The Republican Party of Orange County has forcefully swatted down unfounded claims of voter fraud in the 2024 election, debunking allegations that went viral after Democrats flipped a hotly contested congressional seat.
In a county home to some of the most competitive House races in the nation, a local party leader said he feared the false claims could dampen Republican participation in future elections if they weren’t forcefully addressed.
Republican Party of Orange County Executive Director Randall Avila cited the 45th Congressional District in Los Angeles and Orange counties, where Democratic challenger Derek Tran unseated incumbent Republican Rep. Michelle Steel by just 653 votes in November.
“If 1,000 people see [the claims of voter fraud] and think, ‘Well, I shouldn’t even vote, it doesn’t matter,’ it really hurts our cause, especially in races that are so tight like that,” Avila said Friday.
The Orange County GOP pushed back on the voter fraud claims in a detailed email that went out last week to a mailing list of about 60,000 people, Avila said. The local party also debunked the claims in a question-and-answer format on social media.
“We support commonsense reforms such as Voter ID and ending universal vote-by-mail to ensure free and fair elections, but false claims of voter fraud only hurt our efforts and ultimately decrease Republican votes when our voters believe their vote does not count,” the email said, along with a point-by-point explanation rebutting several issues raised.
Voter fraud is vanishingly rare in the United States. But false claims of widespread malfeasance have permeated the American discourse — particularly in right-wing media ecosystems — since President-elect Donald Trump lost the 2020 election and falsely claimed to have won. The drumbeat of attacks on election integrity in the years since has taken a toll, with polling showing a sharp partisan divide in whether Americans have faith in the electoral process.
Sara Sadhwani, an assistant professor of politics at Pomona College who served on the state’s redistricting commission, praised the Orange County GOP’s decision to speak out on the claims.
“Bogus claims about voter fraud have been abundant in the last several years, many of which have been made by President-elect Donald Trump. So to see the Republican Party coming out so clearly to debunk those myths is is a breath of fresh air,” Sadhwani said.
The Orange County false claims were laid out in a blog post published recently and quickly went viral. They were amplified by a number of prominent right-wing figures, including Roger Stone, a longtime Trump ally who was convicted of lying to Congress during investigations of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign.
The blog post claimed to have revealed “huge ballot discrepancies” that could alter the results of House races. The alleged discrepancies centered on a few issues. One was the number of ballots issued by the county (which includes every ballot printed, including the vote-by-mail ballots sent to the homes of voters who later voted in person) being greater than the number of registered voters. Another concerned the difference between the number of registered voters at the pre-election deadline and the final number of registered voters on election day. Local GOP leaders said the difference was due to about 40,000 Orange County residents registering to vote on or close to election day, as allowed by California law.
Avila estimated that at least 20 people had walked into the party’s Tustin headquarters to raise the issue after seeing the misinformation online, along with 60 to 70 more individuals reaching out by phone. After the deluge of concerns, the party director said his office communicated with the local registrar of voters to gather information and get the facts straight before offering the detailed explanation.
“If there was voter fraud going on here with the House on the line, there would be lawyers here. We’d be in court,” said Jon Fleischman, an Orange County-based Republican campaign strategist and former executive director of the California GOP.
Fleischman reiterated that that wasn’t the “reality” on the ground, regardless of his criticism around some of California’s election laws, like the fact that every Californian receives a vote-by-mail ballot and such ballots are accepted for up to a week after the election, so long as they are postmarked by election day.
“Elections should be over on election day,” Fleischman stated, saying that laws that beget lengthy vote-count waiting periods add to public confusion and distrust.
Avila also called for reform of California’s voter accessibility laws, which allow voters more options than in other states, and help engender California’s notoriously slow vote counts. But like Fleischman, he drew a sharp line between those allowances and actual fraud.
“There’s no real legal challenges here,” said Mindy Romero, a political sociologist who runs USC’s Center for Inclusive Democracy. “So not speaking out or pushing back on allegations of fraud just hurts the integrity of the election, period.”
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