No, Mr. Hilton, our election is not a ‘joke.’ It’s time to stand up to Trump

Well, that didn’t take long.

The day after California’s primary election, President Trump took to social media with baseless claims of voter fraud — predictable, but also dangerous.

“Look what’s happening in California, Democrats, right before our eyes, are stealing the vote,” Trump wrote in another post.

“There is a huge fraud by Dumocrats in California,” he wrote in another, clearly enamored with his latest youth speech.

Never mind that his candidate, Steve Hilton, is leading – for now anyway.

California has once again become a big dish on Trump’s bull-hockey buffet as he continues to undermine democracy and consolidate federal power, using the false and untrue claim that the US election was rigged by Democratic forces working in collaboration with illegal immigrants.

That last part is called the Great Replacement Theory, the idea that the “chosen” are replacing white people – and white voters – with Black and black immigrants in an effort to destroy white culture. It’s at the heart of Trump’s alleged voter fraud.

What’s worse at this point is that Hilton, a man who wants to represent all Californians, seems to be jumping on the election fraud train with the president. I get it, there is a MAGA base that needs to be fed, and it’s a base that enjoys being pissed off and lied to. Serving anger fueled by lies and propaganda has been MAGA’s playbook for years under Trump, a strategy that no one can deny has worked woefully.

But Hilton is a smart man and should know for sure that voter fraud is rare, to the point where it doesn’t matter to the election results. Hilton admittedly understands voting patterns, and that this cycle, Republicans voted early and often by mail, despite Trump’s claims that all mail-in voting is to blame. So Hilton understands that the early polls are skewed his way, and that the later poll numbers will favor the Democrats.

And Hilton is smart enough to expect that in a situation where Democrats outnumber Republicans nearly three to one, he won’t hold the top spot in this primary, and there’s still a slim chance he won’t make it into the top two. That’s just simple math.

So if Hilton really wants to represent this state as an elected official, now is the time to drop the election fraud myths and stand up to Trump’s lies. If Hilton can’t say he believes our recent election was free and fair, then he has no business being our governor.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be the way he’s going, as it looks like he’ll be heading to the general election.

This week, speaking to far-right podcaster and former Turning Point USA creative director Benny Johnson (allegedly duped into working for Russian influence), Hilton said that while “so far we don’t see any signs” of cheating, “we’re going to deal with it. We’re not going to let them do that.”

Hilton was responding to Johnson’s question about whether Hilton would sue for “cheating.”

In a post-election appearance with Laura Ingraham, the Fox News host who has repeatedly promoted the Great Replacement Theory, Hilton got more romantic.

“Just to emphasize the point you made about corruption,” he told Ingraham an anecdote about fraud in the last election when a “whistleblower” at the post office told him they had been instructed that a handwritten postmark was acceptable when ballots were being processed to be sent to the county registrar.

“It’s unbelievable, and of course, that’s why many people don’t believe the results, but it just undermines confidence,” he told Ingraham, certainly knowing that the post office to transfer the vote to the district registrar does not mean that it will be verified or counted. Would we really want the USPS to decide which ballots to deliver? No sense on Hilton’s part.

“This whole thing is a joke,” Hilton continued about the California election, which is ridiculous.

Thursday, when I asked Hilton’s team to talk to him about his thoughts on voter fraud, they returned an answer that focused on holding the California vote count; the voter rolls Hilton described as “uninteresting,” an accurate claim; and two cases of actual voter registration fraud – not examples of counted votes.

Certainly, all those things are important. Any inefficiency should be punished, and the system should always strive for improvement.

But how hard is it to resist fraud, when we rightly admit that it is rare and our current system gives accurate results?

I am against voter registration fraud. I am against vote fraud. I fully support democracy, including policies such as mail-in voting that increase participation.

I do not believe that there is widespread fraud in the California primary, or in the general American election, because the evidence does not support such a conspiracy. I do not believe that the Democrats are running a decades-long, nationwide conspiracy to replace white voters with votes from black and undocumented immigrants, because that is false and racist.

Good basics, and statements that resonate with the values ​​and common sense of the majority of Californians Hilton says he will stand for.

If Hilton can’t come out and clearly say that Trump is wrong — about fraud and the Great Replacement Theory — can he really be trusted to stand up for the values ​​of the Golden State?