In the days immediately after the 2020 election, Jeff Crank didn’t have any doubt about whether election fraud took place and who was responsible: Democrats.
On his KVOR radio show, he repeated unsubstantiated rumors as fact and on that basis called for votes to be thrown out.
He platformed a guest who denied the loss, blaming it on “the globalist sort of structures of our society” including media, big tech, big pharma, the deep state, and even professional sports leagues, while characterizing the election as “the biggest mail-in fraud ever perpetrated in history.”
But 2020 wasn’t Crank’s first dip in the election fraud conspiracy pool. The 2018 midterm results, which were an entirely predictable “blue wave” backlash to Trump’s first two years in office, had Crank convinced Democrats had cheated.
A year later, rather than softening his conspiratorial views, Crank not only continued to claim Democrats were passing laws in order to receive and count fraudulent votes, but he also embraced the white supremacist conspiracy known as the “Great Replacement Theory.” For those not steeped in far-right extremist lingo, this racist fabrication claims that Democratic leaders (or sometimes ‘globalist elites’) are trying to replace conservative white Americans with more liberal non-white immigrants in order to gain political power.
The Colorado Times Recorder reviewed over 300 of Crank’s radio shows on KVOR in Colorado Springs, from 2011 through 2021, analyzing his comments about voting, ballots, and election fraud, and other issues. In this story, we focus on instances when he asserted fraud directly, or promoted known conspiracy theories.
2018: Trump’s First Mid-Term Election
In nearly every midterm election, the minority party comes back with a vengeance. In 2018, this meant sweeping victories for Democrats. As the results came in, Crank claimed Democratic county clerks in three states rigged the vote-counting to favor their party’s candidate. His examples include Montana, where most clerks are either Republican or nonpartisan, and Florida, where Republican candidate Rock Scott won the election, narrowly defeating incumbent Bill Nelson. National news outlets were debunking claims of fraud in Arizona the same day Crank made his claim.
Nov. 10, 2018. Crank: “That’s what the Broward County [Clerk] should do, but she won’t do that because she doesn’t want to give somebody else the ability to control the election. She wants to control it because she wants to steal it. Let’s be honest, Radical Red Randy, this is happening in three states. It happened in Montana. With the Rosendale-Tester race, it’s happening in Arizona, where the Democrat is also behind – was behind – and now they counted provisional ballots, and she’s ahead, and it’s happening in Florida, where the Democrat lost. There are no Republican examples of this right now.”
2020: Trump Biden Wins
Two years later, with the White House on the ballot, Crank’s attacks on the American election process reached a fever pitch. He flat-out said Democrats planned and committed voter fraud, an accusation accompanied by more than a hint of racism. The allegations that monitors had been banned from counting rooms had been debunked that morning by the New York Times in an article headlined, “There’s no evidence to support claims that election observers were blocked from counting rooms.”
Nov. 7, 2020. Crank: “Here’s what I don’t get, right? If you’re not doing anything wrong in some of these states with the ballot counting and things like that, why not allow observers from both parties? That should be welcome. In any election situation, there ought to be monitors. And if you’re not gonna do that — we’re a banana republic if we’re not gonna do it. So if you are not doing anything wrong, then why would you be trying to keep people out in Philadelphia or in… you know, Milwaukee or, you know, in Detroit or some of these places? Why would you even be trying to keep people out? Why not just open up? Here you go. Here’s all the ballots. The bottom line is that … it’s pretty simple what’s going on: the Democrats have a plan. They wanted to flood the country with mail-in ballots, which they did through COVID. They want to block observation of the counting of the ballots so that they can do things, commit ballot fraud, right? In some of these places to be able to get the needed votes they need. And then they want to insist that all votes have to be counted and get all of the fraudulent votes lumped in with the legal votes, so that it’s all one big gigantic mess.”
A week later, he was still accepting the debunked “banned observer” conspiracy as fact, and calling for votes to be thrown out because of it. He also simply asserted that fraud took place.
Nov. 14, 2020. Crank: “This listener says, ‘We vote privately. We collect and tabulate them openly. The instant observers were denied access, the count became invalid. No sense wasting time or money on investigating any further. We need a completely new election because the consequences of a fraud on this scale will destroy America regardless of who claims victory.’ That’s from one of our listeners to the program. Well, there’s no question that it is a problem. And quite honestly, I think what needs to happen is if they can determine the precincts, let’s say, that were being tabulated when observers were kept out, those have to be thrown out. They just have to. And only by doing that will you be able to stop fraud in the future. Will you be able to stop that from happening in the future? If an election official understands that the consequence of not allowing observers from both parties to be in the room when the law says that that’s what is required, unless they understand that the consequences for that action is severe, and severe would be throw out all those votes and not count them, then they’ll keep doing it. And if we just kind of go, oh yeah, well, there was fraud, we know, I mean, we know there was, right? When… An observer from one political party is kept out or blocked or not allowed in when the law stipulates that they must be allowed to observe. We know that the law was broken.”
Later in that same show, Crank invited a far-right podcaster to discuss the supposed problems with the election. Conspiracist content creator Dr. Steve Turley laid out an elaborate red-string-corkboard version of reality for Crank’s listeners. His last data point was “the biggest mail-in fraud ever perpetrated in history.”
Nov. 14, 2020. Dr. Steve Turley: “…you have the entire globalist sort of structures of our society, whether it’s the media, big tech, NBA, NFL, even the medical and science professions, you know, with Pfizer deliberately pushing off announcement of the vaccine after the election. Yeah, the deep state, the FBI sitting on Hunter Biden’s laptop, the biggest mail-in fraud ever perpetrated in history. And yet, more people voted for President Trump than for any other sitting president in all of our elections, 73 million people. It may have even been more than that, for all we know, given all these election discrepancies and like. So at the macro level, that’s a pretty stunning repudiation of the powers that be, as it were, our political class.”
As Biden’s inauguration day approached, election conspiracists, led by outgoing President Trump, continued to escalate their rhetoric. After the most devout and extreme believers stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, however, many right-wing elected officials and pundits, including Crank, made a point of denouncing the rioters. Crank said the Jan 6 riot was a “tragedy … that has to be condemned,” and called its participants “idiots.” Ten days later, however, he was again promoting the election fraud conspiracy that inspired those same rioters.
Jan. 16, 2021. Jeff Crank: It’s been happening for two decades — the changing of election laws to get rid of voter ID requirements, to get rid of signature verification, to go to all-mail ballots. This stuff’s been going on for decades. Anything that makes it less secure of an election, the left has pushed: ballot harvesting, all this stuff, and it’s been going on for decades. And while I think Republicans have fought it, the other side has wrapped it in ‘all of this is all about ballot access’ and just ‘giving people the right to vote.’’ No! It’s about being able to set up a system where you can cheat at the margins. Let’s be honest! And that does happen in the United States of America.”
Months later, with Biden in office, Crank embraced a decade-old racist conspiracy theory. It’s unclear whether Crank was already familiar with the “Great Replacement Theory,” but extremism researchers note that Tucker Carlson, who had yet to be fired from Fox News, resurfaced the conspiracy to a national audience just two days earlier.
April 10, 2021. Crank: “You see what they’re trying to do at the border and just allow as many people as you can to come into the United States who they think are gonna vote Democrat and probably will vote Democrat! That’s the whole plan at the border. Overwhelm the system, break the system.”
April 10, 2021. Crank: “The Biden administration [is] doing it. What’s unfolding at the border is nothing short of a human tragedy caused by bureaucratic ineptness and this policy that they want to open the gates and let anybody in because they just look at it as the more people that come in, let’s get them hooked on government assistance. By the way, when we do that, we’ll be spending more money, we will keep breaking the system. But in addition to that, let’s get them in because we’ll get them and we’ll get them addicted to getting government benefits and they’ll all vote Democrat. It’s all part of their plan. And it’s all nefarious. That’s what’s happening at the border.”
Crank did not respond to a request for comment on any of his specific radio quotes, but a spokesperson for his campaign did offer the following statement:
“Jeff Crank was on public radio for over a decade in the Pikes Peak Region and spoke with residents of his community on a weekly basis. Only now that DC Democrats are trying to buy this seat, the Colorado Times Recorder goes through over 800 hours of his old radio shows that have been publicly available for years, cherry-picking whatever they possibly can twist to serve their partisan political purposes. These are the actions of campaign researchers seeking to achieve a cheap political hit, not journalism.”
Reached for comment, Democratic challenger Jessica Killin responded by saying, “Jeff Crank has shown exactly who he is in Congress: a MAGA extremist who puts loyalty to Donald Trump ahead of the people he represents.”
El Paso County and the neighboring areas that comprise Colorado’s 5th Congressional District (CD5) have long been a conservative stronghold. This year is the first in memory that CD5 is considered to be potentially competitive.
So why then, aren’t Crank’s previous conspiratorial claims and unsubstantiated assertions about election fraud not getting more notice as he runs for re-election? Voters in the 5th Congressional District can blame –or perhaps Crank can thank– one man: his 2024 primary opponent Dave Williams. The former El Paso County state legislator turned state GOP Chair took election denialism to another level, shouting it from the rooftops, as it were. By comparison, Crank’s statements, especially his more recent ones, stay within the realm of hypotheticals or unknown. Even his enthusiastic claims that fraud took place, and that Democrats do it on purpose,
The Colorado Times Recorder’s Logan Davis noted the election conspiracy gap between Williams and Crank in his April 2024 review of GOP primary races when he wrote, “To this day, I’m not sure if Crank has ever given a direct answer as to whether he believes the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump.” While this was published over two years ago, well before CTR’s in-depth radio archive review, it nevertheless holds true.
During over 800 hours of shows analyzed by the Colorado Times Recorder, Crank never actually says the 2020 election was stolen, but he also never denies it. The clips featured here speak for themselves. Crank believes fraud took place and that it was both planned and executed by Democrats. Was it sufficient to steal the election? Jeff Crank is just asking questions.
Bryon Neitzel provided research assistance for this story.
RELATED: Read Parts I, II, and III of the Colorado Times Recorder’s series on the Jeff Crank Show:
As a Talk Radio Host, Congressman Jeff Crank Embodied MAGA, Even Before It Existed
CO Springs Congressman Opposed Gay Rights to Marry & Join Military
