{"id":15396,"date":"2020-12-11T08:17:36","date_gmt":"2020-12-11T13:17:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=15396"},"modified":"2024-09-11T16:03:44","modified_gmt":"2024-09-11T20:03:44","slug":"why-we-question-the-election-results","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2020\/12\/11\/why-we-question-the-election-results\/","title":{"rendered":"Why We Question the Election Results"},"content":{"rendered":"

American Conservative, December 11, 2020<\/h3>\n

Why We Question the Election Results<\/span><\/a><\/h1>\n
\n

Doubt over the election is widely dismissed as crankery, but skepticism of the media elite narrative is hardly unwarranted.<\/p>\n

by James Bovard<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Americans\u2019 trust in government and the media has collapsed. Two months before the presidential election, only 20 percent of Americans trusted the federal government<\/a> to \u201cdo the right thing\u201d most of the time, according to a Pew Research Center survey. It is unlikely that trust in the government will rebound any time soon, in part because of how the 2020 election was conducted and because the news media has obliterated much of the tattered remnants of its credibility since 2016. Instead, the question is: how much lower can Americans\u2019 trust fall in the political system without a total collapse of legitimacy?<\/p>\n

It is unclear at this time how much fraud occurred in swing states and whether it was sufficient to change the outcome of the Electoral College. Some of the early charges by Trump supporters and lawyers regarding electoral foul play have belly-flopped spectacularly. The apparent endorsement by Gen. Michael Flynn for Trump to declare martial law<\/a> is both reckless and reprehensible. But there are plenty of legitimate unanswered questions about the election results.<\/p>\n

A Monmouth poll<\/a> last month found that 77 percent of Trump backers believed that Biden won due to fraud. A Morning Consult poll<\/a> last month showed that the percentage of Republican voters who said they had \u201cat least some trust in the U.S. election system\u201d plunged from 66 percent before the election to 37 percent afterwards. Like the bogus Russian collusion narrative that Democratic activists created after the 2016 election, that distrust will haunt the Biden administration.<\/p>\n

The 2020 election in many states was practically designed to maximize tainted ballots.<\/strong> In 2012, a New York Times<\/i> analysis concluded that \u201cfraud in voting by mail is\u2026 vastly more prevalent<\/a> than the in-person voting fraud that has attracted far more attention.\u201d Notorious mail-in voting fraud stretches back more than 150 years, when there was widespread intimidation and finagling in the Union Army to tilt soldiers\u2019 votes in favor of Abraham Lincoln\u2019s reelection<\/a>. But the overwhelming majority of media commentary prior to the latest election insisted that only paranoid people would fear mail-in fraud. Thanks to 65 million mail-in ballots<\/a> this year, more fraud may have occurred in this election than in any since 1876.<\/p>\n

At the same time that many states made it easier (if not automatic) to vote by mail, some states dropped verification requirements\u2014including matching signatures, return addresses, or having a witness verify the person and the vote. Lawyer J. Christian Adams noted<\/a> that \u201cDemocrats succeeded in tossing out state laws related to absentee ballot verification, deadlines and a whole range of laws all in the name of COVID. By and large, GOP efforts in court failed. It was a courtroom bloodbath that created vulnerabilities across the system.\u201d<\/p>\n

There was no reason to abolish many of the existing safeguards for absentee voting, but the Democratic activists did so regardless. On top of this, widespread \u201cballot harvesting\u201d occurred\u2014political activists and others rounding up ballots to take to a drop-box or other venue for delivery. This was legal in some states, not in others, but it made a mockery of any \u201cchain of custody\u201d for a ballot. Regardless of the potential conniving, any piece of paper with a splotch next to Biden\u2019s name was treated as if it were as sacrosanct as an American showing up at his polling place, showing his identification (still required in some states), and casting his ballot in a booth.<\/p>\n

\n
\n