Take Mike Lee’s Deranged Posts Seriously
The senator from Utah is the SAVE America Act’s most enthusiastic proponent in the upper chamber—and he could soon become our next attorney general. Uh-oh.
Mike and Yikes
Public confidence in elections is a foundational requirement for a constitutional republic. Now, more than ever, we must have confidence and trust in Utah’s elections. . . .
The election systems we built here in Utah work well because of a core tenant [sic] of the U.S. Constitution: federalism. When appropriately applied, the division of power between the federal and state governments means decisions that directly impact us are made by people closest to us in state and local government.
United States Senator Mike Lee coauthored the above for Deseret News on October 5, 2022.
I agree wholeheartedly with the senator’s argument: Utah has reasonable election laws and competent election officials, and the public can trust its election results. Mass interference in Utah’s vote is indeed “virtually impossible,” as Lee put it a bit lower in the piece. And if you don’t like the results of a particular election, you can always work harder to win the next one.
But Lee is now making somewhat different arguments than he did in 2022. He regularly posts that non-citizens will steal our elections if we don’t require voters to provide documented proof of citizenship—something Utah didn’t require for Lee’s 2010, 2016, or 2022 elections.1 He also now says that secure elections require photo identification—but the vast majority of Utah ballots are verified by signature matching, not photo ID. He tells us to be suspicious of mail ballots. But Utah is an all-mail state. And he is suspicious of states that don’t finish counting ballots within forty-eight hours of Election Day—a deadline that Utah failed to hit in 2024.
There’s nothing novel about a flip-flopping politician. Lee is already famous for making a habit of turnabout, including on Trump’s morals (“If anyone spoke to my wife, or my daughter, or my mother, or any of my five sisters the way Mr. Trump has spoken to women, I wouldn’t hire that person”), Trump’s lies (“We can get into the fact that he accused my best friend’s father of conspiring to kill JFK”), and Trump’s disregard for basic law (“I’d like some assurances that he is going to be a vigorous defender for the U.S. Constitution”).
But Lee hasn’t simply flip-flopped on whether this or that aspect of Trump’s character should be open to criticism; he’s belly-flopped into the deep end of the pool of Trump-style election conspiracism. Since March 16, Lee has posted or reposted content about elections and election-related legislation on his personal X account at least 300 times, including 31 times on March 20 alone. God might rest on Sundays, but Mike Lee spent Sunday, March 29, encouraging you to “ask your senators why the SAVE America Act hasn’t passed yet.”
As for the SAVE America Act—which the Bipartisan Policy Center summarizes as a bill that would require “voters to provide documentary proof of citizenship at the time of registration and a photo ID at the time of voting”—Lee is an obsessive. He has explicitly framed the legislation as the only hope Republicans have of maintaining control of Congress. And recently, he warned that if the SAVE America Act isn’t passed, Gavin Newsom could become president, with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as his VP and Michelle Obama (???) as his secretary of state. The AI-generated image (the man loves few things more than spreading AI-generated content around) labels Zohran Mamdani as Newsom’s attorney general, though the picture clearly does not depict the New York City mayor, and it warned that this would be the “2028 White House Administration” even though the next president won’t take office until January 2029. But accuracy isn’t really a concern when sharing stuff like this.
These posts and the obsessions they signal are bad enough coming from a sitting U.S. senator. But they could soon become even more alarmingly consequential, because Trump is reportedly considering Lee to step into the just-vacated role of attorney general.
Lee has shrugged off the idea of running the Justice Department. But that’s just the sort of thing politicians are trained to do right up until they stop shrugging and take the job.
Should Lee end up becoming AG, the implications for how we conduct our midterm elections could be serious. Federal law enforcement resources could be diverted away from national security, financial fraud, or drug trafficking to instead once again investigate the widely dismissed allegations of outcome-altering fraud in the 2020 election—the same allegations that couldn’t be corroborated by Bondi, Trump’s first-term AG Bill Barr, Trump’s private investigators, Dinesh D’Souza, MyPillow’s Mike Lindell, or any of the other fraud hunters.
As attorney general, Lee would also have a far bigger audience for his steady stream of election lies. On March 22, 2026, for argumentative purposes, he seemed to imagine a scenario in which all “Red States” had gleefully given their complete voter registration databases to the Department of Homeland Security to help them sniff out illegal voters on their rolls.2 But no states have directly shared voter information with DHS. Some states have agreed to share (or already shared) voter information with the Department of Justice, but this is true of only a dozen states—and it is not true of Alabama, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Nevada, South Carolina, or, yes, Lee’s own Utah. DOJ has sued thirty states for detailed voter rolls, red states included. So far, the federal government has not won any of these cases, and a number of them have already been dismissed.
On March 23, Lee posted that Democrats “have NO IDEA how common or rare [non-citizen voting is] because the status quo makes knowing that impossible.” But it is possible to know. Two months earlier, election officials in Utah (again, Lee’s home state) thoroughly searched the state’s 2.1 million registered voters. They found one non-citizen on the voter rolls (and not for nothing, but that one non-citizen had never voted). Idaho, Louisiana, Michigan, Georgia, Montana, and others have also recently searched for non-citizens, yielding similarly minuscule numbers of illegitimate voters.
In January, Lee suggested that Virginia doesn’t use paper ballots (it does). And he previously claimed that it’s “illegal to show your ID at a voting location in California” (it’s not).
Those are just a sampling of the ravings to which I responded online when he wrote them. I felt obligated to try and do so because I voted for Lee in his first U.S. Senate run in 2010 and because I admired his dad, former solicitor general Rex Lee, who died in the 1990s. And, dang it, I’ve always just thought that Mormons are less inclined to lie than the rest of us, so if I just gave Sen. Lee the facts, perhaps I could disabuse him of his baseless notions about the security of our elections.
But now I realize correcting the falsehoods I see in Lee’s timeline is a pointless task. I can’t keep up with even a fraction of his lies.
I do take some solace in knowing that his posts now seem as pathetic as they do nefarious. It seems unlikely that the SAVE America Act will pass, and according to reporting from Politico, Lee’s tactics have made him highly unpopular with his Republican colleagues who see his hyper-online activism as “a self-serving attempt” at juicing his own celebrity. As one unnamed Republican senator put it, Lee’s goal is simply “the clicks.” They added that “he has almost no self-awareness.”
Right now, Lee is Congress’s election-obsessed iPad kid, the enfant terrible of the upper chamber whose real power is limited. But if you put the same guy in charge of 9,200 attorneys at the Department of Justice, the election lies of “@BasedMikeLee” start to look a lot scarier.
Stephen Richer is the former elected recorder of Maricopa County, Arizona. He is now CEO of Republic Affairs and a fellow of the Cato Institute.
That said, new requirements were just signed into state law that will limit Utah voters to participating in federal elections if they fail to prove their citizenship.
That’s one read of this post, at least. But he could also be relaying something in earnest that he heard or saw online without getting clear on the details. It’s always a bit hard to tell with Lee.
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Why isn’t Mitt Romney speaking out about his former colleague? Senator Lee is delusional about voting fraud. “Don’t confuse me with the facts!” Seems to be his mantra. He may be too far gone down this particular rabbit hole to ever make a correction.
Stephen, great to see your byline! Good stuff, and I hope we see more from you.