Did The Democrats Steal...

 POSTED ON JANUARY 15, 2021 BY JOHN HINDERAKER to Power Line

DID THE DEMOCRATS STEAL THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION?

Democrats are making extraordinary efforts to suppress all discussion of whether Joe Biden actually won the 2020 presidential election. In fact, they go even farther: they want to suppress all discussion of the extent to which voter fraud occurred. That naturally makes me want to write about voter fraud, and who really won the election.

First, this question: why are the Democrats so hysterical in their insistence that fraud not be mentioned? One reason is obvious. Joe Biden will take office under a cloud, since close to half of all Americans doubt that he really won the election. The Democrats want to stamp out such doubts to preserve Biden’s authority as president.

But there is a second reason that may be more important. The Democrats want the lax voting procedures that prevailed in 2020 to continue in the future. They know that efforts will be made in many states to improve ballot integrity, and they want those efforts to fail. By rendering all discussion of voter fraud out of bounds, they hope to forestall reforms that would make it harder for them to cheat, or enable cheating, in the future.

So, did the Democrats steal the presidential election, or not? I don’t know the answer to that question. No one does. A number of statistical analyses have been done, which on their face suggest large irregularities. I wrote about one such analysis, by John Lott, here. 

Beyond that, major questions remain unanswered. In several key swing states, there were midnight dumps of 100,000 or more votes, virtually all of which were for Joe Biden, something that can’t normally happen. Those dumps may have made the difference in the election. I have seen no attempt by any Democrat to explain or justify them. Maybe I’ve missed it, and maybe they somehow reflected actual ballots cast, but the burden of proof is on those who seek to justify such anomalies.

Even greater doubts about the election arise from the deliberately loose procedures that governed voting. Something like 69 million mail-in votes were cast, and until two months ago, everyone agreed that mail-in voting is highly susceptible to fraud. But the laxity in 2020 went far beyond the risks inherent in mail-in votes. I put it this way: I don’t know whether the Democrats stole the 2020 election, but I do know that they tried hard to steal it.

In a number of states, including my home state of Minnesota, the Democrats pursued a coordinated strategy of collusive litigation to eliminate electoral safeguards. In Minnesota–and the same thing occurred in a number of other states–the Democratic Party recruited plaintiffs to sue the Democratic Secretary of State, asking that the statutory requirement of witness signatures on mail-in ballots be eliminated. The requirement of a witness signature is, as a practical matter, the only speed bump on the way to fraud in mail-in voting, so the Democrats wanted to get rid of it.

Of course Secretaries of State have no power to change election laws, hence the need for collusive litigation, which is one of the most sinister forms of corruption in today’s world. In Minnesota and other states, the Democratic Secretaries of State immediately “settled” the lawsuits brought “against” them by their fellow Democrats. The “settlements” simply agreed to what the Democrats wanted–no safeguards to prevent fraud in mail-in voting.

The Democrats knew how corrupt, and therefore likely to fail, this tactic was, so in my state they made sure they had two bites at the apple. They recruited two sets of plaintiffs, one in federal court and another in state court, thereby dodging res judicata if they lost the first case. The key to collusive litigation is that the “settlement” conspired at by the supposedly adverse parties is ratified by a court. In Minnesota, the federal court refused to approve the Democrats’ fraudulent “settlement,” finding no showing to justify it. But a loyal state court judge went along with the Democrats’ charade. As a result, mail-in ballots in Minnesota, as in a number of other states following similarly corrupt litigation, bore no witness signatures, in plain violation of state law. The door to fraud was wide open, as the Democrats intended.

One of the problems in assessing the 2020 election is that the same lax procedures that enable fraud in the first place also make it more or less impossible to prove after the fact. Sixty-nine million mail-in votes were cast; how many were fakes, and which ones? There is really no way to tell. Once those votes have been counted (sometimes in the absence of Republican poll-watchers, illegally excluded by Democrats from the rooms where counting was going on), there is no way to identify which ones were illegal and pull them out of the vote totals.

So at this point, neither I nor anyone else knows whether the Democrats stole the 2020 election, and we may never know. But, given the lengths to which the Democrats went in order to facilitate voter fraud, there is no reason to cut them slack in judging whether their efforts influenced the result.

No doubt, a number of people are currently investigating the election, either nationally or in particular states. (Not “journalists,” who don’t investigate anything; certainly not anything that could harm the Democratic Party.) Over the next two years, such researchers will publish books on the election. Some will argue that voter fraud swung the election to Joe Biden, while others will argue that he legitimately won, even if his vote totals were swelled by fraud. Books in the former category will have a hard time finding publishers, but someone will publish them, and lots of Americans will read them and discuss their findings. The Democrats’ efforts to suppress discussion of election integrity will fail.

What is most important is what happens next. Rightly or wrongly, Joe Biden will be our next president. We can’t change that. But, by pressing the issue of election integrity in the states, we potentially can ensure that in 2022 and succeeding elections, Americans have confidence that the candidate who got the most legal votes is the winner. To accomplish that, we will have to overcome entrenched opposition not only from the above-ground Democratic Party, but from its press auxiliary, which tries to ban any suggestion that voter fraud is a problem. We all know better, and we can’t give in to the Democrats’ crude efforts at intimidation. Election integrity must be a priority for the next two years, and in the future.