2020 election denial is on the ballot in New Mexico this year. These are the candidates.
Running against election integrity in New Mexico did not start with Donald Trump.
U.S. Rep. Yvette Herrell’s first run for the House, in 2018, foreshadowed the 2020 “Big Lie” by claiming the election against Democrat Torres Small was fraudulent and she was the rightful winner.
Many New Mexico Republicans have since embraced the "Big Lie."
A prominent group of the state's Republican electors submitted a bogus election certificate to the National Archives proclaiming Trump the winner despite Biden having won the state by nearly 100,000 votes and 11 percentage points.
State chairman Steve Pearce ― a former congressman from Herrell's district — entertained election conspiracy theories on his own podcast while the party threw its support behind a Texas lawsuit seeking to overturn certification of Biden's wins in four states.
A Republican county commissioner, Couy Griffin, who was convicted of entering a restricted area at the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6 insurrection, survived a recall election but a judge ordered his removal from office. Griffin told the court he was there that day to press Vice President Mike Pence not to certify the election result.
And the woman running to oversee New Mexico's elections has said 2020 was a "coup" and suggested Biden has a body double.
Here are the actions and false claims made by her and other election deniers on this year's ballot.
U.S. Rep. Yvette Herrell
Bio: Herrell, 58, is a first-term Congresswoman, former state legislator and Realtor.
Actions: The lone Republican in New Mexico’s five-member delegation, Herrell objected to counting electoral votes for Joe Biden from Arizona and Pennsylvania following the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
"The Constitution gives states legislators, not state executives or judges, the sole authority to determine how their state selects presidential electors," Herrell said in a speech on the House floor, arguing that in Pennsylvania and other states' "rules and regulations were changed by executive fiat or judicial edict."
Herrell's communication director did not respond to queries for this story.
Herrell cast doubt on New Mexico's election integrity in her initial, unsuccessful House run, in 2018.
Her campaign impounded and inspected absentee ballots from that election, which had strongly favored Democrat Xochitl Torres Small, but ultimately did not contest the election result in court. Still, the campaign’s early ads for 2020 insisted, "on Election Day, we won, but the Democrats took it away."
Audrey Trujillo, candidate for Secretary of State
Bio: Trujillo, 50, is a local Republican officer, businesswoman and first-time political candidate
Actions: When speaking to conservative interviewers on platforms such as Rumble and shared on Facebook, the GOP nominee for New Mexico's top election official has referred to the 2020 election as a “coup” and aired spurious theories about election rigging and hacking of tabulation machines. She frequently urges voters to cast their ballots in person and insist on having their ballots tabulated by hand rather than a mechanical tabulator.
She has also used her social media platforms to spread conspiracism about COVID-19 vaccines and to suggest that President Joe Biden has at least one body double standing in for him at public appearances.
When reached by USA Today, on the other hand, Trujillo conceded that Biden was president but said 2020 election processes had seeded widespread doubt. She said she was running to restore confidence.
"I just want to improve the system we have in place; I'm not here to recreate the wheel," she said. "But if there are questions on those machines, we're going to do our damnedest to do our research and see how we can do it a better way and an easier way."
Trujillo, who ran unopposed in her primary, has the endorsement of the America First SOS Coalition, which promotes Secretary of State candidates who question the 2020 election.
"We're not denying any election," she told USA Today. "There was an election. The people voted. Joe Biden is our president."
Recent polling showed her trailing Democratic incumbent Maggie Toulouse Oliver by 12 percentage points.
Karen Bedonie, candidate for governor
Bio: Bedonie, 47, is a businesswoman and a 2020 congressional candidate.
Actions: She is a fervent Trump supporter. During this campaign she has retweeted election conspiracies from David Clements, a prominent election denier in New Mexico who has toured the country participating in forums disputing the 2020 result and calling for local election audits.
Bedonie was also listed a guest speaker alongside Clements at an Albuquerque screening of a documentary airing allegations of election fraud involving tabulating machines on Sept. 3.
In an interview, Bedonie rejected the 2020 results and alleged they were the result of systematic manipulation. "I believe that our elections were stolen, and I do not agree with the outcome," she said.
Michelle Garcia Holmes, candidate for U.S. House
Bio: Michelle Garcia Holmes, the Republican nominee for New Mexico's U.S. House seat currently held by Democrat Melanie Stansbury, is a small business owner and a former Albuquerque police officer who later served as chief of staff for the New Mexico Attorney General's Office before leaving government.
Actions: After losing a bid for Congress in the 2020 election, Garcia Holmes impounded all ballots from New Mexico's most populous county, Bernalillo, for inspection "with an eye toward both prospective improvements in election policy and retrospective, outside verification of certain results ... in this very unusual election," per court filings.
On social media she has alleged widespread doubt about the 2020 election results, without rejecting the outcome outright. "People feel their vote wasn't counted in the 2020 election," she wrote on Twitter earlier this year.
On Jan. 6, 2021, she tweeted support for the U.S. Capitol attack, writing: "Fighting back is not a bad thing... It's how America became the home of the free and the brave." She also alleged that "ANTIFA crashed the protest," repeating an unfounded conspiracy theory that leftist militants were behind the violence that interrupted the counting of 2020's electoral votes.