The reasons are several, and we’ll try to explain.
The reasons are several. Lawmakers should pass reforms that would reassure the public of election integrity in the future.
N ow that Joe Biden has won the Electoral College vote, many readers have asked us how lawsuits challenging the presidential results were rejected by dozens of courts. We’ll try to explain a few reasons.
In an election for any other office, it’s possible to conduct a full investigation. But in this presidential race, all 50 states by law had to certify their results by December 8. Then the Electoral College was set to meet on December 14 to elect the president.
That’s a very short time window in which to collect clear evidence of fraud or irregularities great enough to change the outcome, to file lawsuits, and then to have them decided. The result would then go to a Supreme Court highly reluctant to get involved in a presidential race after its disputed role in the Bush-v.-Gore recount in 2000.
The other obstacle Trump lawyers faced was that he would have had to overturn results in three or more states to win the required 270 electoral votes. That was very difficult — Bush v. Gore involved only Florida. Plus some Trump lawyers hurt their case by filing easily ridiculed and error-filled briefs.
Then there are the media. Reporters who spent countless resources on the dry hole that Trump colluded with the Russians in the 2016 election showed a complete lack of curiosity over both voter fraud and the now-revived Hunter Biden scandal.
When Trump ally Elizabeth Harrington told CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour ,“I would love if you guys would start doing that digging and start doing that verification,” she was shot down.
“No, we’re not going to do your work for you,” Amanpour snapped.
“That’s a journalist’s job!” Harrington exclaimed. “It’s a journalist’s job to find out if this is verified.”
The Trump lawsuits may have had merit. In Georgia alone, Trump lawyers alleged, in addition to mail-in signature problems:
92 mail-in ballots cast before voters requested them
217 voters whose mail-in ballots were “applied for, issued, and received all on the same day”
395 out-of-state voters
1,043 people who claimed to live at post-office boxes
2,560 ineligible felons
10,315 dead people
66,247 voters under the age of 18
305,701 voters who requested absentee ballots after the deadline
In Georgia, Joe Biden won by fewer than 12,000 votes.
Many Democratic-appointed judges were hostile to Trump lawsuits. But even conservative judges privately knew anything they did to help prove fraud charges would be viciously attacked in the media and wouldn’t allow enough time to meet the Electoral College deadlines without creating national chaos.
That may explain some bizarre dismissals of lawsuits. David Shestokas, a Pennsylvania attorney, says a judge canceled the hearing where we was to produce evidence. Two days later, the judge dismissed the case. “Judges are generally willfully refusing to hear evidence,” Shestokas says.
In one court, Trump did come close to victory. Wisconsin’s supreme court rejected by a close vote, 4 to 3, his claims that proper procedures weren’t followed in allowing thousands of voters to cast mail-in ballots. Three justices ruled that some Trump claims had merit, but they didn’t say what the remedy should be or whether any votes should be thrown out.
Their silence speaks volumes for how concerns about fraud were handled this year. To paraphrase the old saying: “See no evil, hear no evil, don’t even suggest evil.”
In the future, reforms must be made to ensure that the public believes in the integrity of the election. Many don’t believe that the 2020 election was fair. A Quinnipiac poll released on December 9 found that 38 percent of Americans believe that the election was marred by widespread fraud. That included 35 percent of independents and 77 percent of Republicans.
Needed reforms include requirements for a government photo ID to vote by mail (people could send a photocopy or smartphone image), as in Kansas and Alabama currently.
States should use Department of Homeland Security records to check the citizenship of registered voters.
Absentee ballots should go only to voters who request them — there should be no automatic mailing of such ballots to all registered voters, because those lists are filled with people who have moved or died or are ineligible.
The computer software used in voting machines must be shared with election officials and available to the public in court cases.
Abuses, incompetence, and, yes, alleged fraud made the 2020 election suspect. Too bad Trump exaggerated his claims, failed to address some of the election’s ticking time bombs in court before the election, and took on lawyers unsuited to the task. Those errors, plus the fact that the media and courts often didn’t do their jobs, doomed his effort.