Balancing false claims of rigged elections while getting out the vote

Good Monday morning and welcome to this week's edition of Political Winds, The Oklahoman's weekly political newsletter.

Two years ago, when some Republican lawmakers were trying to walk the line between supporting former president Donald Trump’s false claim he had won the election, while not completely casting aside the nation’s electoral system, some in this state said the rest of the country needed to be a lot more like Oklahoma.

I remember Sen. James Lankford saying states like Pennsylvania, where vote counting lasted several days, needed to follow Oklahoma's lead.

“Oklahoma can count our ballots in five hours, with a record-setting election turn out but PA, NC, NV, AZ and GA can not even figure out how many ballots they have left to count after three days,” Lankford, R-Oklahoma, wrote in a Facebook post shortly after the 2020 election.

By all accounts, Oklahoma’s election system is aces.

But asking why Pennsylvania isn’t more like Oklahoma is like asking why Philadelphia's traffic isn’t more like Oklahoma City’s. There’s a big infrastructure and population difference. (I wrote about this two years ago, which you can read here)

I was reminded of this last week when AJ Ferate, the chairman of the state Republican party, also praised the state’s voting system, while acknowledging problems in other states. But unlike Lankford, Ferate has been more forceful in his rejection of a rigged election.

Last month, Ferate said “The election wasn’t stolen,” in response to both Republican candidates for an open U.S. Senate seat saying that it was.

The fact that the state’s Republican chairman said this is rather big news, especially since a new poll shows 63% of likely Oklahoma Republican voters still believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

Last week, Ferate joined The Oklahoman’s weekly Twitter Spaces conversation about the upcoming election and we asked him about such a large percentage of his party disagreeing with him.

Here’s what he said:

“That’s fine. I don’t have a problem with that. If they want to believe that, that’s their decision … If people want to say the election was stolen, why does that bother me? I just want people to vote for Republicans and I want to put conservatives in office.”

Two years later Republican leaders are still trying to accept that many in their party continue to reject the results of 2020. But as Ferate went on to say, completely allowing Republicans to assume their votes don’t matter can be a recipe for disaster.

Ferate told The Oklahoman he believed Republicans lost two U.S. Senate races in Georgia last year because voters thought the 2020 election was rigged and didn’t turn out to vote.

“In Oklahoma, I can’t have those people staying home,” he said. “Whether they believe the election was rigged or not, I need them all to come out. I need them all to come vote.”

You can read more about the belief a majority of Oklahoma Republicans have that the 2020 election was stolen from my colleague Chris Casteel, his story is the first link below, followed by several other important political stories from this past week.

Have a great week and thanks for reading.

-Ben Felder (benfelder_okc)

This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: Catch up on Oklahoma politics