A clear-eyed look at what really happened on Election Night
President Trump’s loss in the 2020 presidential election is looney as it gets thanks to the relaxation of voter-ID laws, ballot harvesting and fixed voting machines, writes Miranda Devine
Opinion
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The Electoral College formally affirmed Joe Biden’s victory Monday, but President Trump fights on, much like the Black Knight in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” who won’t give up, even when his arms and legs have been chopped off.
“’Tis but a scratch,” he says after King Arthur severs his right arm.
“It’s just a flesh wound,” he insists as he loses the other arm.
“I’m invincible!” he yells after losing his left leg, to which Arthur replies: “You’re a loony.”
The psychology of the nation, six weeks since the election, is encapsulated in that 1975 movie scene.
On Trump’s side, in his fruitless efforts to overturn the election result, are most of the 74.2 million Americans who voted for him, along with 126 House Republicans who signed on to the Texas lawsuit rejected by the US Supreme Court last week.
Most of the rest of the country thinks they’re all loonies.
This damaging divide won’t be resolved by Biden moving into the White House, no matter how much he talks about “unity.”
When 62 percent of Republicans are convinced it is “very likely the Democrats stole the election,” according to a Rasmussen poll, and 28 percent of independents and 17 percent of Democrats agree, “Houston, we have a problem.”
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, put it best in Wednesday’s “Examining Irregularities in the 2020 Election” hearing:
“This is not a sustainable state of affairs in our democratic republic.”
It is clear to reasonable people that something was fishy about this unusual election, conducted during a pandemic.
Where people differ is whether the fishiness was enough to change the election result and, even if it was, whether it is possible to prove.
Trump would have to overturn at least 44,000 votes in three states — Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin — a high bar made insurmountable by a pile of failed lawsuits.
The rational choice is to move on and not jeopardize the two all-important Georgia Senate runoff races on Jan. 5, which will determine whether Biden can enact radical change.
White House trade adviser Peter NavarroEPA/Chris Kleponis/POOL
But where everyone ought to agree is that a thorough investigation is needed to ensure public faith in the integrity of future elections.
To that end, renowned economist and White House trade adviser Peter Navarro has conducted a forensic analysis of reported election irregularities and distilled his findings into a 35-page report to be released Thursday.
Navarro has collated allegations in battleground states — ranging from outright voter fraud and ballot mishandling to statistical anomalies — contained in 50 lawsuits and judicial rulings, thousands of affidavits and declarations, and testimony from state hearings.
He concludes that “patterns of election irregularities . . . are so consistent across the six battleground states that they suggest a coordinated strategy to, if not steal the election, strategically game the election process in such a way as to . . . unfairly tilt the playing field in favor of the Biden-Harris ticket.”
Some of the material in the report is questionable, particularly about voting machines.
Far-fetched tales by lawyer Sidney Powell about a plot by Hugo Chavez, George Soros, Hillary Clinton and sundry Communists to rig voting machines manufactured by the Dominion Voting Systems company have poisoned that well.
But plenty in the report is credible.
For instance, it cites affidavits alleging exploitation of the elderly and infirm.
In one case, the family of an elderly man in a Georgia nursing home discovered that a mail-in ballot had been requested and submitted in his name without his consent.
In Pennsylvania, two parents and their Down syndrome-afflicted daughter “discovered that a mail-in ballot had both been requested and submitted for the daughter without her consent.”
But these instances, while disturbing, can’t change the election result.
Where the report is most compelling is in its thesis that, under cover of the pandemic, Democrats and allied voting-rights activist organizations managed to get voter ID requirements relaxed to such an extent that widespread ballot harvesting or outright fraud was able to occur without detection.
For example, the report cites 130,000 questionable votes in Wisconsin due to relaxed voter ID requirements for “indefinitely confined” voters who said they were unable to get to the polls in person. These voters were seen “attending weddings, riding their bikes, going on vacation and otherwise [being] anything but confined.” Yet they evaded the rigorous ID checks required for in-person voting.
The number of “indefinitely confined” voters in Wisconsin almost tripled from 2019 to 2020, when 200,000 people took advantage of relaxed voter ID laws due to the pandemic.
“This 130,000-vote increment of new indefinitely confined voters is more than five times the Biden victory margin in Wisconsin.”
Across battleground states, relaxed ID requirements for mail-in and absentee ballots “disproportionately benefited [Biden] because President Trump had a much higher percentage of in-person voters.”
The report also cites indications of ballot harvesting — for instance, 25,000 ballots requested from nursing home residents in Pennsylvania at the same time.
In Nevada, it claims Native Americans were “bribed” to vote by Biden operatives with Visa gift cards, jewelry and other swag.
Perhaps the biggest “tell” that something was amiss was the obstruction of Republican poll watchers in Georgia, Michigan and Pennsylvania, where they claim they were denied entry to ballot-counting centers or “directed to stand at unreasonably lengthy distances from ballot counters.”
Whether or not you think the skepticism of half the country is “loony,” only a bipartisan and transparent investigation of these allegations will allow the country to move on with some semblance of the “unity” Biden claims to desire.
This column originally appeared in the New York Post.
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