Quite long post - hopefully the last one in this 2020 election saga.
NY Times November 10, 2020 report: Election
officials in dozens of states representing both political parties said that
there was no evidence that fraud or other irregularities played a role in the
outcome of the presidential race, amounting to a forceful rebuke of President
Trump’s portrait of a fraudulent election.
Related coverage also here from NPR, and here from The AP where former AG Barr disputes Trump.
Quick reminder of what is at stake in future elections if Republicans get the kind of “election reform” they say is needed and they are attempting in all over the country – state-by-state even as Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election (including January storming of the Capitol to stop the final EC certification conducted in Congress and overseen by then VP Mike Pence – whom the rioters shouted “Hang Mike Pence, Hang Mike Pence”). His allies now say they will use his false claims to shape future elections – again, state-by-state:
Key Example from Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) who said several times, first on Fox News (November 8) that: “Mail-in balloting is a nightmare for us” (Fox News on November 8).
He was referring to the
form of voting that has been used securely with little controversy for years
but was used more often by Democrats in 2020 and it showed in their massive
wins. He went on to say that without election changes that: “We're never going
to win again presidentially.”
Then he appeared again on
Fox News (November 9) and said Senate Republicans would conduct “an oversight
of mail-in balloting because if we don't do something about voting by mail,
we're going to lose the ability to elect a Republican in this country.”
Following the 2020 election,
Trump, members of his own administration, congressional Republicans, and right
wing allies all put forth the false claim that the election was
stolen including the January 6 storming of the capital by Trump loyalists.
Their goals was to “STOP THE
STEAL” and along the way, they shouted “HANG MIKE PENCE” who was overseeing
that final EC certification process. To this day. Trump refuses to accept the
results that showed he lost to Joe Biden and by over 7 million votes, too.
Top election officials across
the country have said in interviews and statements that the process had been a
remarkable success despite record turnout and the complications of a dangerous
pandemic. For example:
Frank LaRose, Ohio’s Republican Secretary of State said: “There’s a
great human capacity for inventing things that aren’t true about elections. The
conspiracy theories and rumors and all those things run rampant. For some
reason, elections breed that type of mythology.”
Steve Simon, Democrat and Minnesota’s Secretary of State, said: “I
don’t know of a single case where someone argued that a vote counted when it
shouldn’t have or didn’t count when it should. There was no fraud.”
A spokeswoman for Scott Schwab, Kansas’ Republican Secretary of State,
said in an email: “Kansas did not experience any widespread, systematic
issues with voter
fraud, intimidation, irregularities, or voting problems. We are very
pleased with how the election has gone up to this point.”
The NY Times contacted the
offices of the top election officials in every state for two days for this
comprehensive report and analysis.
They asked whether they
suspected or had evidence of illegal voting. Officials in 45 states responded
directly to The Times and for four remaining states, The Times spoke to other
statewide officials or found public comments from secretaries of state that
reported no major voting issues.
The one state (ironically the
“Lone”star state of Texas) did not respond to repeated Times inquiries.
However, a spokeswoman for the
top elections official in Harris County (the largest county in Texas with a
population greater than many states), said that there were only a few minor
issues, but that they “…had a very seamless election.”
Note: Texas Lieutenant Governor, Dan Patrick (R), announced a $1 million fund to reward reports of voter fraud.
None still have not been
reported, nor likely to be confirmed as legitimate examples.
Some states described small
problems common to all elections, which they said they were addressing: (1) a
few instances of illegal or double voting, (2) some technical glitches, and (3)
minor errors in math.
Officials in all states are conducting
their own review of the voting — a standard component of the certification process after any election.
Perhaps none of the Trump
campaign’s claims received more attention than an allegations made for PA and
made Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer.
For example, Giuliani held a
news conference in the parking lot of a Philadelphia landscaping company and
claimed that the election in the city had been rife with fraud. However, the
office of the state’s top law enforcement official said that there was no
evidence to support Giuliani’s claims, and that the election in the state was
“fair and secure.”
Jacklin Rhoads, spokeswoman for Josh Shapiro a Democrat who is PA’s AG
said: “Many of the claims against the commonwealth have already been
dismissed, and repeating these false attacks is reckless. No active lawsuit
even alleges, and no evidence presented so far has shown, widespread problems.”
(Note: PA is Joe Biden’s birthplace).
What emerged in The Times’s
reporting was how, beyond the president, Republicans in many states were
engaged in a widespread effort to delegitimize the nation’s voting system.
Examples:
Some Republicans have even
turned to lashing members of their own party who, in their eyes, did not show
sufficient dedication to rooting out fraud.
In Georgia for example, where Biden led, the two Republican senators, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, both of whom are in a runoff to gain re-election, called for the resignation of the Republican Secretary of State Raffensperger, saying an official statement: “The secretary of state has failed to deliver honest and transparent elections.”
In Washington State, the losing Republican candidate for governor, Loren Culp, disputed the Republican Secretary of State’s determination that the election there was free of fraud. The Secretary of State, Kim Wyman, in turn challenged Culp, trailing by roughly 14 percentage points in the results, to produce evidence, saying: “It’s just throwing grass at the fence at this point to see what sticks.”
Democrats have more frequently been the target of criticism. For
example:
1. Republican leadership, again in PA’s legislature called on Kathy Boockvar, the Democratic secretary of state, to
step down.
2. In Wisconsin, the Republican speaker of the Assembly announced
he would form committees to investigate voter fraud in the wake of Biden’s
narrow victory in the state, though there is no evidence of any.
3. Republican lawmakers in Michigan voted to issue subpoenas for documents in search of “election
irregularities.”
Indeed, Republicans in all three
of those “blue wall” states have initiated “investigations or called for audits”
— which is redundant given the certification work already showed no fraud of
any amount. Democrats say those are ways to simply undermine confidence in the
results.
The Trump campaign accelerated
their legal efforts, filing a lawsuit in the seven Pennsylvania counties where
the president lost.
They claimed that mail-in voting
created an unfair, “two-tiered” system during the election — though the system
is also in place in counties the president won.
Then they announced plans to
file another suit in Michigan.
Trump kept up his barrage of
Twitter posts with false claims about improprieties in Nevada and Pennsylvania,
and predicting he’d prevail in Georgia, where he is behind, also saying Wisconsin
“needs a little time statutorily,” though he offered no explanation for what he
meant.
Nellie Gorbea, Rhode Island’s Democratic Secretary of State said the
amount of attention on the election would make illegal voting extremely
difficult, adding: “It would be nearly impossible to do voter fraud in this
election because of the number of people tuned in since voter in the United
States is extremely rare.”
The irregularities that do occur
are often inconsequential, isolated in nature, and unlikely to alter the
outcome of any election.
FYI: The most significant
episode of election fraud over the past several years involved an alleged
effort to manipulate ballots to benefit a Republican candidate for Congress in
NC, and that was Mark Harris in 2018. The supposed scheme forced a
new election and an operative who worked for Harris, L.
McCrae Dowless, is under indictment. Harris was not charged with wrongdoing
denying a role.
In the case of the 2020
election, Biden’s margins in the blue wall states of PA, MI, and WI are all in
the tens of thousands. Even in GA where Biden led by more than 11,000 votes, it
would be hard to uncover enough voting irregularities to change who won, in
fact in the final analysis Trump would lose GA four times; election night loss
and three recounts/court challenges.
Jake Rollow, spokesman for Jocelyn Benson, MI’s Democratic Secretary of State said: ‘‘We have not seen any evidence of fraud or foul play in the actual administration of the election. What we have seen was smooth, transparent, secure, and accurate.’’
Still, Trump remains fixated on
voter fraud even for his win in 2016, when he falsely claimed that vote
stealing had cost him the popular vote, which he lost by roughly 3 million. In
that election aftermath, he formed a voting fraud commission (run by Republican Kris Kobach of KS) which
disbanded without findings any secrecy, bias, fraud, or election overreach.
Trump’s attack on the
election system this year has relied on either outright fabrication or gross
exaggeration involving the sorts of small problems that typically come up in
elections.
For example:
In Ohio, LaRose said that while it was not unusual to discover a
handful of improprieties in a statewide election, systemic fraud has not
happened adding: “In the past, I’ve referred people to local prosecutors
and the attorney general for noncitizens voting. It’s like tens or dozens of
people, not hundreds. There’s no acceptable level of voter fraud and we take
every one of those cases seriously.”
In Georgia, the tension over voting has been most palpable. The
Trump campaign and the two Republican senators complained about transparency,
which Republican Brad Raffensperger, the Secretary of State, called “laughable”
saying in full: “We were literally putting releases of results up at a minimum
hourly. I and my office have been holding daily or twice-daily briefings for
the press to walk them through all the numbers. So that particular charge is
laughable.” He also added that while there were likely small instances of
fraud, he did not expect it to be significant enough to affect the election outcome.
The absence of any major
findings of fraud or irregularities, and the willingness of even Republican
election officials to attest to smooth operations, have all undercut Trump’s
legal efforts.
For example:
In Michigan, the Trump campaign has sued, saying that their poll watchers were not given access to properly observe ballot counting in Detroit. But election officials in the city deny that, saying there were dozens of poll watchers from both campaigns inside the main counting center there. A judge denied a Trump’s bid to halt counting based on complaints about observers, dismissing key evidence as “vague and hearsay.”
Trump ended losing by over 7
million votes and losing more than 60 court cases, including at least four from
the U.S. Supreme Court.
My 2 cents: You lost Mr.
Trump, grow up and face reality and admit the fact that you lost. Regarding
fraud and a rigged election that you have claimed from day-one, put simply,
“there is no there, there.” Get over it.
Thanks for stopping by and
reviewing this.
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