SEATTLE — More than nine months after the 2020 election, some Republicans continue to follow former President Donald Trump’s lead in waging a campaign to overturn or undermine confidence in the results.
That’s true even in Washington — no one’s idea of a swing state — where Trump lost to Joe Biden by nearly 785,000 votes.
On Sunday, five Republican state representatives are hosting an unofficial public hearing at a Snohomish church, encouraging the public to bring forward evidence of voting fraud or irregularities.
The goal is to lay groundwork for a review of Washington’s election results, similar to the controversial “forensic audit” being conducted in Maricopa County, Ariz., by a private company called Cyber Ninjas.
There has been no credible evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election, and courts have struck down dozens of lawsuits challenging the results. Trump and his loyalists continue to claim the election was stolen.
The lead organizer of the Sunday hearing — which has not been backed by top Republican leaders — is state Rep. Robert Sutherland, R-Granite Falls, who visited the Arizona audit facility last month. In December, he told his Facebook followers to “prepare for war,” after declaring “Joe Biden is not my president.”
This week, Sutherland was in South Dakota, attending a three-day “cyber symposium” organized by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, who has emerged as a leading purveyor of outlandish, false assertions about the 2020 election.
Earlier this month, Lindell claimed that millions of votes were flipped by hackers or computer algorithms, not primarily in swing states, but in places like Washington, Oregon and California, “where they could take the most” in order to run up Biden’s popular vote margin.
Lindell faces a $1.3 billion libel lawsuit from voting-machine maker Dominion Voting Systems, which says his false claims have damaged the company’s reputation. On Wednesday a federal judge rejected Lindell’s efforts to have the case dismissed, writing that his claim of “a vast international conspiracy that is ignored by the government but proven by a spreadsheet on an internet blog is so inherently improbable that only a reckless man would believe it.”
Also attending the South Dakota event was state Rep. Brad Klippert, R-Kennewick, who joined other state lawmakers there in announcing creation of an “election integrity caucus” seeking audits in all 50 states.
Sutherland, who has held his legislative seat since 2019, did not respond to messages on Wednesday and Thursday seeking comment. He represents the 39th legislative district, covering most of Snohomish and Skagit counties.
In a podcast interview last month, Sutherland praised the Arizona audit, and said Washington’s election should be similarly scrutinized. He said he has been asked frequently whether he can vouch for the accuracy of Washington’s elections. He said he could not. “I don’t know how our system works when you get down into the weeds. It’s a black box,” he said, adding that “some of the results seem off.”
