Lying about 2020 fraud was just ‘a political game’ to one Republican

[Max Boot]

Don Bolduc is a patrolman on the police force of Pittsfield, N.H., population
4,100. But this is not the job he had hoped to be doing in February 2024.

In September 2022, he won the Republican primary for U.S. Senate in New
Hampshire, earning the right to face off against Sen. Maggie Hassan (D) in
November. He lost by a wider margin than polls had suggested, hence his
unexpected new career in law enforcement.

The Concord Monitor checked in on him last week. The conversation focused mostly
on Bolduc’s unusual employment trajectory but also explored a bit of his 2022
ambitions. And it was in that part of the conversation that Bolduc offered an
important insight.

When he was running in 2022, Bolduc gained national attention for his
inconsistent approach to a key issue: whether Donald Trump legitimately won the
2020 election.

In August, he told a cheering audience of Republican primary voters that “Trump
won the election.” In September, after winning that primary, he went on cable
news to say that “President Biden is the legitimate president of this country”
and that “the election was not stolen.”

Then he flipped back the other way. In a general election debate in October,
Bolduc suggested that there was, in fact, rampant fraud in his state.

“We need to make sure that school buses loaded with people at the polls don’t
come in and vote,” he said. Some in the audience chuckled. “You can laugh about
it,” he added, “but people in New Hampshire aren’t laughing about it.”

Pressed on the claim by the moderator — since it’s an old, unfounded assertion —
Bolduc insisted that this is what he had been hearing and, therefore, needed to
be addressed.

That was Candidate Bolduc. Speaking to the Monitor this week, Officer Bolduc
offered a slightly different perspective.

“I do believe there was fraud,” Bolduc told the reporter. “That’s something that
can’t be disputed, but at the end of the day, I played a political game, right?
So then I decided no more political games. I’m going to say what I honestly
believe, and that is the election wasn’t stolen.”

In fact, it cannot be disputed that there was fraud. There have been dozens of
people arrested around the country for having violated voting laws. A handful
were arrested in New Hampshire, too. But this in no way proves or even suggests
that the election was “stolen” — as Trump has so often claimed and as any
Republican seeking his party’s nomination in 2022 might have been tempted to claim.

As Bolduc was. He “played a political game,” elevating an assertion he didn’t
believe.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/02/21/bolduc-election-fraud-2020-republicans/

"Election fraud" / "stolen election" always and *only* was a political game.

There has never been a shred of evidence to support the lie/claim of
election-changing fraud, anywhere in the country. And don't lose sight of the
fact that 95%-plus of documented cases of election or vote fraud were committed
by Republiscums/QAnon.