The Left’s Attack on the Secret Ballot and on Same Day voting

I do not myself believe that there was fraud in the counting of ballots or voting machine malfunctions. I do believe, however, that the unprecedented use of mail in voting over a period of many weeks, with the loss of the secret ballot, and drop boxes, produced a fundamentally illegitimate Biden victory in 2020 in Pennsylvania and elsewhere. I simply do not believe that in an honestly held traditionally run presidential election that Joe Biden would get 181,866 more votes for President in 2020 in Pennsylvania than Barack Obama got in 2008.

As a result, many Republicans, myself included, thought that the 2020 presidential election was probably stolen, even though that fact could not be proved in a court of law. President Trump himself did not claim right after the election that mail in voting and the loss of the secret ballot had altered the vote count in the 2020 election. He waited for two weeks and asked for hopeless recounts instead. No recount in Pennsylvania was ever going to erase an 80,555 Biden lead in votes counted at the polls. The margins Trump lost by in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Arizona were simply too big to change after endless recounts. Some Republicans, including me, therefore acquiesced in Joe Biden taking office because we thought we had to do that to preserve a facade of democracy absent concrete proof of vote fraud.  But deep down in our guts we thought that Joe Biden’s campaign had probably won with dirty tricks, although that could not proved in a court of law.

We did not side with President Trump on January 6, 2021 because we did not want the GOP controlled state legislatures of Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, and Arizona to declare Trump re-elected given the returns at the polls. The question was what outcome was worse for our democracy? Going by the probably fraud-infested vote count on Election Day or letting state legislators pick the President, which had never before been done in American history. Reluctantly, we went along with allowing Joe Biden to be crowned the winner based on the fraud infested vote count on election day, but we felt then and will always feel that Biden may well have been an illegitimate President.

We disapproved of Trump’s behavior on January 6, 2021, not because his claim of election fraud was wrong, but because he as President did not articulate this claim in anything remotely resembling  a compelling way nor did he call on his supporters to forgo violence in the way of a Martin Luther King or a Mahatma Gandhi, and as a result five people died in a riot. The election fraud that wrongly cost Trump his victory in 2020 was caused by mail in voting, drop boxes for ballots, and the loss of the secret ballot. President Trump’s mistake was in not complaining much more loudly before the vote was counted that the rules of the game had been rigged against him to produce an undemocratic outcome.

via reason.com

Steve Calabresi.

Well, you know where Steve stands now.