Reprinted with permission from American Independent

A study published on Thursday of support for the "Stop the Steal" movement found nearly half of Republican voters believe their state legislatures should simply be able to overturn the results of elections.

The report, published by the Voter Study Group research collaborative, finds 46 percent of Republican voters believing "that it was appropriate for 'Republican legislators in states won by Joe Biden to try to assign their state's electoral votes to Donald Trump.'"

However, just 23 percent of Americans overall believe lawmakers should have the power to overturn an election, a dichotomy the report's author, Lee Drutman, says could pose a challenge for Republicans in future elections.

"As Republican states continue to restrict the franchise around manufactured concerns of 'electoral integrity,' and Republican leaders both local and national work to purge the party of those who accept the legitimacy of the 2020 election results, there are lingering questions about whether relitigating the 2020 election is a viable path forward for the GOP," Drutman writes.

The report also finds that nearly 62 percent of Republican voters don't think Biden is the legitimate president, and two-thirds believe the lie that Trump really won, figures that indicate how hard it will be for Republicans to wrest control of their party from those who are pushing voter fraud lies.

"It's clear that some Republicans accept the legitimacy of the 2020 election, are eager to move past Trump, have more moderate positions on race and immigration, and have at least a degree of acceptance of Democrats," Drutman wrote. "But they are clearly a minority within the party — and, at this point, there is not a clear path for such a faction to retake control of the Republican Party."

The results come as former President Donald Trump continues to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election, telling the Christian Broadcasting Network on Monday, "I never admitted defeat. ... No, I never, the word is 'concede,' [and] I have not conceded."

Earlier in June Trump was reported to have been telling those around him that he plans to be reinstated as president in August.

The new report is the latest to demonstrate that the lies Trump and other Republican officials have told about voter fraud have been internalized by GOP voters.

A Politico/Morning Consult poll in early June found that 17 percent of Republican voters believe the lie that Trump will be reinstated.

And a CBS News poll in May found that two-thirds of Republican voters, or 67 percent, believe that President Joe Biden did not legitimately win the election.

However, multiple reviews have found that there was no fraud in the 2020 election, including a report released Wednesday by the Republican-controlled Michigan state Senate, which debunked voter fraud lies pushed by Trump and his supporters.

Still, Republican state lawmakers across the country have used those lies to pass voter suppression legislation across the country, some of which gives them more control over election administration, provoking fears that Republicans will overturn results in majority-Democratic areas.

Republican lawmakers in Texas tried to pass a law that would make it easier for election judges to overturn results based on nebulous claims of "fraud."

That bill failed after Democrats walked out of the state Senate to deny their Republican colleagues a quorum, stopping the bill from passing just before the legislative session expired.

GOP Gov. Greg Abbott has called a special session of the Legislature to begin on July 8 to take up the bill again.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.