Rep. Eli Crane (R-AZ) compared the Republican Party's planned army of poll watchers for the November election to SEAL Team 6 snipers, according to Rolling Stone.
Crane, himself a former Navy SEAL and winning "Shark Tank" contestant, declared that poll watchers would be “boots on the ground” to counteract a “desperate” opposition which will “do whatever it takes to hold on to power.”
A staunch ally of former President Donald Trump first elected to a redistricted Arizona congressional seat in 2022, Crane is an unrepentant election denier who has proclaimed the 2020 election was full of "massive amounts of fraud." There is no evidence of any significant degree of fraud.
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He has also pushed other conspiracy theories, most recently that “people in our government” were involved in the assassination attempt on Trump in Pennsylvania, and apologized for using the phrase "colored people" while introducing a congressional amendment to bar racial sensitivity training in the military.
Arizona has been a hot battlefront for the MAGA election denial movement. Following President Joe Biden's narrow victory in 2020, the GOP state Senate commissioned a third party firm, Cyber Ninjas, to conduct a secretive "audit" of the results that failed to follow any regular election recount procedures; eventually, that investigation failed to turn up any meaningful irregularities. This week saw the GOP nominate as its Senate candidate Kari Lake, a former Phoenix news anchor who ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2022 and has filed a series of lawsuits seeking to have her declared the winner anyway.
The Republican National Committee, under new Trump-approved leadership, has shifted its focus from ground operations to poll observers. This comes as Trump has urged GOP leadership to preemptively begin crafting legal challenges to the election, ready to dispute any results that don't break in the former president's favor.
