By John Fund
Monday, December 21, 2020
Now that Joe Biden has won the Electoral College vote,
many readers have asked us how lawsuits challenging the presidential results
were rejected by dozens of courts. We’ll try to explain a few reasons.
In an election for any other office, it’s possible to
conduct a full investigation. But in this presidential race, all 50 states by
law had to certify their results by December 8. Then the Electoral College was
set to meet on December 14 to elect the president.
That’s a very short time window in which to collect clear
evidence of fraud or irregularities great enough to change the outcome, to file
lawsuits, and then to have them decided. The result would then go to a Supreme
Court highly reluctant to get involved in a presidential race after its
disputed role in the Bush-v.-Gore recount in 2000.
The other obstacle Trump lawyers faced was that he would
have had to overturn results in three or more states to win the required 270
electoral votes. That was very difficult — Bush v. Gore involved only
Florida. Plus some Trump lawyers hurt their case by filing easily ridiculed and
error-filled briefs.
Then there are the media. Reporters who spent countless
resources on the dry hole that Trump colluded with the Russians in the 2016
election showed a complete lack of curiosity over both voter fraud and the
now-revived Hunter Biden scandal.
When Trump ally Elizabeth Harrington told CNN anchor
Christiane Amanpour ,“I would love if you guys would start doing that digging
and start doing that verification,” she was shot down.
“No, we’re not going to do your work for you,” Amanpour
snapped.
“That’s a journalist’s job!” Harrington exclaimed. “It’s
a journalist’s job to find out if this is verified.”
The Trump lawsuits may have had merit. In Georgia alone,
Trump lawyers alleged, in addition to mail-in signature problems:
92 mail-in ballots cast before
voters requested them
217 voters whose mail-in ballots
were “applied for, issued, and received all on the same day”
395 out-of-state voters
1,043 people who claimed to live
at post-office boxes
2,560 ineligible felons
10,315 dead people
66,247 voters under the age of
18
305,701 voters who requested
absentee ballots after the deadline
In Georgia, Joe Biden won by fewer than 12,000 votes.
Many Democratic-appointed judges were hostile to Trump
lawsuits. But even conservative judges privately knew anything they did to help
prove fraud charges would be viciously attacked in the media and wouldn’t allow
enough time to meet the Electoral College deadlines without creating national
chaos.
That may explain some bizarre dismissals of lawsuits.
David Shestokas, a Pennsylvania attorney, says a judge canceled the hearing
where we was to produce evidence. Two days later, the judge dismissed the case.
“Judges are generally willfully refusing to hear evidence,” Shestokas says.
In one court, Trump did come close to victory.
Wisconsin’s supreme court rejected by a close vote, 4 to 3, his claims that
proper procedures weren’t followed in allowing thousands of voters to cast
mail-in ballots. Three justices ruled that some Trump claims had merit, but
they didn’t say what the remedy should be or whether any votes should be thrown
out.
Their silence speaks volumes for how concerns about fraud
were handled this year. To paraphrase the old saying: “See no evil, hear no
evil, don’t even suggest evil.”
In the future, reforms must be made to ensure that the
public believes in the integrity of the election. Many don’t believe that the
2020 election was fair. A Quinnipiac poll released on December 9 found that 38
percent of Americans believe that the election was marred by widespread fraud.
That included 35 percent of independents and 77 percent of Republicans.
Needed reforms include requirements for a government
photo ID to vote by mail (people could send a photocopy or smartphone image),
as in Kansas and Alabama currently.
States should use Department of Homeland Security records
to check the citizenship of registered voters.
Absentee ballots should go only to voters who request
them — there should be no automatic mailing of such ballots to all registered
voters, because those lists are filled with people who have moved or died or
are ineligible.
The computer software used in voting machines must be
shared with election officials and available to the public in court cases.
Abuses, incompetence, and, yes, alleged fraud made the
2020 election suspect. Too bad Trump exaggerated his claims, failed to address
some of the election’s ticking time bombs in court before the election,
and took on lawyers unsuited to the task. Those errors, plus the fact that the
media and courts often didn’t do their jobs, doomed his effort.
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