Former President Donald Trump won Mesa County, Colorado, by 28 points in last fall's election.
In Barry County, Michigan, he won by more than 32 points. And in Lander County, Nevada, his victory was in excess of 61 points.
Yet in each county, Republican officials have sought to further investigate those results and, in some cases, suggested they may not be accurate. That's despite no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 election there or elsewhere.
With denial of President Joe Biden's victory at the core of the pro-Trump movement, demands for partisan election investigations styled after the one authorized by Republicans in Arizona — focused in a county Biden won — have proliferated. Now, a push to revisit November's results is underway or being called for in at least nine counties Trump won by more than 24 points.
The trend is symptomatic of the increasingly entrenched idea among the Trump base that elections are rigged and not to be trusted — a lie Trump continues to vigorously promote and which has become a litmus test for GOP officials at all levels of government. A recent CNN poll found that nearly 6-in-10 Republicans say believing this false claim is important to their partisan identity.
Some county officials have taken increasingly irregular steps to probe the prior election while others face pressure at rowdy local government meetings from groups demanding such investigations. Experts say this is another flashing red light for the state of U.S. elections.
The growing trend of unorthodox election reviews "demonstrates that the Big Lie is getting bigger," Jena Griswold, a Democrat who serves as Colorado's secretary of state, told NBC News, referring to Trump's baseless and unceasing claims that massive fraud prevented him from winning a second term. "The threat to democracy is increasing."
