Microsoft announced this week that it is halting its financial support for Republicans in Congress who objected to the certification of Joe Biden’s electoral votes for the duration of the 2022 election cycle. In Congress, a full 147 Republicans supported the effort to block the certification of Biden’s electoral votes, which was based on the utterly false claim that the then-president-elect’s victory was the result of fraud. In fact, no court anywhere in the country ever even partially accepted the idea that systematic fraud was present in the 2020 presidential election.
Now, in a blog post, Microsoft says as follows:
‘[We] will suspend contributions for the duration of the 2022 election cycle to all members of Congress who voted to object to the certification of electors. We will also suspend contributions for the same period for state officials and organizations who supported such objections or suggested the election should be overturned.’
2. This next part is important. @Microsoft will also "suspend contributions for the same period for state officials and organizations who supported such objections or suggested the election should be overturned."https://t.co/r4Z4TjJUCe pic.twitter.com/V8yL9ciMED
— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) February 5, 2021
The conspiratorial fight against the election outcome had numerous supporters on the state level. Although it’s not immediately clear how Microsoft might go about defining support for the effort to block the formal certification of Biden’s victory, well over a dozen Republican state attorney generals from states across the country backed a lawsuit that sought the invalidation of Biden’s victories in four individual states. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected this lawsuit, but in other instances, state legislators nevertheless pushed the idea that the 2020 presidential election outcome was dubious and should be dealt with accordingly.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, had to issue a public fact-check in response to antics from Republican members of his own state’s legislature. Raffensperger is no liberal, but as he put it at one point, “Fake news is hard enough to combat when mainstream media outlets push it out, but when a small cadre of Georgia legislators do it, it’s a whole different story.” Those legislators once presented J. Hutton Pulitzer — who Raffensperger’s office characterized as a “failed treasure hunter” — as a central witness, but his claims of glaring vulnerabilities in electronic voting infrastructure were totally meritless. The poll pads, which are used for checking in voters and which Pulitzer claimed provided some kind of inroad for meddling with the rest of the system, are never even connected to the broader system to which they supposedly provided access for imaginary hackers. Fraud claims were a farce.
