Take Mike Lee’s Deranged Posts Seriously

Mike and Yikes

Public confidence in elections is a foundational requirement for a constitutional republic. Now, more than ever, we must have confidence and trust in Utah’s elections. . . .

The election systems we built here in Utah work well because of a core tenant [sic] of the U.S. Constitution: federalism. When appropriately applied, the division of power between the federal and state governments means decisions that directly impact us are made by people closest to us in state and local government.

United States Senator Mike Lee coauthored the above for Deseret News on October 5, 2022.

I agree wholeheartedly with the senator’s argument: Utah has reasonable election laws and competent election officials, and the public can trust its election results. Mass interference in Utah’s vote is indeed “virtually impossible,” as Lee put it a bit lower in the piece. And if you don’t like the results of a particular election, you can always work harder to win the next one.

But Lee is now making somewhat different arguments than he did in 2022. He regularly posts that non-citizens will steal our elections if we don’t require voters to provide documented proof of citizenship—something Utah didn’t require for Lee’s 2010, 2016, or 2022 elections.¹ He also now says that secure elections require photo identification—but the vast majority of Utah ballots are verified by signature matching, not photo ID. He tells us to be suspicious of mail ballots. But Utah is an all-mail state. And he is suspicious of states that don’t finish counting ballots within forty-eight hours of Election Day—a deadline that Utah failed to hit in 2024.

There’s nothing novel about a flip-flopping politician. Lee is already famous for making a habit of turnabout, including on Trump’s morals (“If anyone spoke to my wife, or my daughter, or my mother, or any of my five sisters the way Mr. Trump has spoken to women, I wouldn’t hire that person”), Trump’s lies (“We can get into the fact that he accused my best friend’s father of conspiring to kill JFK”), and Trump’s disregard for basic law (“I’d like some assurances that he is going to be a vigorous defender for the U.S. Constitution”).

But Lee hasn’t simply flip-flopped on whether this or that aspect of Trump’s character should be open to criticism; he’s belly-flopped into the deep end of the pool of Trump-style election conspiracism. Since March 16, Lee has posted or reposted content about elections and election-related legislation on his personal X account at least 300 times, including 31 times on March 20 alone. God might rest on Sundays, but Mike Lee spent Sunday, March 29, encouraging you to “ask your senators why the SAVE America Act hasn’t passed yet.”

As for the SAVE America Act—which the Bipartisan Policy Center summarizes as a bill that would require “voters to provide documentary proof of citizenship at the time of registration and a photo ID at the time of voting”—Lee is an obsessive. He has explicitly framed the legislation as the only hope Republicans have of maintaining control of Congress. And recently, he warned that if the SAVE America Act isn’t passed, Gavin Newsom could become president, with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as his VP and Michelle Obama (???) as his secretary of state. The AI-generated image (the man loves few things more than spreading AI-generated content around) labels Zohran Mamdani as Newsom’s attorney general, though the picture clearly does not depict the New York City mayor, and it warned that this would be the “2028 White House A