Mike Johnson Jumps Aboard Trump’s Rigged Elections Bandwagon: ‘Can I Prove That? No’
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) suggested that three 2024 congressional elections may have been rigged against the GOP while speaking to reporters on Tuesday.
During an interview with former FBI deputy director Dan Bongino on Monday, President Donald Trump — who has long claimed that he and his party have been held back by election fraud without furnishing any hard evidence — called for a federal takeover of elections.
“These people were brought to our country to vote, and they vote illegally,” Trump told Bongino. “And it’s amazing the Republicans aren’t tougher on it. The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over, we should take over the voting in at least 15 places.’”
“The Republicans oughta nationalize the voting,” he added.
On Tuesday, Johnson advocated for the passage of the SAVE Act, which would require voters across the country to provide “documentary proof” that they are American citizens when they register to vote. The president’s comments were then raised by a reporter who asked if Johnson agreed that Republicans should “nationalize elections,” and whether he has “confidence in how elections are conducted right now heading into the midterm.”
Johnson replied:
We have thoughtful debate about our election system every election cycle and sometimes in between. We know it’s in our system the states have been in charge of administering their elections. What you’re hearing from the president is his frustration about the lack of some of the blue states, frankly, of enforcing these things and making sure that they are free and fair elections. We need constant improvement on that front.
I don’t know what the ultimate solution is going to be. I’m not going to get ahead of the negotiations here, but I think that is something that’s going to be a continuing theme here. It’s something that we’ll continue to push. And we hope the governors will insist upon that same thing as well. In some of the states, like in California, for example, I mean they hold the elections open for weeks after Election Day. That’s just one thing that bothers so many people. We had three House Republican candidates who were ahead on Election Day in the last election cycle. And every time a new tranche of ballots came in, they just magically whittled away until their leads were lost. And no series of ballots that were counted after Election Day were our candidates ahead on any of those counts. It just-, it looks on its face to be fraudulent. Can I prove that? No, because it happened so far upstream, but we need more confidence, and the American people in the election system, and it’s essential. And everybody, no matter what party you’re in, should agree with that.
The, you know, mass mailing of paper ballots, of mail-in ballots, and all the other irregularities that have haunted us over the last couple cycles, we need to tighten that up. Now, the red states have done a lot of good work in that front, but it’s the blue states that I’m frankly concerned about. So, we’ll see how the law is modified and what’s changed, but I hope we can get consensus to get that done.
During the early years of the Biden administration, Democrats pushed for a federal elections takeover of their own that would have banned voter ID nationwide, among numerous other controversial provisions.
After the 2020 presidential election, which Trump falsely claimed to have won, Johnson promoted the conspiracy theory that voting machine companies Smartmatic and Dominion Voting Systems had changed votes for Trump into votes for Joe Biden.
“The allegations about these voting machines, some of them being rigged with this software by Dominion, there’s a lot of merit to that,” said Johnson in 2020. On January 6, 2021, Johnson objected to the Democratic electors from two states hours after the infamous Capitol riot delayed the certification of the election results.
Watch above via Newsmax.
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