Former President Barack Obama called the actions of his immediate successor during the 2020 election “a whole bunch of hooey” and cautioned people would witness a “further delegitimizing of our democracy” if Republican lawmakers continue to push their election reform policy agenda.
The warning came as Obama spoke during a virtual fundraiser for the National Democratic Redistricting Committee on Monday. He criticized Trump for his opposition to certifying President Joe Biden’s victory buffeted by his constant barrage of voter fraud claims in the 2020 election, according to a clip of the virtual meeting played on CNN’s Don Lemon Tonight.
“In this election, what we saw was my successor, the former president, violate that core tenet that you count the votes and then declare a winner, and fabricate and make up a whole bunch of hooey,” Obama said.
To this day, former President Donald Trump insists the 2020 election was “rigged” against him even though legal challenges in court and government entities, including his own Justice Department, denied seeing any evidence of widespread fraud.
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Shortly after the election, Trump’s campaign filed a lawsuit to block the Pennsylvania election results that was ultimately rejected by a U.S. district judge.
“If we had to repeat in future elections in which, let’s say, the Republican-controlled Pennsylvania Legislature decided, ‘We’re not going to certify all those votes coming out of Philadelphia because we think that those urban votes are shady,’ imagine what would have happened,” Obama said. “We would have had a worse constitutional crisis than we did.”
Obama said he is confident the Senate will have another vote on H.R. 1, a Democratic-backed election and voting bill that failed in the upper chamber last week with Republicans blocking it.
Beyond the allegations of 2020 election fraud, GOP lawmakers nationwide have pushed legislation they say will make future contests more secure, while Democrats have argued reforms would infringe on voter access.
Georgia made headlines this year when it implemented a sweeping Republican-backed election reform law that the Justice Department announced a lawsuit last week, with Attorney General Merrick Garland alleging the voter laws could restrict the rights of black Georgians.
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“If we don’t stop these kinds of efforts now, [what] we are going to see is more and more contested elections — contested not in the sense of healthy competition but contested in terms of who wins, who loses,” Obama said. “We are going to see a further delegitimizing of our democracy.”
