AUSTIN, TEXAS: Joe Rogan, a prominent podcaster, has given new life to Kari Lake's charges of electoral fraud in her failed 2022 election bid. On Thursday's episode of his podcast, on August 3, Rogan repeated a series of debunked claims about the integrity of Arizona's elections system made by Lake after her defeat in the 2022 gubernatorial race.
Rogan includied claims of concentrated voting machine errors in Republican-leaning areas of the state that had previously been disproven in fact checks by outlets such as the Associated Press.
'Voting machines can be f**ked with'
He also lent credibility to the case Lake and her campaign laid out in the aftermath of her roughly 17,000 vote loss to Democrat Katie Hobbs. Lake has continued to push the debunked claims despite several court defeats as she has been unable to prove her allegations. According to Lake, the election was systematically "stolen" from her using a rigged system of faulty machines and potentially forged or invalid signatures on the envelopes of submitted absentee ballots.
Rogan concurred, but also failed to provide specific evidence. Only that he thought it was 'doable'. "I don't think [the amount of fraud] is zero," said Rogan. "I think we could all agree it's not zero. And we know that these voting machines can be f**ked with."
He went on say, "All that Kari Lake stuff in Arizona they tried to dismiss, it doesn't look like that's invalid. It looks like there's real fraud there. It looks like there's some real shenanigans there. At the very least there were voting machines that weren't working properly. And it seems very suspicious that a lot of them were in Republican areas." Rogan further added, "There's a lot of shenanigans. And I think there's coordinated efforts to make sure that certain people get elected. I don't know how far they go, but I know it's not zero."
A Twitter user posted Rogan's clip saying, "“We know that these voting machines can be f*cked with.” Joe Rogan promotes another conspiracy theory, that Trump and Kari Lake will love."
'Our election was stolen in broad daylight'
According to a database managed by the conservative Heritage Foundation, Arizona saw seven convictions for voter fraud in the 2022 election cycle, mostly related to older elections. However, Associated Press and independent review found no statistically significant disparity between Republican and Democratic precincts affected by malfunctioning machines. Machine error was the primary factor for ballot printer failures, not human error or outside interference.
Lake rejoiced after Rogan supported her claims. She tweeted saying, "Our election was stolen in broad daylight. Even @joerogan knows it. That's why I'm traveling across the country advocating for election reforms that will ensure what happened to Arizonans never happens to anyone again."
Rogan, a podcast host, has faced scrutiny for his conservative views, including unproven claims about US intelligence agencies' involvement in riots and a conspiracy theory about Trump-supporting protestor Ray Epps being a government-recruited catalyst. Rogan's podcast has gained attention for his appeals to conservative talking points.
