A Little Bit Fraudulent
Others have pointed this out, but it bears repeating. With regard to the 2020 presidential election, we’ve gone from supporters of the outcome saying, “there’s no fraud” to “there’s no widespread fraud” to “there’s not enough fraud to change the outcome”.
That concept of “there’s no widespread fraud” reminds me of the old saying, “you can’t be a little pregnant”. Pregnant is pregnant. And fraud is fraud.
From a legal standpoint, cases may be rendered moot if a decision will not alter the status of the parties; it’s a waste of a court’s time, in other words, to rule on something that has no impact. That’s the concept behind “there’s not enough fraud to change the outcome”.
That alone, the level of fraud, is in question. But beyond that, we’re talking about the most sacred part of our representative democracy…election of those representatives. If we don’t have confidence in that, the foundation for the whole thing is broken.
It’s hard, if not impossible, to do…but we really need to separate the issue of President Trump from all this. There are clear voting irregularities that Trump haters are willing to ignore because they got the outcome they wanted. Some are based on bad rules, such as not requiring signature matches on absentee ballots. Some are based on flawed premises, such as vote by mail. Regardless, citizens need to demand that they be reviewed and confidence in the system restored.
Seems like we do things pretty well here in Iowa, but there’s always room for improvement, especially as our ever-more-fractured electorate provides closer and closer elections. But Iowa is not the problem. And citizens of states that do have problems need to do more than simply point to their “I Voted” stickers and say they’ve done all they could.
