CLAY: We are joined now by Arkansas Senate candidate in the Republican primary, Jake Bequette. Jake, I know that the Arkansas primary is coming up soon, and there’s all sorts of craziness, including the fact that they have misspelled your name on the ballot? Tell us the latest of what’s going on in Arkansas.
BEQUETTE: Well, it’s worse than that, Clay. It’s not just a misspelled name. It’s not a typo. It’s the wrong name!
CLAY: Oh.
BEQUETTE: So, just to set the table for you. So, on last Monday, May the 9th, the first day of early voting here in Arkansas, we started getting these frantic phone calls and text messages and social media DMs and screenshots from outraged voters in multiple counties in Arkansas, because they saw — and our screenshots confirmed — that my name was wrong on ballots in multiple Arkansas Counties. It said “Jack Bequette” instead of Jake Bequette.
So, you know, we immediately spring into action and we called some of the election coordinates in these various counties to see what was going on. And we expected them to be surprised, “Oh, my gosh. Let’s fix these ballots.” No! They were expecting our call. They knew these ballots were gonna be wrong, erroneous, for three weeks. So, in violation of Arkansas State law, they covered it up. They didn’t tell anyone. They didn’t notify me, the media, my opponents — and, most importantly, the voting public — until we confronted them.
So they thought that they could just, you know, sweep this under the rug, kind of slap me around like a typical Arkansas RINO. But, no, that’s not how I do business. I filed a lawsuit, I drug all these defendants into court and then, you know, voila! They started changing these voting machines within 48 hours. They’re supposedly correct in one of the counties that were previously erroneous. We’re verifying to see. Another county, you know, they couldn’t be bothered to show up in court.
They claimed via email correspondence they’ll be fixed early this week. But we’re hearing reports… I was speaking in another part of Arkansas yesterday at a college commencement, and I heard from voters in other Arkansas counties who said my name said Jack instead of Jake. So we’re gonna get to the bottom of this. We are not letting this investigation go because, you know, unlike a lot of Republicans in Arkansas — Republican politicians in Arkansas and RINOs across the country — who say they’re for election integrity, I actually mean it, and I’m gonna show the people of Arkansas that I mean business.
BUCK: Jake, it’s Buck. Who are “they” in this situation? When you said they refused to change it, it seems… This is one of these stories where it’s hard to believe until you really are told it by the person affected. You read the headline; you say, “How can they get the name wrong of a candidate and not…?” As you point out, it’s not even like there’s just a letter missing. It’s actually a name of another person. There’s probably some guy out there, Jack Bequette, who’s like, “Hey, I’m doing really well in the write-in campaign,” right? It’s crazy. Why are they not…? First of all, why do you think they’re not changing it right away? And what accountability measures are there?
BEQUETTE: Well, we’re still determining if this was just stupidity, incompetence, laziness, or something more nefarious or malicious. I’m not giving them the benefit of the doubt because the state secretary of state’s office are blaming the counties, the counties are blaming the secretary of state. Of course, no one is taking responsibility, and I’m sure some of your listeners had seen and heard the recording that my campaign made of one of these original phone conversations with a county election coordinator.
And they initially told us — when they thought that we just would let it go they told us — “Hey, we knew about this weeks ago, the voting machine software is controlled out of state by a company in Omaha, Nebraska, so we can’t get it changed. Sorry, try again next cycle.” So really it’s… What I see is this is, you know, an effort either by hook or by crook by the Arkansas Republican establishment to stop me. I’m challenging…
I’m primary challenging a longtime Arkansas incumbent, U.S. Senator, he’s been there over 20 years, you know, he’s just totally visible. And I think a lot of these Arkansas RINO politicians, they’re threatened by me, quite frankly, because they recognize that I’m not one of these guys just gonna go-along-to-get-along, be part of the Washington uniparty, just go up there and be invisible. I actually believe what I’m saying.
Like, I’m actually an America First candidate. I’m actually gonna hold them accountable. And I’ll be one of these guys who exposes these RINOs from the right because these politicians, they claim to hate the left. They really don’t hate the left because the left is a convenient enemy for them. Who they really hate, what they really despise are the true believers in the Republican Party. Okay?
You have Senators like Rand Paul and Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz and Ron Johnson, okay, the people like JD Vance and Blake Masters and myself, people like Ron DeSantis. They hate us the most because we show them what real leadership it looks like. Like we show the people, their voters, their constituents, the people they’re supposedly representing, we show them what’s possible. Like, we can have nice things! We don’t have to have Mitt Romneys and people like that up and down the ballot in every single election cycle.
CLAY: Jake, what are you seeing and hearing from people that they care about the most on the ground in Arkansas right now?
BEQUETTE: So a great example of kind of the dichotomy between the bleeding heart, the beating heart of a grassroots versus the D.C. establishment is this issue over foreign aid in Ukraine, where the Senate’s about to vote to pass this $40 billion foreign aid program to Ukraine. And look, I’ve got no love for the Russian federation but when I talk to voters on the ground here in Arkansas, okay, they don’t care about the territorial sovereignty of, you know, corrupt governments in Eastern Europe.
Okay? They care about the territorial sovereignty of our country, of America. We have a wide-open southern border. Okay, we have millions of illegal immigrants coming in to this country every single year. Okay, in Arkansas I talk to county sheriffs, and people wouldn’t believe the amount of fentanyl that comes into our state right up I-30 through Texarkana up through Little Rock, and that comes straight from Mexico and the U.S. Mexican borders. We have a baby formula shortage.
I can’t believe I’m actually saying that. But why are we sending $40 billion to Ukraine, okay, into what is essentially the bloodlands of Eastern Europe, when we have young mothers in Arkansas and across this country who are wondering how they’re gonna feed their babies? So I think that is the disconnect between the voters, the constituents, the people who have boots on the ground, who do the living and dying and working and praying in Arkansas versus their elected leaders in Washington.
BUCK: JakeBequette.com if you want to learn more about Jake’s run for the Senate in Arkansas. Jake, appreciate you being with us. Thanks so much.
BEQUETTE: Thanks for having me.
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