ALLEGATIONS OF MASSIVE VOTER FRAUD DOESN”T PASS MUSTER

 

… Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman, Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) still wants to look into voter fraud

 

The massive “election voter irregularities” were just, all those “votes by mail”

 

I don’t know about you, but I am starting to get upset with those people that are saying there was massive voter fraud.  Yes, I am including our ignorant president, but also those people that claim, without showing and evidence, that they were “disenfranchised by all this supposed voter fraud”.   What voter fraud?

In addition, even though Trumps own head of security said that this election was the “most secure election ever”, and that statement got him fired by our sore-loser president, who is the number one supporter of the voter fraud accusations.

Then we have those GOP led Senate committees such as those hearings which are supposedly looking into the so called “voting irregularities” of which no one has been able to properly define exactly what are those irregularities. 

Multiple GOP senators, including Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, they have all made statements recognizing Biden’s winning status. But a GOP-led Senate committee pressed forward with a hearing on those supposed irregularities in the election that multiple Republicans and witnesses have stated the issues as being actual “voter fraud”.

And their message, repeatedly, was: Why not have a look into these? 

But what they are calling “irregularities” is all because of the pandemic scare, and because more people have decided that they were this time going to “vote by mail”.  That was the, “irregularity”.

Such measures for looking into irregularities is usually a fallback when the standard voting processes might not be viewed as sufficiently impartial.  A good recent example is having a special counsel examine an issue such as the Russia investigation.  There is a very logical question about how independent the Justice Department is when the president fires an FBI director looking into the matter.  Another would be a huge issue like the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when there is massive public interest and Congress wants to eliminate any perceptions that one party or another is unduly guiding the proceedings in its preferred direction.  Those are good examples for “looking into irregularities”.

The allegations of massive voter fraud in the 2020 election, doesn’t track with any of those precedents.

We have, in fact, already had extensive review in the arena that is supposed to deal with such questions and it is nonpartisan and called, the judiciary. 

Even if you believe that judges are somewhat beholden to the political parties that put them on the bench, the verdict on the 2020 election has been resoundingly bipartisan.  A Washington Post analysis has found that at least 86 judges had heard challenges to the election results, and 38 were appointed by Republicans.  And nine were either Trump’s appointees, or they had been included in Trump’s Supreme Court shortlists.  Judges, regardless of who appointed them, to date have overwhelmingly found that there was nothing to substantiate the allegations of massive fraud.

All this false questioning of possible voter fraud, all it does is to suggests an actual problem is involved.  It causes for people to have false suspicion of an unfounded questionable issue.

When it comes to widespread voter fraud, will there be some fraud somewhere? Undoubtedly, there will be some.  It’s a big country.  The question is whether it’s substantial enough to launch an effort that gives credence to suspicions that actually mattered, or could matter.  We could launch a bipartisan, blue-ribbon commission or a special counsel on any allegation.  But pretending that doing that doesn’t come with it own costs, when it comes to the veracity of the allegations, is to bury one’s head in the sand.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), his recent reference to the many Republicans who believe this election was stolen is a case in point.  There is no genuine reason to harbor that belief. Multiple judges have routinely ruled that people who signed affidavits to that effect either misunderstood the process, or they were just flat wrong.  Multiple courts have overwhelmingly found those contentions to be baseless.

Let’s face it, the majority of Republicans believed in these debunked voter fraud claims. Telling their people what they want to hear, or at least hinting at it, is a time-honored political tradition.  And there is a very receptive Trump supporter audience for all this, despite the lack of evidence.

If these so called hearing were truly just about irregularities, that would be one thing.  But invited witnesses claimed without evidence that dead people voted, among other bizarre things. But multiple judges have acknowledged the “dozens” of court cases affirming the election results, despite those same courts having dealt with this issue over and over again.

Anybody pretending that they see no downside for American democracy in going down this road either isn’t being honest or doesn’t understand how this works. It’s fine to say this should be dealt with conclusively, but the mechanism for doing so has already been employed extensively. 

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris beat Donald Trump and Mike Pence by over 7 million popular votes and by the Electoral College vote.  And it was all fair and square.

Copyright G. Ater 2020