Benko: Ballot Fraud? Voter Suppression? Not So Fast!
Christine Walker, county clerk for Jackson County, Oregon, at a recent public talk before the Government Blockchain Association, pointed out how many of her counterparts, county and local officials, are retiring.
These local officials are doing their job of carefully counting ballots, as they do every election year. They are leaving, in droves, because they are sick of, and sickened by, ungrounded accusations from those who believe the 2020 election was stolen. Threats, even.
Not so fast. We voters are a lot smarter than the political elites think!
As I wrote here at The Western Journal, the “stolen election” isn’t a Big Lie. It’s a Little Fib. Let’s update.
I am an attorney who has been involved in politics for over half a century, occasionally right down to the ballot box level. As Ms. Walker told me, “There are always onesies and twosies [of ballot fraud], not enough to change the outcomes. And we are always on the lookout for ballot fraud. Always.”
No one has presented me with convincing evidence of game-changing election irregularities in 2020. Considering how spectacularly the Republicans outperformed expectations in 2020 down-ballot, the claim of outcomes-changing ballot fraud is implausible. If the Donks were going to “steal an election,” they would have gone whole hog.
Didn’t happen! Pachyderms (and sensible Donks) cleaned the progressives’ clocks, much to the left’s dismay, as I pointed out at the time.
Some, mostly minor, ballot-tampering has been part of American elections since George Washington left the building, from the first contested presidential elections of 1796 (John Adams) and 1800 (Thomas Jefferson). These races were described by the Constitutional Rights Foundation as plagued by “intense rivalries, political disputes, and attempted manipulations of the Electoral College.”
And as Jill Lepore wrote in a piece for The New Yorker in 2016 called “How to Steal an Election”:
“The rise of the primary was a triumph for Progressive reformers, who believed that primaries would make elections more accountable to the will of the people. That didn’t quite come to pass. Instead, primaries became part of the Jim Crow-era disenfranchisement of newer members of the electorate.
…
“The end of Reconstruction saw the rise of the secret ballot, which, by effectively introducing a literacy requirement, disenfranchised black men. If the Emancipation Proclamation ended the electoral advantage granted to Southern whites by the three-fifths clause, the secret ballot restored it. In Louisiana, black-voter registration dropped from 130,000 in 1898 to 5,300 in 1908 to 730 in 1910.”
Or as H.L. Mencken, the “Sage of Baltimore,” wrote in “Notes on Democracy”:
“I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing. Does it exalt dunderheads, cowards, trimmers, frauds, cads? Then the pain of seeing them go up is balanced and obliterated by the joy of seeing them come down. Is it inordinately wasteful, extravagant, dishonest? Then so is every other form of government: all alike are enemies to laborious and virtuous men. Is rascality at the very heart of it? Well, we have borne that rascality since 1776, and continue to survive. In the long run, it may turn out that rascality is necessary to human government, and even to civilization itself — that civilization, at bottom, is nothing but a colossal swindle.”
So let’s belay the mass hysteria. What’s really going on?
As I wrote at Newsmax two years ago, predicting a Biden victory about three months before Election Day:
“Almost none of the factors that Pundits, Talking Heads, and we Political insiders use to predict the outcome of elections matter. Not polls. Not campaign strategies. Not Super PACs. Not clever commercials such as Bill Moyer’s anti-Goldwater Daisy Girl nor Lee Atwater’s anti-Dukakis Willy Horton. Not FiveThirtyEight-style statistical analysis. Not Russian troll farms. Not Cambridge Analytica.
All that matters is what we-the-voters care about. No matter how cleverly political operatives spin things, we voters are fully capable of figuring out the truth. And we vote according to our values and our interests. Not campaign rhetoric or media stray voltage.”
And, as it turns out, claims that ballot fraud or voter suppression materially contributed to the outcome of the last presidential election, or is likely to contribute to the outcome of the next, fall somewhere between superstition and pious fraud.
Doubt it? Then please explain how Allan Lichtman, using his “13 Keys to the White House,” has correctly called the popular vote in every presidential race since 1982 (including Trump’s 2016 upset victory and Biden’s 2020 win), retrospectively correlating the winners back to 1860.
What’s really going on? Both parties like to “work the ref” to their imagined advantage. The Pachyderms cry “ballot fraud.” The Donks, “voter suppression.”
Just politics. Don’t fall for it.
And a word to my MAGA readers? Stop hippie-punching innocent election officials.
The views expressed in this opinion article are those of their author and are not necessarily either shared or endorsed by the owners of this website. If you are interested in contributing an Op-Ed to The Western Journal, you can learn about our submission guidelines and process here.
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