Reprinted with permission from American Independent

As polling grows grimmer for him, California gubernatorial recall candidate Larry Elder is baselessly warning of"election fraud" — parroting the same lies former President Donald Trump and his GOP defenders told in the wake of the 2020 contest.

"I believe that there might very well be shenanigans, as it were in the 2020 election," Elder, currently the GOP's top candidate in the race, told reporters on Wednesday, after he cast his recall ballot for himself.

Elder's comments came amid a spate of polling showing that Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom has opened up a wide lead and is heavily favored to hold on to his position — despite the Republican effort to remove him.

A Suffolk University poll released Wednesday found 58 percent of California voters want to keep Newsom, while 41 percent want to remove him, giving Newsom a 17-point advantage. According to the FiveThirtyEight polling average, voters want to keep Newsom as governor by a 12-point spread.

Election handicapping outlets also say Newsom is the favorite, with Inside Elections rating it a "likely Democratic" contest and the Cook Political Report rating it a "lean Democratic" race.

If voters choose to keep Newsom as governor in the recall election, the race for who will replace him won't matter; however, if Republicans manage to oust Newsom, Elder is the leading GOP candidate in the race.

The Suffolk University poll showed Elder having the support of 39 percent of voters, with "undecided" taking the second-place spot at 28 percent. No other major candidate received more than five percent support.

Elder has echoed many of former President Donald Trump's voter fraud lies, questioning the results of the 2020 election with the same kind of rhetoric repeated by Trump and his defenders both before and after the election and the riot by his supporters, stoked by such lies, at the U.S. Capitol on January 6.

"The 2020 election, in my opinion, was full of shenanigans," Elder said in a Fox News interview on Sunday. "And my fear is they're going to try that in this election right here and recall."

Elder also said Wednesday that he's gearing up to file lawsuits if he loses.

"We have a voter integrity project, we have lawyers all set up all ready to go to file lawsuits in a timely fashion," Elder said.

He added falsely that the reason for the failure of the many lawsuits filed by Trump supporters and lawyers in an effort to overturn the 2020 election was that they were "filed too late."

In fact, the lawsuits failed because Trump's legal team and others who filed them provided no evidence that there was fraud, with judges dressing down the lawyers who filed the suits for their efforts to undo the democratic process.

In Pennsylvania, Trump-appointed Judge Stephanos Bibas of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit wrote in a decision in one of the cases, "Free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy. Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here."

And a number of lawyers who filed lawsuits to overturn the 2020 election, including conspiracy theorist lawyer Sidney Powell, have been sanctioned by a federal judge and face further disciplinary actions.

As of Tuesday, a week before the recall election in California, nearly 6.2 million ballots had already been returned, according to political handicapper Ryan Matsumoto, with Democratic voters far outpacing Republicans in the number of returned ballots.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.