![TUCSON, ARIZONA - JULY 31: Republican attorney general candidate for Arizona Abraham Hamadeh prepares to speak to supporters during a campaign event at the Whiskey Roads Restaurant & Bar on July 31, 2022 in Tucson, Arizona. With less than two days to go before the Arizona primary election, candidates continue campaigning across the state.](https://img.huffingtonpost.com/asset/630644ce2000005c00f2ce61.jpeg?cache=URa24XBoRZ&ops=scalefit_720_noupscale)
Abraham Hamadeh, the Republican nominee for attorney general in Arizona, seemingly admitted to committing voter fraud during the 2008 presidential election in a series of message board posts he made as a teen, the Phoenix New Times reported Tuesday.
Hamadeh, a 31-year-old first-time candidate, won Arizona’s crowded attorney general primary earlier this month after securing former President Donald Trump’s endorsement. He embraced many of Trump’s favorite conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and has said he would not have certified the results of that contest in Arizona, which Trump lost. Hamadeh has also vowed to use the attorney general’s office to “prosecute crimes of the rigged 2020 election.”
But more than a decade ago, a teenage Hamadeh reportedly suggested on an internet forum that he had changed his mother’s vote on her absentee ballot, which could have been a crime at the time, the New Times reported.
An account the New Times linked to Hamadeh, who was 17 and ineligible to vote at the time, made the posts on a forum popular among fans of libertarian former congressman Ron Paul, who ran for president in 2008. In two posts from before that election, Hamadeh reportedly appeared to admit that his mother intended to vote for Paul, but that he regretfully changed her absentee ballot to a vote in favor of Barack Obama instead.
“Obama is getting all of this crap simply cause he’s Black, he has an Arab name, he’s the only senator who is Black in the Senate, he is successful, and he is a Harvard Law graduate, they’re scared they might have a smart man in the White House,” Hamadeh wrote. “Based on Barack Obama’s intelligence I casted my vote for him yesterday through absentee.”
He wrote in a follow-up reply: “No, I cannot vote. I just submitted my mother’s absentee ballot, she votes who I vote for, she voted for Ron Paul, and I’m saddened that I had to vote for Barack Obama, but it was the right thing I had to do.”
That could amount to an admission of a crime under Arizona law, one expert told the New Times. The statute of limitations on voter fraud cases, however, means that Hamadeh couldn’t be prosecuted now.
Hamadeh’s campaign did not deny the substance of the claims in a statement to the New Times, instead insisting that posts made while he was a teenager should not be an issue in a 2022 campaign.
“Abe Hamadeh is the youngest statewide candidate in the country, and one of the first to be scrutinized on his digital footprint dating back to a time when he was 16 years old, the same time he thought he would grow up to become a wrestler in the WWE,” Erica Knight, a spokesperson for Hamadeh’s campaign, told the New Times. “We are entering a new era of political opposition where candidates who have lived through their adolescent years on the internet are being judged and criticized based on comments they made well before their minds were even fully developed. It is now our responsibility to be careful where we draw the line.”
Asked for additional comment, or to clarify whether Hamadeh’s apparent posts indeed admitted that he had changed his mother’s vote, a spokesperson for his campaign directed HuffPost to a tweet Hamadeh posted late Tuesday night.
“The media hates minority Republicans,” Hamadeh wrote in the tweet.
In other posts made on the forum, teenage Hamadeh made comments that invoked stereotypes about powerful Jewish bankers, and suggested that only college graduates should be allowed to vote, the New Times reported.
“It’s shocking that the Republican candidate for attorney general in Arizona admitted to engaging in voter fraud, and it’s equally offensive that he made so many anti-Semitic and sexist remarks,” Kris Mayes, the Democratic candidate for attorney general, told HuffPost in a Wednesday interview. “It’s just inexcusable and disqualifying.”
Hamadeh was among the cadre of Trump-backed candidates who swept to victory in Arizona’s August primaries. GOP gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake and secretary of state candidate Mark Finchem, like Hamadeh, have spread conspiracies that the 2020 election was stolen and said they would not have certified the results. They have vowed to use their offices to overhaul elections and promote “election integrity,” the euphemism Republicans nationwide adopted to curb voting rights and exert more power over future elections.
The GOP-controlled Arizona state legislature, meanwhile, implemented new restrictions on voting rights – including absentee ballot practices that they baselessly assert are linked to widespread fraud – in recent years. In 2021, the Supreme Court further gutted the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965 by upholding an Arizona law that banned third-party ballot collection, a practice that disproportionately benefited the state’s large Latino and Native American populations.
Voter fraud is exceptionally rare in Arizona and nationwide, and there’s no evidence supporting Hamadeh or any other GOP candidates’ claims that widespread fraud occurred in the 2020 election or previous contests.
“It’s the height of hypocrisy,” Mayes said, “for Abe Hamadeh to have spent the last year undermining trust in our election system when apparently he’s the guy who engaged in voter fraud.”