Itโs not a Republican or Democrat issue, Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb assures us.
He and the people behind the โ2000 Mulesโ movie just want to make sure no election fraud happens.
I donโt believe him โ and you shouldnโt either.
Lamb has teamed up with the group True the Vote to try to ensure that the massive voter fraud they are certain happened in 2020 doesnโt happen again. They announced their effort earlier this month, and the leaders of True the Vote celebrated their new alliance with self-described โconstitutional sheriffsโ at a mid-July conference in Las Vegas.
To be clear, large scale voter fraud didnโt happen in 2020, no matter what Lamb and True the Vote leaders claim. But nothing will convince Lamb of that. And thatโs what makes Lambโs new effort sinister.
He says his effort is something all Americans should back, regardless of political orientation. But his own political activities and statements make it clear this nationwide effort could lead to partisans like Lamb using sheriffโs departments to swing the vote in favor of far-right candidates.
A politician like Lamb, ignorant of election procedures but armed with cocksure certainty that his side has been wronged, could insert his uniformed officers on the side of people claiming election irregularities. Or he could allow posse volunteers or militia groups to take actions themselves.
Remember the controversy over the use of Sharpie pens in Maricopa County in 2020? There was absolutely nothing wrong with it, as it turned out, but what would a sheriff like Lamb do if told by his partisans that election officials were forcing them to use faulty pens on election day?
Fame โan amazing rideโ
You may not be familiar with Lamb unless you live in Pinal County or are a devotee of conservative news media. Lamb replaced a similarly telegenic Pinal County sheriff, Paul Babeu, when he took office in 2017. Like Lamb, Babeu used frequent appearances on Fox News to rally nationwide support behind conservative causes.
Lamb has even gone beyond Babeu in his branding effort. He became the figurehead of a group trying to rally sheriffs to conservative causes, called Protect America Now. He started a paid online streaming service called American Sheriff, and he wrote a self-published book with the same title โ American Sheriff.
I plowed through the short bookโs aw-shucks aphorisms and its self-congratulation this week. One thing that becomes clear is Lamb thinks his branding effort has made him famous.
โIโm not going to lie โ the fame is a pain in the rear sometimes,โ he writes. โActually most times, but I wouldnโt change it for the world. Itโs been an amazing ride!โ
Beyond the branding effort, Lamb has also outpaced Babeu in his embrace of the โconstitutional sheriffโ concept. This is the idea, promoted by former Graham County Sheriff Richard Mack for decades, that sheriffs should serve as sort of interpreters and arbiters of constitutional rights in their counties, wielding powers even superior to the state and federal governments.
The idea emerged from the Posse Comitatus movement of the 1970s and 1980s, which posited that counties were the most important level of government and that sheriffs had supreme constitutional duties because they are law enforcement officers elected by the people.
Mack has driven the idea forward with his Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, the group that met in Las Vegas. The Anti-Defamation League categorizes it as an anti-government extremist group and notes Mackโs long association with the Oath Keepers, a group whose leaders are charged with seditious conspiracy for their role in the Jan. 6, 2021 coup attempt.
Babeu stuck his toe into the waters of constitutional sheriff ideology when he was in office, but he never submerged himself in it. Lamb has plunged in. In a July 13 interview on the Falun Gong-affiliated news site, Epoch TV, Lamb explained it this way:
โThe sheriff is elected by the people. Itโs the highest law enforcement official in the county. The beauty of that is Iโm not beholden to anybody,โ he said. โIโm the county sheriff, I protect you from bad guys and I protect you from government overreach. I think thatโs one of the key roles of a sheriff to ensure people are able to pursue life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.โ
Of course, this is not really the sheriffโs role โ itโs an invented power of a government official, ironically enough. Itโs government overreach, if you will.
Jan. 6 sympathizer
Similarly, it has not been the sheriffโs role to monitor elections or enforce election laws as ballots were being cast. But you can see why Lamb got interested โ he has long believed and repeated Donald Trumpโs claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
In an interview on Nov. 4, 2020, the day after the election, he repeated a variety of unsubstantiated election-fraud claims and concluded Trump was right all along.
โThe president has been seeing things coming down the pike for a long time,โ Lamb said on the Joe Pags online show. โHeโs got his ear to the ground a lot better than we do. The reason heโs talking about the fraud and the mail fraud and different things is because heโs probably seeing things that indicate this is going to happen.โ
On Jan. 6, 2021, at a rally in Phoenix, Lamb expressed sympathy for the rioters in Washington D.C., the Arizona Mirror reported.
โThis is about the fact that our Supreme Court isnโt hearing our voices. This is the fact that our governor and our governments are not hearing our voices,โ he said. โI donโt know how loud we have to get before they start to listen to us and know that we will no longer tolerate them stripping our freedoms away.โ
And he has repeatedly suggested that elections must produce the policies he thinks are right for the country โ not necessarily the peopleโs will. In the Nov. 4, 2020 interview, he said:
โWe are in 2020, if we canโt put a better process together on the national level, to ensure there is the least amount of voter fraud, to ensure that the people get the person that is right for the country, then we have a lot more problems than we think we have.โ
In his July 13, he said something similar: โGranted right now weโre dealing with chaos everywhere we turn โ this administration has set fire to just about everything. But voter integrity is still one of those things, because if weโre going to change bad policies, we have to be able to believe and trust in the voting process.โ
In Lambโs view, it appears, the vote is legitimate only if it leads to the election of the person he thinks is โright for the countryโ or to change policies he thinks are bad.
Partisan sheriffs not neutral
Lamb has remained a consistent ally of Trump, appearing with him as a speaker on Trumpโs โAmerican Freedom Tour.โ He came out of viewing the โ2000 Mulesโ movie, which claims to demonstrate massive voter fraud, completely convinced. Subsequent analyses, even by Trump attorney general William Barr, have pointed out that the movie doesnโt actually show what it claims to show โ a pattern of fraudulent ballot-stuffing.
So perhaps itโs no surprise that he reached out to True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht, whose group backed the film, and suggested that sheriffs could get involved in investigating their election-fraud claims.
โOnce we had been burned by both the Federal Bureau of Investigation and state-level law enforcement, we realized weโve got to take this more localโ, Engelbrecht said at the meeting of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association last week.
โAs God would have it, at the same time, both Sheriff Mark Lamb of Pinal County, Arizona and Sheriff Mack reached out,โ she went on. โAll of a sudden itโs like the lights went on โ itโs the sheriffs. Thatโs who can do these investigations. Thatโs who we can trust.โ
In fact, the public should not trust them to investigate claims of election irregularities, especially as ballots are being cast. A blindered partisan like Lamb could never use his powers neutrally, and he could insert law enforcement or its allied volunteers to sway the election in the officialโs preferred direction.
This, by the way, would be a classic case of government overreach by a self-described constitutional sheriff.
