It's time to move on from the presidential election and cease amplifying baseless Trump campaign claims [editorial]
THE LNP | LANCASTERONLINE EDITORIAL BOARD
THE ISSUE
“A group of Republican lawmakers on Friday amplified a baseless conspiracy theory alleging a Venezuelan-backed effort to undermine the 2020 election by manipulating the software in one company’s voting machines to take votes from President Donald Trump,” Mike Wereschagin of the LNP Media Group watchdog publication The Caucus reported Sunday. “Interim House State Government Committee Chairman Seth Grove called a press conference in the Ryan Office Building in Harrisburg to chastise election system manufacturer Dominion Voting Systems for backing out of a public hearing scheduled for Friday.” Joe Biden’s margin over Trump in Pennsylvania: more than 80,000 votes.
We remain deeply mystified by the efforts of Republicans — including otherwise sensible lawmakers in Pennsylvania — to question the 2020 election.
We’re especially bewildered that the Dominion voting system conspiracy theory has gotten any traction here.
As Wereschagin reported, part of the conspiracy theory against Dominion “emerged on right-wing media and blog sites and has since been adopted by Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.” It “alleges Dominion machines deleted 941,000 Trump votes in Pennsylvania.”
That, Wereschagin pointed out, is a “mathematical impossibility.”
He wrote: “About 1.3 million votes were cast on Dominion machines in Pennsylvania. The total voter registration in the counties that use Dominion machines is 1,751,401, according to state data.
“There couldn’t possibly be 941,000 deleted votes because, factored back into the results, they’d add up to nearly half a million more registered voters than actually exist in those counties.”
Moreover, Wereschagin noted, “the answers to many of the questions the Republicans claimed they needed from Dominion are already available on the Department of State’s website or are the purview of county elections officials.”
These facts did not keep state Sen. Ryan Aument of Mount Joy from tweeting Friday that he was “disappointed” Dominion chose “to let these allegations go unanswered — a decision that only perpetuates distrust.”
Aument, who just was reelected as secretary of the state Senate Republican Caucus, is a fair-minded and pragmatic politician whose political hero is Democrat Robert F. Kennedy. We have found him to be a stand-up person and lawmaker.
So we found Aument’s decision to amplify Grove’s concerns about Dominion puzzling. Because they are baseless.
Even Grove seemed to allow for that possibility. “There are broad accusations,” he said. “I didn’t say they were true.”
We would think someone as smart and reasonable as Aument would want to be precise in his language regarding Dominion.
Especially as the Dominion conspiracy theory, as Wereschagin noted, is a creation of right-wing social media.
In its most bizarre incarnation, voiced by lawyer Sidney Powell at a news conference staged by Trump’s legal team last week, the debunked theory supposedly involves Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez (who died in 2013), communist money and — because no conspiracy theory would be complete without him — liberal philanthropist George Soros. (Even Trump’s campaign disavowed its connection to Powell on Sunday.)
The comments from Grove and Aument must be set against a backdrop of the president and his allies seeking, as Wereschagin put it, “to undermine faith in the American democratic system in order to sow doubt about the validity of an election he lost.”
This is what Grove said of Dominion’s decision not to take part in a public hearing Friday: “If they have nothing to hide, why are they hiding from us?”
This is what social scientists call framing a question with bias.
Grove also said this: “Pennsylvanians could have been put at ease. Instead, we walk away more skeptical.”
But, as Wereschagin pointed out, a Nov. 12 statement from the federal Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency makes it clear that such skepticism is groundless.
Said that agency: “The Nov. 3 election was the most secure in American history. ... All of the states with close results in the 2020 presidential race have paper records of each vote, allowing the ability to go back and count each ballot if necessary. This is an added benefit for security and resilience. ... There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.” (The bold lettering was the agency’s.)
Efforts by the Trump campaign to make the case in court that the president was robbed have been downright embarrassing. And they all seem aimed at disenfranchising legitimate voters, which is the very opposite of democracy.
In a scathing ruling this weekend, U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann pointed out that the plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed by the Trump campaign sought to discard nearly 7 million votes legally cast in Pennsylvania.
“One might expect," Brann wrote, "that when seeking such a startling outcome, a plaintiff would come formidably armed with compelling legal arguments and factual proof of rampant corruption. ... That has not happened.
“Instead,” the judge wrote, “this Court has been presented with strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations, unpled in the operative complaint and unsupported by evidence. In the United States of America, this cannot justify the disenfranchisement of a single voter, let alone all the voters of its sixth most populated state. Our people, laws, and institutions demand more.”
Brann was appointed by President Barack Obama, but “is regarded as a conservative judge,” Politico reported, noting that Brann had been selected by Republican U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey and “served as a regional Republican Party chairman in Pennsylvania for about a decade before being nominated to the federal bench.”
Toomey issued this statement in response to the ruling: “With this decision by Judge Matthew Brann, a longtime conservative Republican whom I know to be a fair and unbiased jurist, to dismiss the Trump campaign’s lawsuit, President Trump has exhausted all plausible legal options to challenge the result of the presidential race in Pennsylvania. ... I congratulate President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris on their victory. They are both dedicated public servants and I will be praying for them and for our country.”
The Trump campaign has filed a legal request to stay the effects of the impending certification of Pennsylvania’s vote, but legal observers say the campaign’s efforts are pretty much kaput in the commonwealth.
Meanwhile, as PennLive.com reported, state Legislative Budget and Finance Committee officers voted Monday against performing the “risk-limiting” audit that was ordered by a resolution championed by state House Speaker Bryan Cutler, of Peach Bottom.
The election is over.
While insisting he would yet prevail (he will not), the president himself tweeted Monday evening that he has authorized his administration to begin the “initial protocols” of a transition to a Biden administration.
It is time for officials in Harrisburg as well as Washington, D.C., to move on to the essential business of addressing the pandemic surge — not least because there will need to be an effective distribution of COVID-19 vaccines in the new year.
After these past several weeks, American democracy may need a booster shot, too.
