Andy Biggs wanted the public to believe Arizona’s voters had done something wrong — that the state’s electoral votes should not have been certified. Every court, every audit, every Republican state official who examined those votes found no evidence of wrongdoing. Biggs has never withdrawn that claim. He won 71.8 percent of Arizona’s Republican primary vote on Tuesday because the Christian conservative apparatus told its voters the claim was a virtue, not a lie, and they believed it.
This is not exclusively a theological matter. It is, in the first instance, a matter of law.
Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution assigns to each state the authority to appoint presidential electors in the manner its legislature directs. Amendment XII requires those electoral votes to be transmitted sealed to the president of the Senate. The Electoral Count Act of 1887, recodified and strengthened by the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act of 2022, governs what happens in the joint session where Congress receives and counts those votes.
Under the 2022 amendments, a member who objects to a state’s electoral votes must present a written objection signed by at least one-fifth of the House and at least one-fifth of the Senate — a threshold raised from the previous one-member, one-senator requirement specifically because of what happened in 2021.
Biggs was one of 147 Republican members of Congress who voted on January 6 and 7, 2021, to sustain objections to electoral votes from states certified by their own Republican officials and validated by their own courts. He objected specifically to Arizona’s eleven electoral votes. He told his colleagues the state’s electors should not be certified because, he said, unconstitutional election changes had been imposed by officials who lacked the authority to make them.
Every venue tasked with adjudicating those claims rejected them. Federal courts — sixty-one of them, including judges appointed by Donald Trump — found no evidence of fraud of a scale or character that could invalidate Arizona’s result. The Maricopa County forensic audit, commissioned by the Republican-controlled Arizona Senate and conducted by Cyber Ninjas, a firm sympathetic to the review’s proponents, confirmed that Joseph Biden had won the state — and by a margin larger than the official count. William Barr, Trump’s own attorney general, said the Department of Justice had found no evidence of fraud that would alter the outcome. Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger refused to reverse his state’s outcome after the now-infamous phone call.
Every state certified its results. Every American court examining those results upheld them. The Electoral Count Act’s objection mechanism exists for a reason Congress defined precisely. Biggs used it to advance a claim that every lawful forum had rejected.
The persons whose voting rights are the most immediate casualty are not abstractions. In 2020, 1,040,776 Arizona residents — voters who cast ballots legally, in full view of the law, under election procedures approved by state courts and overseen by Republican officials — voted for Joseph Biden. When a sitting congressman objects to the certification of those ballots on no substantiated evidence, he is telling a million Arizona residents that their votes should have been thrown out. He is telling the poll workers — the volunteers, the civic employees, the people who processed ballots and ran machines and certified tallies through the night — that their work was illegitimate. Death threats against election workers spiked after the 2020 election. Harassment campaigns. People whose job was counting votes became targets.
The 2022 amendments to the Electoral Count Act exist because what Biggs did is no longer possible in its 2021 form. Congress rewrote the statute to prevent precisely what 147 members of the House attempted — a parliamentary device deployed without evidentiary basis to delay or nullify the stated electors of a sovereign state. The law now requires that a fifth of the chamber sign on before an objection can be debated and voted upon. Biggs’s action in 2021, carried out under the old rules, is documented history.
Biggs is a political figure, not a minister. He does not hold a Bible. But the Evangelical apparatus that nominated him by a thirty-six-point margin operates in the register of Scripture, and the Scripture it claims to hold above all other authorities has something to say about the thing Biggs did.
Exodus 20:16 is not obscure. “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.” The Hebrew is ed sheqer — a witness who testifies falsely. The commandment does not exempt elected officials. It does not contain a footnote reading “except when the testimony serves the right political coalition.” Proverbs 14:5 says an honest witness does not deceive. Proverbs 12:22 says lying lips are an abomination to the Lord.
The Evangelical apparatus that raised me deployed those verses in Sunday-morning application. They applied them to the boy who lied about the neighbor’s fence line. They applied them to the woman who falsified her tax return. The verses were taught as a standard for individual conduct in every room I sat in for thirty years. Those same verses were never applied to a member of Congress who asserted publicly that an election was rigged on evidence that every court and every audit found was not there. The apparatus needed the lie to serve its political purpose. The eighth commandment was set aside when it became inconvenient.
The chasm this names is specific and verifiable. The text of Exodus 20:16 says “you shall not bear false witness.” The Electoral Count Act says election results certified by a state are valid unless a congressional objection meets specific statutory thresholds, which Biggs’s lacked under the 2022 amendments. Both documents converge: they require that testimony — legal or moral — correspond to evidence. Biggs’s testimony did not meet that standard in any forum where the question was adjudicated, and the apparatus rewarded him for the failure by giving him his party’s nomination.
The Christian-nationalist response is predictable. The apparatus will cite Romans 13 — “the powers that be are ordained of God” — and argue that political loyalty to the right candidate is a mode of submission to divine authority. But Romans 13 does not say what the claim needs it to say. Read alongside Romans 12 — “do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good” — Romans 13 describes the governing authority as God’s servant for the good. It does not anywhere authorize the believer to bear false witness about what the governing authority actually did. It does not anywhere authorize the believer to tell a million legally registered voters that their ballots should have been counted differently. The apparatus reads verse 1 and stops where the text itself requires the authority to answer to a standard of justice.
Gov. Katie Hobbs was right when she said it plainly: Andy Biggs has spent years undermining public confidence in elections. He refused to certify Arizona’s electors in 2020 on no statutory grounds. He still does not acknowledge the 2022 gubernatorial result. He campaigned on that claim in a party primary and received 71.8 percent of the vote. The governor did not need a verse to say what the record already showed. She simply told the truth.
The lie is not incidental to the Christian-nationalist project. It is structurally necessary. The entire narrative depends on it. If the 2020 election was free and fair — and every lawful forum that examined it concluded that it was — then the architecture begins to tremble. The sense of a besieged remnant standing against demonic political forces, the righteous nation displaced by evil, the election stolen by the powers of darkness — that story cannot survive the simplest halt word: where is the evidence? Biggs provided the text of his objection. No court accepted it. The Cyber Ninjas audit contradicted it. The apparatus deployed its voters to the primary and closed the gap by telling them the evidence was a suppression of truth, not an absence of it.
The believers in those Arizona pews have a decision before them in November. They will stand before a ballot that asks whether a man who told a false testimony about their neighbors’ votes — about a million citizens of their own state, about the volunteers and poll workers who processed every one of those ballots — should govern them. The reference frame is not complicated. The eighth commandment does not offer an exemption for carrying a claim on behalf of a coalition. The Electoral Count Act did not offer one either, and when Biggs gamed its objection process in 2021, Congress rewrote the statute to close the loophole he exploited.
71.8 percent of Republican primary voters on Tuesday said that none of this is disqualifying. November will tell the rest of the state what it thinks.
The law has spoken. The text has spoken. The courts have spoken. The testimony has been weighed and found wanting. And a man who built his career on a witness that no lawful forum would corroborate stands before the people of Arizona asking them to trust him with their state.