At a press conference last week in Arizona, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem sparked an unexpected controversy when she said Trump administration officials have been “proactive to make sure that we have the right people voting, electing the right leaders to lead this country.” The comments were so provocative that when White House border czar Tom Homan was asked what Noem was talking about, he replied, “That would be something she’d have to answer.”
But there’s another element to the secretary’s appearance that stood out: The point of her trip to Arizona was to advance Republican conspiracy theories related to voting and election administration. In fact, the South Dakotan insisted during her trip that Arizona is “an absolute disaster” when it comes to elections.
Naturally, this led to a reporter to ask the secretary an obvious question that she should have seen coming. As The Arizona Mirror reported:
She called Arizona’s elections an ‘absolute disaster’ and made the false claim that there is widespread voter fraud by illegal immigrants. But when pressed by reporters to provide examples, Noem could not provide even a single one.
‘Oh, I’m sure there’s many of them,’ she responded.
That might seem like an exaggeration intended to make Noem appear foolish, but the report summarized precisely what happened. When a reporter asked whether she was aware of any examples of voter fraud actually happening in the state, the secretary pointed to nothing.
This led to ample pushback from state officials, who explained in detail that the state’s system of elections is already secure and that they’re already doing what Noem says needs to be done, but it’s worth dwelling on her seven-word answer: “Oh, I’m sure there’s many of them.”
When a powerful federal official travels across the country to accuse a state of having a system of elections that’s become “an absolute disaster,” she really only has one job: Prove it.
The very least Noem could have done is to offer one example of fraud. Ideally, her indictment of the system would have included a documented pattern of irregularities. If that wasn’t an option, the DHS secretary might have at least pointed to a single, specific instance.
But she didn’t. Rather, she said, “Oh, I’m sure there’s many of them,” which was a hand-waving way of saying, “I assume my conspiracy theory is correct, but I can’t back it up with evidence.”
Unfortunately, this is emblematic of how the debate over the integrity of American elections has been unfolding. A couple of years ago, for example, House Speaker Mike Johnson declared at a press conference, “We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections.”
But the word “intuitively” was doing a lot of work in that sentence. The Louisiana Republican seemed to realize that he had no way of bolstering his conspiracy theory, so he acknowledged that he and his fellow partisans just kind of assume they’re right. It’s an argument rooted less in fact and more in “truthiness.” It’s worth emphasizing that after the 2020 election, Republicans thought they’d finally come up with a real example of voter fraud: A Nevada man named Donald Kirk Hartle claimed that someone had cast a ballot in the 2020 election on behalf of his late wife, who’d died three years earlier. Tucker Carlson, a Fox News anchor at the time, told his viewers of the Hartle matter, “In moments like this truth really matters more than ever. False allegations of fraud can cause as much damage as the fraud itself. … So we want to be accurate. What we’re about to tell you is accurate. It is not a theory. It happened, and we can prove it.” Others on the right seized on the Hartle story with comparable enthusiasm. Except they were wrong. Hartle had lied and ultimately pleaded guilty to having cast the ballot himself. The single best example Republicans could come up with wasn’t real. Six years later, Noem is “sure” there are “many” such examples — but she just can’t tell you about a single one.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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