The Colorado Republican Party on Saturday officially threw its support behind U.S. Senate primary candidate Ron Hanks, a GOP state representative who’s been advancing ex-President Donald Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election.
During the state Republican GOP’s assembly in Colorado Springs over the weekend, Hanks got 39 percent of the vote from assembly delegates to be on the Republican primary ballot, clearing the required 30 percent threshold.
The vote makes Hanks the party’s lead choice in the race against Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) in the 2022 midterms. The Republican lawmaker is facing off against one other GOP primary foe, Joe O’Dea, who circulated petitions and collected signatures to get on the ballot instead of going through the delegate process.
Hanks is an outspoken voter fraud conspiracy theorist who, like other pro-MAGA election deniers, falsely claims that Trump was the true winner of the 2020 election.
In fact, Hanks boosted the lie at the convention on Saturday and even compared the election to the terrorist attacks on 9/11.
“I fully expected Donald Trump to win in 2020 — and he did,” the candidate declared, per the Associated Press. “When we saw what we saw on election night in 2020, it changed everything just like the changes we felt after 9/11.”
The delegates at the convention also voted to back Tina Peters, the Republican clerk of Mesa County who’s been indicted on charges related to an alleged leak of sensitive election data from her county’s voting machines, in her bid for Colorado secretary of state.
