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(Amanda Fiore / The McGill Tribune)
As we said in our previous post, American democracy is under assault. This attack has been going on for decades and on many fronts. But the most devastating attack is the assault on truth, mainly by President Trump and his allies. As Barack Obama said, “…most importantly, and most disconcertingly, what we’ve seen is what some people call ‘truth decay,’ something that’s been accelerated by outgoing President Trump, the sense that not only do we not have to tell the truth, but the truth doesn’t even matter.”
Why is this so important? Democracy (government of the people, by the people and for the people) depends on trust. As Ryan Sullivan wrote in 2018 –”Maintaining a democracy requires that people believe that the system works. They need to believe that their votes are counted properly and actually matter in choosing political representatives. They need to believe that the government is working for their benefit and that all its institutions and leaders are striving to build a better nation. The people need to believe that the President is competent at making the right decisions based on available information; that Congress is passing good legislation; that judges are fair and impartial; that regulators are preventing greed and self-interest from destroying society; that our tax dollars are being put to good use and that they are generally moving towards a better future. If people don’t believe in the system, how can a democracy be expected to thrive?”
It is not the police power of the state that results in people respecting the laws of a democratic government; it is the bedrock belief in the system’s legitimacy. That trust is being eroded daily by the President of the United States.
President Trump has:
- Repeatedly lied about things small and great (The Washington Post asserts that Trump is currently making about 50 false or misleading claims a day).
- Been supporting a disinformation campaign asserting that he won the election and any evidence to the contrary is fraudulent
- Consistently undermined America’s national security institutions by arguing that they are part of a “deep state” that is undermining his presidency
- Promoted bizarre conspiracy theories
- Consistently attacked the press as the “enemy of the people”
On Sunday, November 29, 2020 Trump appeared on Fox News and made the following statements:
- Well, first of all, I have to start by saying the whole world is watching, and nobody can believe what they’re seeing. And you have leaders of countries that call me, say, that’s the most messed-up election we have ever seen. You start with these machines that have been suspect, not allowed to be used in Texas, the Dominion machines, where tremendous reports have been put out.
- Well, no, we had glitches where they moved thousands of votes from my account to Biden’s account. And these are glitches. So, they’re not glitches. They’re theft. They’re fraud, absolute fraud.
- And they did these massive dumps of votes. And, all of a sudden, I went from winning by a lot to losing by a little. And, in some cases, it took a period of time to do it.
- And that’s in Philadelphia and various areas around Philadelphia. They cheat, and they cheat like crazy. So, we have him winning Pennsylvania, but you have to allow five points for cheating. This is a terrible thing that’s happened. The mail-in ballots were — are a disaster. They sent millions and millions and millions of mail-in ballots.
And so on, non-stop. None of these statements is true. The Trump campaign has lost almost all of the cases concerning election fraud that it brought to the courts. Typical was a case brought before the Pennsylvania Appeals Court where Judge Stephanos Bibas, a Trump Appointee, said the “campaign’s claims have no merit.” The opinion, written for all three Republican judges in the special panel said, “Free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy. Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here,”
But there is something more fundamental here. Truth, itself, is proving elusive. Politico/Morning Consult conducted a tracking poll on November 6-9 and one of the more salient results was whether people believed the 2020 election was “free and fair.” Note this poll was largely conducted before the final results were “called” by the media. Democrats believed the election was free and fair by 90% to 7%; while Republicans believed it wasn’t free and fair by 60% to 28%. On the specific issue of mail-in ballot fraud, the differences between Republican views, Democrats’ views and the truth could not be starker. The chart below shows the differing beliefs of Republicans and Democrats.
Forty-three percent of Republicans believe voter fraud has been a major issue with mail-in ballots while only eleven percent of Democrats agree. But massive mail-in voter fraud is almost impossible. According to Alfred Ng, writing for CNET.com, massive fraud would require the following three steps:
- Identifying a large number of registered voters
- Intercepting the ballots
- Getting very good at forging signatures which you haven’t seen
In prior elections, the rate of overall voting fraud in the United States according to the Brennan Center was 0.0009%. The White House web-site includes a Heritage Foundation study which says “The United States has a long and unfortunate history of election fraud. The Heritage Foundation is providing a list of election fraud cases from across the country, broken down by state, where individuals were either convicted of vote fraud, or where a judge overturned the results of an election. This is not an exhaustive list but simply a sampling that demonstrates the many different ways in which fraud is committed. Preventing, deterring, and prosecuting such fraud is essential to protecting the integrity of our voting process.”
Heritage’s sampling includes 1,071 proven instances of voter fraud dating back to 1979. In the five states that used mail-in ballots before 2018, Heritage found 29 cases of attempted voter fraud by mail out of a total of about 50 million votes cast, much lower (by a factor of 10) than what the Brennan Center found above.
Thus, although 52% of all Americans thought mail-in voter fraud was a problem, the actual occurrence is 0.00005%.
On December 1, 2020, one of the President’s most loyal supporters, Attorney General William Barr, told the Associated Press that U.S. attorneys and FBI agents have been working to follow up specific complaints and information they’ve received, but “to date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”
Thus, despite not winning any important court case challenging the election results, despite the Attorney General’s blanket statement above, and despite the statement of Chris Crebs, the Homeland Security official in charge of protecting the election that the 2020 election was “the most secure in American history,” President Trump and his allies continue to push the big lie that he actually won the 2020 presidential election, and that it has been massive fraud that has led to states certifying Biden as the winner.
As of this date thirty-eight states (including the battleground states Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, Minnesota, Iowa, Arizona and Wisconsin) have certified their election results. The 2020 election is over. My next post will talk in some detail of the damage Trump’s assault on truth has created.
Leah Millis / Reuters