A Republican U.S. Senate candidate in Illinois is refusing the concede, despite suffering a blowout loss in Wednesday’s GOP primary.
Bobby Piton, the managing partner of an investment services firm and a supporter of claims that the 2020 presidential election was rife with massive fraud, announced that he would not be conceding his loss in social media posts on Thursday.
Kathy Salvi was the projected GOP primary winner with around 30 percent of the vote, while results show that Piton was favored by around 9 percent of Republican voters and finished in a distant fourth place.
“I am NOT conceding my US Senate race primary … stay tuned …” Piton tweeted.
“It appears as though the machines flipped results between different candidates differently in each voting jurisdiction …” he added.
Piton, whose campaign website touts his experience as “a paid thinker” who reads “two to three times as fast as the average human being,” reiterated his claim that the votes had been “flipped” in a phone call with Newsweek. He said that he completely rejected the official results, citing no evidence but insisting that statistics and an algorithm used in stock trading explained his loss.
Piton maintained that the first-place result may have been flipped with seventh place “and so on,” although he admitted that he still had to “figure out” which candidates had swapped fortunes. He argued that “they” were treating the primary’s different candidates like stocks and speculated someone may have “hacked” voting machines or used some other method to manipulate the outcome.
When asked who “they” referred to, Piton said that “the uniparty” was behind the alleged plot and was responsible for fraud affecting both Republican and Democratic candidates. He pointed to a video showing him making a lengthy speech claiming that statistics proved Democratic Illinois U.S. Senators Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth were both “illegitimate” due to massive voter fraud.
Piton was involved in efforts to overturn former President Donald Trump‘s 2020 presidential election loss and appeared as an “expert witness” at related hearings held by former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, according to Vice.
He is also reportedly a supporter of the false pro-Trump QAnon conspiracy theory, having “shared many QAnon messages and posts on social media,” though he claimed to be largely uninformed of the theory in an interview with The Daily Beast last year.
Trump’s former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, who became heavily associated with the conspiracy theory after reciting and praising the QAnon slogan “where we go one we go all,” endorsed Piton’s Senate run.
Piton’s website also features at least one apparent QAnon reference. The Republican candidate mentions the QAnon catchphrase “Great Awakening” while arguing that “Trump broke the rigging algorithm.”
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