March 16, 2022 10:23 AM UTC

Matt Soper Shows Again Why Trump's GOP Can't Be Fixed

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• by: Colorado Pols

Colorado Public Radio’s Bente Birkeland reports on Senate Bill 22-153, legislation supported by Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold to emplace additional internal safeguards to help prevent the kinds of election security breaches allegedly committed by Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters and Elbert County Clerk Dallas “Even More Based Than Ricky” Schroeder. Peters is getting by far the most attention after the election system data she stole was leaked to far-right conspiracy theorists, resulting in none of the hoped-for evidence that the 2020 election was stolen but creating a whole new security problem in the process.

Republican Matt Crane of the Colorado Country Clerks Association sums up Peters’ problem as a combination of ignorance “low information” and exploitation by “bad actors,” which we take to mean everyone from Donald Trump down to local agitators who encouraged Peters to break the law on a supposed higher mission:

“I think what we saw in Mesa County was a low-information clerk, which made her susceptible to grifters and bad actors,” said Crane. Peters did not have experience in elections administration before being elected clerk in 2018.

The county clerks “overwhelmingly” support the new bill to beef up election security from insider threats, says Crane, another sign that despite a whisper campaign of dissent against Jena Griswold since her election in 2018 she remains fully capable of leading and uniting the state’s elections officials in both parties. Despite this, partisan Republicans are mobilizing against the bill via their usual unabashed Griswold demonization, after which we expect they’ll wonder guilelessly again why Griswold keeps getting death threats:

“Jena Griswold not only wants to be the Secretary of State; she wants to become judge and jury as well. The extreme portions of this bill are a transparent attempt to stoke fear and distrust in local elections and center all the power with Jena — all without checks or balances,” said GOP State Party Chair Kristi Burton Brown…

It takes a quantity of gall we do not possess for the chair of the Colorado Republican Party to accuse Democrats (or anyone else) of stoking “fear and distrust in local elections.” Donald Trump’s refusal to accept the outcome of the 2020 president election has accomplished more to “stoke fear and distrust” in elections than any event in modern American history. The psychological projection at work in this statement is so astoundingly perfect that it’s a struggle to respond–and that’s no accident.

That’s how “Big Lies” work.

And if that’s not bad enough, here’s Clerk Peters’ own Rep. Matt Soper kicking the Orwellian doublespeak into overdrive:

“Seeing a bill like this being run immediately, in response to what happened in Mesa County, is troubling,” [Pols emphasis] said Republican Rep. Matt Soper, who represents most of the county in the House. “Quite frankly (it) angers me because I don’t think we ought to be writing legislation for just one particular element that has occurred out in society, knowing that the law that’s currently on the books has been playing out.”

Soper said he’s open to voting for the bill, if it’s amended to address some of his concerns. But he also noted that it’s hard for Republicans to embrace a proposal when Democratic Secretary of State Jena Griswold is championing it.

“She’s made the office incredibly partisan, and it didn’t have to be that way,” he said. [Pols emphasis] “It makes the politics around this very difficult to vote for, even if reading through the bill there’s a lot of things that Republicans and Democrats could agree with here.”

As we know from the case proceeding against Elbert County’s similarly deluded clerk Dallas Schroeder, this bill is not just in response to “what happened in Mesa County.” The “one particular element” in society responsible for the continued spread of the “Big Lie” that Donald Trump should still be President constitutes a majority of Soper’s own party. As for the allegation that SoS Griswold has “made the office incredibly partisan,” that’s probably due to the fact that Griswold has spent three years on the front lines of the greatest assault on American democracy in our lifetimes, and it’s one side waging the assault.

Matt Soper’s side. Soper himself joined in the Dominion Voting Systems conspiracy theorizing while venting about losses in Grand Junction city elections. There’s no nice way to say this: Soper has become of the “bad actors” fellow Republican Matt Crane is talking about. And by attacking Griswold instead of the true bad actors in their own party, all of these Republicans from Kristi Burton Brown to SoS candidate Pam Anderson discredit themselves with general election voters.

Rarely in history have so many discredited people refused to just stop talking.