Five vocal fake electors
The most publicly vocal of the fake electors, Kelli Ward called
the group the “true electors,” and provided play-by-play updates on the Arizona Republican Party’s YouTube. Falsely saying the state’s electoral votes were “contested,” even though legal challenges to the count had been dismissed, she urged supporters to call on Arizona’s state legislature to decertify the state’s results.
“We believe our votes are the ones that will count on January 6th,”
she said in one interview on conservative talk radio, two days after signing the fake documents.
Ward’s comments were echoed
in tweets by her husband, Michael, also an elector and a gadfly in Arizona politics
known for spreading conspiracy theories. In a post sharing a White House memo that urged Pence to reject the results from states that submitted fake electors, Michael Ward hinted at retribution for Republicans who failed to act.
“My Holiday prayer is that every backstabbing ‘Republican’ gets paid back for their failure to act come Jan 20th!” he
wrote in a tweet on December 22.
Another prominent elector was the RNC Committeeman Bowyer, who on his Twitter account pushed false election claims and conspiracies.
“It will be up to the President of the Senate and congress to decide,” Bowyer
tweeted after signing the fake electors documents.
In repeated comments Bowyer declared the decision would come down to Pence.
“It’s pretty simple: The President of the United States Senate (VP) has the awesome power of acknowledging a specific envelope of electoral votes when there are two competing slates— or none at all,” wrote Bowyer in a
December 28 tweet.
“We don’t live in a Democracy. The presidential election isn’t democratic,”
he added when receiving pushback.
A spokesperson for Bowyer said that he was simply responding to a question from a user on what next steps looked like and maintained that there was precedent for a competing slate of electors.
Bowyer urged action in the lead up to the joint session of Congress on January 6.
“Be a modern Son of Liberty today,” he
said late in
the morning of January 6 – a post
he deleted following the riot at the Capitol.
The spokesperson for Bowyer said he had not directly been contacted by Mayes’s office or the DOJ.
Newly elected state representative Hoffman sent a
two-page letter to Pence on January 5, 2021, asking the vice president to order that Arizona’s electors not be decided by the popular vote of the citizens, but instead by the members of the state legislature.
“It is in this late hour, with urgency, that I respectfully ask that you delay the certification of election results for Arizona during the joint session of Congress on January 6, 2021, and seek clarification from the Arizona state legislature as to which slate of electors are proper and accurate,”
wrote Hoffman.
In
interviews, Hoffman repeatedly argued no electors be sent at all because “we don’t have certainty in the outcome of our election,” and to contest Democrat electors if they were sent.
Then-state Rep. Kern, who lost his seat in the 2020 election, spent his final weeks in office
sharing “stop the steal” content and
participating in their rallies. He said he was “honored” to be a Trump elector.
“On January 6th, vice President Mike Pence gets a choice on which electors he’s going to choose,” Kern told the Epoch Times
in an interview in December.
“There is no president elect until January 6th,” he added.
Kern hadn’t changed his tune in an interview with CNN.
“Why, why would you think alternate electors are a lie?,” Kern said.
Kern
repeatedly promoted the January 6, 2021, rally preceding the Capitol riot. Kern was in DC that day and shared a photo from the Capitol grounds as rioters gathered on the steps of the Capitol.
“In DC supporting
@realDonaldTrump and
@CNN @FoxNews @MSNBC are spewing lies again. #truth,” he wrote in a
tweet.
Later Kern
was seen in a restricted area of the Capitol steps during the riot. There is no indication he was violent, and he has not been charged with any crime.
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