Friday, November 6, 2020

The Trump campaign’s fraud claims are unfounded

 

The refrain from state officials is consistent: The Trump campaign’s fraud claims are unfounded

We should begin any consideration of President Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was riddled with fraud with the context that Trump has been making similar claims without evidence for five years and, for months, has telegraphed his intention to claim that any loss in this year’s contest was a function of dishonesty. He is the president who has repeatedly cried wolf — but who also said for months that he was going to cry wolf. And now he is saying there’s a wolf.

Georgia Secretary of State Ben Raffensperger holds a news conference on the status of ballot counting on Friday in Atlanta. (Jessica McGowan/Getty Images)© Jessica Mcgowan/Getty Images Georgia Secretary of State Ben Raffensperger holds a news conference on the status of ballot counting on Friday in Atlanta. (Jessica McGowan/Getty Images)

The rationale for doing this is obvious. It’s becoming increasingly clear that Trump lost the election, by about the same electoral-vote margin he won four years ago but with a much greater loss of popular vote. If his goal is to stay in office at any cost, he has got to do something to undercut the results. So this is his play, as he said it would be.

His allies and enablers, predictably, are lining up to support him. Instead of demonstrating fraud, though, they’re simply alleging it and using those allegations as their case. Former ambassador Ric Grenell, for example, was asked by MSNBC on Thursday for evidence of his claims about fraud in Nevada, and he insisted that the reporters ask Nevada officials, as though simply because he said something the media was supposed to consider it believable by default. That’s not how such things work. If I say that you are a space alien, it’s not sufficient for me to demand that any skeptics bother you to answer questions about it. Also, Michigan has been called for Biden.

Regardless, we have heard from officials in Nevada and elsewhere on the subject. Their response to questions about fraud is uniform: There’s no evidence it exists at any significant scale, if at all.

Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford said in an interview on Thursday that he rejected the idea that the election was riddled with fraud.

“We need to trust the process and finish it out,” he said of the election. “Rest assured, again, that we have people here who know how to run fair, safe and secure elections, and voter fraud is a very minimal occurrence.”

As is the case in other states, there are observers from both parties in the room as votes are counted.

In Georgia, a spokesman for Secretary of State Ben Raffensperger similarly dismissed the idea that fraud was occurring.

“These are 159 elections directors and employees who are here to do the job of protecting democracy,” he said. “When you go to talk to them, they think about that. They think about the votes of every person in this room and around the country. These people are not involved in voter fraud. These people are not involved in voter suppression. I’m telling you, they are doing their jobs every day. It is hard, and we are thankful to them for it, and we are going to work with them to make sure that every legal, lawful ballot is counted.”

Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs said something similar in an interview on CNBC.

“There is absolutely no merit to any claims of widespread voter fraud in Arizona,” she said. “There is no evidence to back it up, and it is not something that we’ve experienced here.”

“Poll workers, their job is to maintain the integrity of the election at each polling site,” she added later. “They’re such an important part of the process. And they are employees who are hired by the counties, and they’re required to uphold the laws in terms of elections.”

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel spoke to a local television station reinforcing the integrity of the vote in her state.

“We feel very confident that the election was conducted appropriately and that it was fair and transparent and the results accurately display who really won the election here in the states of Michigan,” she said.

Asked if she had seen any credible evidence of fraud, Nessel said she hadn’t.

“I will say this: The system truly works,” Nessel said. “There are so many protocols in place. There are so many measures so that if there are efforts at any kind of election fraud we usually catch those right away. And we do have a handful of cases that we’re prosecuting right now involving attempts to do something fraudulent involving the election.”

She used an analogy to reinforce that point.

“We catch people when they do that,” she said of attempts to commit fraud. “It’s kind of like robbing a bank. I’m not saying that no one ever tries to rob a bank, but I am saying that almost always that person gets caught and then prosecuted. And we certainly don’t say, well, we can’t have banks anymore because sometimes people try to rob them.”

It’s worth noting that former vice president Joe Biden won Michigan by nearly 140,000 votes, a massive number that by itself precludes the idea that somehow systemic fraud occurred.

In an interview with Republican Party chair Ronna McDaniel, Fox News’s Bret Baier raised that point. McDaniel urged patience as the allegations the Trump campaign and the party have been scrambling to collect are investigated. (In that CNBC interview, Hobbs said that her office had been “flooded with calls and emails” but that there were no specific credible reports to her knowledge.)

“We agree with you, and we want to look into everything as well,” Baier said to McDaniel about investigating allegations. “But we just haven’t seen it. You know, it hasn’t been presented. There’s all kinds of stuff flying on the Internet, but we when to look into it, it doesn’t pan out.”

McDaniel’s response? Let’s wait and see.

Meanwhile, state officials are looking and seeing nothing, even in Pennsylvania, where — thanks to the current vote margin and the number of electoral votes at play — allegations have been most fervent. There, Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar was asked whether she had seen evidence of fraud during a news conference.

“I’m not aware of any — ” she said, before catching herself. “I mean, well, I should say, you probably heard some weeks ago that there was a gentleman in Luzerne County who tried to apply for a ballot for his deceased mother? I don’t know if you heard that. But that was several weeks ago. That was the only incident that I am aware of in this year.”

Aha! There was fraud: a guy in Northeastern Pennsylvania who might have wanted to cast a ballot for his dead mother.

We should point out that the officials undercutting Trump’s claims aren’t all Democrats. Republican state officials may find themselves in something of a bind, having to choose between defending the president and defending their constituents. That’s made easier, of course, when reality has weighed in.

Sen. Patrick J. Toomey (R-Pa.) was asked about Trump’s claims on Friday morning.

“There is simply no evidence that anybody has shown me, or anyone else I’m aware of, of any kind of corruption or fraud,” he said about the results in his state. He later added that legal fights over the distance observers must maintain when watching vote counting are “not proof that there’s widespread fraud or theft. It’s not likely at all.”

The politics are pretty simple for Toomey, particularly given that Trump is likely to lose after being rejected by Toomey’s state. That’s also why the politics are similarly simple for Trump: tossing a massive fraud Hail Mary pass as the clock winds down is the only play he’s got.

Unfortunately for him, he has no receivers in the end zone.

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