The New York Times reports:

At least 357 sitting Republican legislators in closely contested battleground states have used the power of their office to discredit or try to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, according to a review of legislative votes, records and official statements by The New York Times.

The tally accounts for 44 percent of the Republican legislators in the nine states where the presidential race was most narrowly decided. In each of those states, the election was conducted without any evidence of widespread fraud, leaving election officials from both parties in agreement on the victory of Joseph R. Biden Jr.

The Times’s analysis exposes how deeply rooted lies and misinformation about former President Donald J. Trump’s defeat have become in state legislatures, which play an integral role in U.S. democracy. In some, the false view that the election was stolen — either by fraud or as a result of pandemic-related changes to the process — is now widely accepted as fact among Republican lawmakers, turning statehouses into hotbeds of conspiratorial thinking and specious legal theories. [Continue reading…]

Politico reports:

Donald Trump has been lying about voter fraud for so long that his impugning of yet another election seemed almost inevitable.

What was more revealing was that, for the first time, Republicans appeared not to be listening.

Mehmet Oz, the Trump-backed Senate candidate in Pennsylvania, did not prematurely declare victory last week, as Trump said he should. David McCormick, who is running narrowly behind Oz, has not claimed the election is unfair.

“No one’s paying any attention to it,” said Christopher Nicholas, a longtime Republican consultant based in Harrisburg.

Ever since the 2020 election, the Republican Party has been transfixed by Trump’s baseless claim that the 2020 election was “rigged,” a falsehood large majorities of Republicans still believe. It’s an obsession that has animated primary campaigns across the country. And it will almost certainly resurface in the general election, when Republicans are running against Democrats, not one another. [Continue reading…]