a-reality/