The president’s appointee to the Federal Election Commission argued that the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election was stolen from Stacey Abrams.
The president’s appointee to the Federal Election Commission argued that the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election was stolen from Stacey Abrams.
‘I n America, if you lose, you accept the results,” President Biden said in Philadelphia in July of last year.
If only Biden practiced what he preached. Stolen-election claims, regardless of party, are a dangerous threat to voter confidence and undermine election integrity. Yet, when it comes to Stacey Abrams’s three-year-long stolen-election campaign, Biden and his Democratic allies in politics and the media have been shown to be hypocrites time and time again.
Most recently, Dara Lindenbaum, an election lawyer and general counsel for the 2018 Abrams campaign, had a hearing before the U.S. Senate to be appointed to the board of the Federal Election Commission, the agency tasked with oversight of elections on the federal level. Lindenbaum’s nomination is nothing short of an effort to institutionalize stolen-election claims at the federal level.
Despite Biden’s pronouncement that people who lose elections should accept them, Lindenbaum was one of the legal architects behind Abrams’s years-long campaign to prove Georgia’s 2018 gubernatorial election was stolen. The initial filing in Abrams’s lawsuit against Georgia’s election system claimed that votes had been switched, treated the possibility of voting machines being hacked as if they were actually hacked, and challenged the constitutionality of Georgia’s elections. President Trump and his allies made the same arguments about the 2020 election in their efforts to undermine it.
The claims made by Lindenbaum on Abrams’s behalf have been disproved several times in the three and a half years since the November 2018 election. The lawsuit Lindenbaum filed is now a hollow shell of what it initially was, after a judge appointed by President Obama “threw out” many of the suit’s claims, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The only remaining piece of Abrams’s lawsuit that is worthy of note is her effort to stop citizenship checks of Georgia’s voter rolls.
The bottom line: Instead of proving some vast voter-suppression conspiracy theory, Lindenbaum helped Abrams prop up a fiction to support her stolen-election claims. Lindenbaum has been critical to spreading election disinformation and helping Abrams become a millionaire off of the proceeds.
Biden’s choice not only normalizes stolen-election claims on the left, but also demonstrates his effort to institutionalize them. At the same time that the Biden administration demonizes stolen-election claims from President Trump and his allies, Lindenbaum’s appointment sends a message to the American people that election disinformation is perfectly acceptable if it supports a preferred narrative.
Biden himself has spread doubt about the reliability and integrity of elections in the United States, laying the groundwork to challenge the results of the November 2022 midterm elections. Only months ago, when asked whether the 2022 midterms would be legitimate, Biden said “it depends.” When pressed further, Biden refused to say the 2022 midterms would be legitimate unless his bills allowing the federal takeover of elections were passed. Days before, he flew down to Atlanta to accuse anyone who opposes his proposed legislation of being “on the side of George Wallace . . . Bull Connor . . . [and] Jefferson Davis.”
Biden, too, spread disinformation about Georgia’s election law, claiming repeatedly that it “ends voting hours early.” The Washington Post, FactCheck.org, and other outlets all corrected those falsehoods. Based in part on this misinformation, Biden encouraged Major League Baseball to move the All-Star Game out of Georgia, costing small businesses in the Peach State an estimated $100 million.
Lindenbaum’s appointment comes as no surprise considering Biden’s blatant effort to implement a federal takeover of America’s elections. Before they failed to garner enough support in the Democrat-controlled Senate, Biden championed H.R. 1 and H.R. 4, bills that would have federalized our elections and imposed burdensome and complex regulations on the local elections workers who actually have to run the contests.
A disconcerting aspect of Lindenbaum’s nomination is the near-total silence from mainstream-media outlets. Countless news outlets have reported breathlessly in recent months about the prospect of individuals who push baseless 2020 conspiracy theories getting elected as secretaries of state around the country. Shamefully, those same outlets have been silent on Lindenbaum’s nomination to the Federal Election Commission. These are the same outlets that have failed to condemn Abrams’s stolen-election claims and have lionized her instead. Now, they are tacitly helping a stolen-election conspiracy theorist to take a leadership position at the nation’s highest election-oversight agency.
Free and fair elections have been considered a beacon of the American democratic process since its inception almost 250 years ago. After the stolen-election claims that followed the 2016, 2018, and 2020 elections, politicians and election officials need to be working to restore confidence in the vote. Elevating individuals who have actively worked to undermine the integrity of elections in this country demonstrates the Biden administration’s real indifference to the damage stolen-elections claims cause.
Lindenbaum’s appointment provides a grim look at liberal-controlled elections. After spending months condemning President Trump and his allies for stolen-election claims, the Biden administration has made clear its belief that election disinformation is a problem only if Democrats aren’t the ones pushing it. This is no way to run elections in America, much less the Federal Election Commission.