‘No more audits’: Republican group taunts Trump with Times Square billboard

Ad campaign launched ‘to denounce sham election audits that delegitimise our democratic process’

A GOP group has put up multiple billboards taunting former President Donald Trump and his supporters for their continued efforts to get the 2020 election overturned.

One of the billboards, from the group Republicans for Voting Rights, is in New York City’s Times Square and says: “Trump Lost. No more ‘audits’.”

On Wednesday, the Republican Accountability Project tweeted that they have “launched a billboard campaign across the country in response to reckless Republican calls for sham audits of the 2020 election”.

The “billboards will run in Georgia, Florida, Texas, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Michigan to denounce sham election audits that delegitimise our democratic process,” they added.

Republicans for Voting Rights says on their website that the campaign will cost a quarter of a million dollars and will “call on state lawmakers to reject frivolous audits of the 2020 election results”.

The “Trump lost” billboards will be seen in “major markets” in states where discussions of having audits of the 2020 election results are ongoing.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said in a statement on 12 November 2020: “The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history.”

Mr Trump made the baseless claim that the 2020 election was stolen yet again when he called into a campaign event for Republican Virginia gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin on Wednesday.

“We won in 2016. We won in 2020 – the most corrupt election in the history of our country, probably one of the most corrupt anywhere. But we’re gonna win it again,” he said.

Mr Trump issued a statement a few hours earlier, saying: “If we don’t solve the Presidential Election Fraud of 2020 (which we have thoroughly and conclusively documented), Republicans will not be voting in ’22 or ’24.”

But Mr Trump’s claims of fraud is not borne out by the evidence – an audit of the 2020 votes in Maricopa County, Arizona organised and led by Republicans recently showed that President Joe Biden did win, with his vote share actually increasing according to the heavily criticised review of votes.

Part of the audit in Maricopa County was funded by donations from Trump supporters, but the Associated Press reported in July that taxpayers in the county will now have to shell out $3m on new voting machines because the ones used in the 2020 election were compromised after being handled by companies not approved to be in control of such equipment.

Republicans in Wisconsin have budgeted $680,000 of taxpayer’s funds for an audit of the state’s 2020 results, according to the AP, and similar GOP efforts in Texas, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania could also lead to taxpayers funding election results reviews.

Bill Kristol, one of the directors of the Republican Accountability Project, told CNN on Monday that “we have a problem of a whole political party signing onto a lie and acting on behalf of that lie going forward”.