This GOP secretary of state candidate has questioned disabled Americans’ right to vote

09 August 2022

This Tuesday, August 9, Republican voters in Minnesota will nominate a secretary of state candidate — and the far-right MAGA Republican endorsed by the Minnesota GOP is Kim Crockett, former vice president and general counsel of the think tank Center of the American Experiment. Crockett has been controversial for a variety of reasons, including questioning whether or not the disabled should have the right to vote.

HuffPost recently unearthed some audio from 2020 in which Crockett told a talk show host, “The Minnesota Supreme Court ruled that indeed, you can help an unlimited number of people vote if they are disabled or can’t read or speak English — which raises the question: Should they be voting? Um, we can talk about that another time.”

In response to an article by HuffPost’s Travis Waldron published on August 5, Crockett denied she was questioning whether or not the disabled should be allowed to vote during that 2020 interview. Crockett, on August 6, tweeted that her remarks were “completely taken out of context.”

But in fact, Crockett — who is trying to unseat incumbent Democratic Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon — has a long history of saying controversial things, as both Waldron and Mother Jones’ Julia Lurie have pointed out.

Lurie, in an article published on August 7, explains, “As HuffPo notes, this isn’t the only time Crockett has made bigoted remarks. She made headlines in 2019 when, as the head of a right-wing think tank, she spoke to the New York Times about Somali resettlement efforts in Minnesota. ‘I think of America, the great assimilator, as a rubber band, but with this — we’re at the breaking point,’ Crockett told the Times. ‘These aren’t people coming from Norway, let’s put it that way. These people are very visible.’ Earlier this year, at the state’s Republican convention, Crockett played an anti-Semitic campaign video depicting George Soros, the Jewish billionaire and frequent donor to liberal causes, as a puppet master controlling Simon, who is Jewish.”

If Crockett wins the GOP nomination and defeats Simon in the general election in November, the person in charge of administering elections in Minnesota will be someone who has falsely claimed that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump.

Lurie notes, “Crockett is among a number of GOP-endorsed promoters of the Big Lie — the claim that the 2020 election was stolen — who are running for secretary of state positions in swing states across the country. These individuals, including Nevada’s Jim Merchant, Arizona’s Mark Finchem, and Michigan’s Kristina Karamo, could play pivotal roles in determining the outcome of the next election. All three have been endorsed by the ultimate Big Lie champion and likely 2024 candidate, Donald Trump.”

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