State Rep. Phil Lyman, a Republican who has a long history of spreading election conspiracy theories, declared Tuesday that he would challenge Utah Gov. Spencer Cox for renomination.
"Utah was never meant to be a vassal state. It was meant to be an ensign for the nations," said Lyman, who also released an announcement video that proudly showcased his mugshot from his 2015 arrest for misdemeanor trespassing. The state representative did not directly mention Cox, who has remained a Donald Trump critic, even as he declared, "If we find ourselves with a government that conjures emergencies to trample our rights, then in our republic, we have the right to choose new leaders."
Lyman was a San Juan County commissioner in 2015 when he was convicted after leading an all-terrain vehicle group through a canyon the federal government had closed to protect Native American cliff dwellings. Prosecutors alleged that he recruited people who had recently taken part in far-right militant Cliven Bundy's armed standoff with federal law enforcement officials. Lyman spent 10 days in prison, and Trump later pardoned him in late 2020.
That was hardly Lyman's only brush with far-right politics, though. He successfully ran for the legislature in 2018 after courts ruled that San Juan County's commission and school board maps discriminated against Native American voters in this majority-Navajo county. Navajo-backed candidates for local offices won historic majorities in that year's elections after the courts imposed new districts, and Lyman, whose old district was struck down as an illegal gerrymander, proposed that a heavily white part of the county secede and form its own county.
That idea went nowhere, but Lyman soon turned his focus to advancing lies about the 2020 and 2022 elections. The state representative tried to eliminate the state's universal mail-in voting system last year, arguing, "In Utah, we have a crisis of confidence in our elections." (Democrats haven't won a single statewide race since 1996, when Jan Graham won reelection as attorney general.)
The bill died in committee, but that didn't deter Lyman months later when he threw out another evidence-free allegation insinuating that a voting machine had changed votes for Sen. Mike Lee to one of his GOP primary opponents. But while the state representative declared that the machines were "programmed with functionality" to switch votes from one candidate to another, state and local election officials quickly affirmed that this wasn't true. Even Lee, who was involved in Trump's efforts to steal the 2020 election, responded, "[O]ur campaign has every confidence in Utah’s elected county clerks and the Lieutenant Governor’s office to oversee free and fair elections."
Unsurprisingly, elections aren't the only topic Lyman puts his tin foil hat on for. Indeed, he hosted what the Salt Lake Tribune calls a "short-lived, conspiracy-driven podcast" with fellow state Rep. Mike Petersen: One late 2021 episode of "The Common Cause" featured a guest who declared that Utah's digital driver's license program was part of a United Nations plot to take over the state.
Cox's reelection campaign may have the unpleasant task of having to listen to each episode of "The Common Cause" to find out what else their opponent said, but they wasted little time responding to his entry into the contest. "Gov. Cox was one of the very first people to contribute money to Phil's legal defense," said a spokesperson, "and he's grateful that President Trump pardoned him."
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