New Mexico’s Republican Party is shocked, SHOCKED, that anyone would be upset about a group of “upstanding citizens” submitting their names as valid electors from New Mexico purporting to represent our state’s presidential election result in 2020 as having gone to Trump.
They created a Certificate of Ascertainment that names themselves as the official representatives of New Mexico for the Electoral College and that all of our state electors go to Trump as the winner of our Presidential Election in 2020.
In fact, New Mexicans voted for Joe Biden with 54.3% of the vote. Trump garnered only 43.5% of the vote. Joe Biden won by 10.8%, which is considered to be a landslide victory. Yet, these GOP fake electors submitted their own document that identically resembled the official state document – except that it did not contain the signature of the Governor, Secretary of State, or any other official signifying that theirs was the ACTUAL result.
Now, as Congress’ January 6 Committee begins to reveal their findings, these “upstanding citizens” are starting to feel the heat. The NMGOP is moving in to provide cover in an effort to defend the lawless actions of their “upstanding citizens”. Last week, the NMGOP published a statement regarding this aberration of our New Mexico election. We have no desire to reprint their misleading CYA attempt here, but the enterprising reader can find it easily using Google.
At the end of their “statement” about the false electors, they conclude with the following words:RPNM calls on Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver to speak up and tell the truth about the conversation that she had with the elector representative on Dec 14th. She knows laws were not broken, and we call on her to do the right thing.
While there is no surprise in reading the GOP call their current predicament “a witch-hunt”, nor does it shock the senses to read outright falsehoods penned by the GOP, like “This entire media blitz surrounding the electors has been orchestrated by Democrats”, as if Democrats owned, operated, or benefited directly from giant media companies, the way the GOP does from Fox News.
Stating that “The harassment of law-abiding and upstanding, civic-minded people in our community should not be tolerated in a free society” was a bit refreshing, in as much as we learn that these five signatories of a fake document that attempts to disenfranchise New Mexicans who chose Joe Biden in a landslide victory are now feeling enough “harassment” that they forced their own party to publish a statement in their defense.
Even their excuse, that these 5 rogue republicans only submitted a false document to congress in case “there were a turnover in the election,” is so far afield that it is believable, since the GOP seems to only favor falsehoods that are incredulous in the extreme, like this one. After all, assuming that a court in New Mexico could find enough fraud in the 2020 election that it would disqualify almost 100,000 votes and make Trump the victor is just crazy enough to appeal to the NMGOP.
No, none of this remarkable statement by the NMGOP surprises enough to generate more than a modest chuckle over coffee and huevos rancheros. However, at the end of their diatribe, the statement takes a not-so-subtle jab at one of our favored elected Democrats: Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver.
In the final lines of the GOP’s defense of the indefensible, they remark that the SOS should “tell the truth about the conversation she had with the elector representative on Dec 14.”
Before you fall out of your seat from being gobsmacked, let’s hear what Toulouse Oliver’s office had to say in response:In a statement to a reporter for the Albuquerque Journal, Alex Curtas, a spokesman for Toulouse Oliver, said the only conversation Toulouse Oliver had with Republicans about the electors was a text exchange on Dec. 14, 2020, with Anissa Ford-Tinnin, a former executive director of the state Republican Party and one of the five Republican electors who signed the document.
Curtas said Ford-Tinnin asked that the GOP electors be allowed into a meeting at the state Capitol that day, when the state’s electoral votes were awarded to Biden.Curtas said Toulouse Oliver texted Ford-Tinnin that the group couldn’t enter the building and that was the end of the conversation.
“It seems (New Mexico Republicans) are implying that Maggie (Toulouse Oliver) gave them some sort of go-ahead or permission (to send in the certificate), and that is absolutely not the case,” Curtas said.Ah, the voice of truth is so easy to hear. Indeed, we already knew that the GOP wanted to hold their unauthorized meeting of their own fake electors inside the State Capitol since that is one of the legal stipulations required for the Certificate of Ascertainment to be legal. (It also has to have the signature of the Governor and Secretary of State, as well as reflect the results of the election and contain verified and legal electors among other legal requirements, none of which seems to have mattered to the GOP. Perhaps they just wanted in out of the cold.)
These words tacked on to the end of the GOP statement actually say nothing. It does, however, imply that our lauded Secretary is withholding crucial evidence that SHE was complicit in their submission of fake electors, that SHE alone knows for a fact that “no laws were broken” (though she is not the Attorney General), and that she must “do the right thing”, which seems to be that she should defend the possibly illegal activity of the GOP as though she has any power to do so.
Once again, the NMGOP is making every effort to cover for certainly unethical and possibly illegal acts on their behalf, provide talking points for their cronies to parrot when asked by citizens and journalists about this attempt to throw out New Mexican’s electoral will, and malign the character of Democrats and elected officials who are working hard on behalf of New Mexicans and upholding the truth and the rule of law.
Though the depth of depravity that the NMGOP will descend to in order to no longer surprise New Mexicans, defaiming the good character of an honest and respected public servant like our Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver, is too much to be tolerated.
We must all denounce this misleading and insulting lie about someone we know to be above reproach.
NMGOP, stop maligning the character of our elected public servants. Run for office, campaign on your ideas about governance, work to support the citizens of our great state, but do not impugn the integrity of our elected leaders like Maggie Toulouse Oliver without a clear accusation and supporting evidence.
I call on the NMGOP to immediately retract your statement suggesting impropriety on the part of our Secretary of State for being false, misleading, and working against the good of the people of New Mexico.
