After President Biden was sworn in, election denialism continued to simmer in New Mexico, where the far-right faction of the GOP has kept the misinformation and conspiracy theories alive on social media, and local officials have helped amplify the lies.
- New Mexico was one of seven states where Republicans submitted alternate slates of electors for the 2020 presidential contest despite Joe Biden winning the state by almost 100,000 votes.
- In mid December as the New Mexico fake electors met to sign false documents, the Trump campaign filed a federal lawsuit against the secretary of state over the state’s use of drop boxes to collect ballots, one of a series of measures that many states resorted to during the 2020 election to enhance public safety in the first year of the pandemic. The campaign subsequently dropped the lawsuit in January 2021.
- Following Trump’s loss, New Mexico’s GOP fully embraced the narrative of a stolen election, attempting to impound ballots in Bernalillo County, promoting the fake electors meeting of Republican-appointed electors at the state capitol, and supporting both the Trump campaign’s lawsuit against the secretary of state and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s Texas v. Pennsylvania election lawsuit before the Supreme Court.
- Just prior to the June 2022 primaries, Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver (D) announced a new Rumor vs. Reality page on the office’s official website to challenge ongoing lies and confusion about election security, voting, and how ballots are counted in New Mexico.
- After the June 2022 primary, election commissioners in Otero County initially refused to certify the results, citing debunked conspiracy theories about voting machines. The state Supreme Court later overruled the commissioners and ordered the county to complete its certification process.
- One of those county commissioners, Couy Griffin, founded a group called Cowboys for Trump and participated in the mob attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6. “I wasn’t part of an insurrection,” he has said. “I exercised my constitutional right to peacefully protest.” After Griffin was convicted of trespassing on Capitol grounds, a state judge removed him from office in September 2022 and barred him from holding any state or federal elected office in the future.
- As Santa Fe election denier John Block was participating in the march to the Capitol in D.C. on January 6, he posted a photo of the crowd with the message: “The battle has just begun. Stand up and fight like hell, patriots.” In November 2022, he was elected to represent District 51 in the New Mexico legislature and is running for his second term in 2024.