Opinion: No amount of voter fraud will change outcome of the Nov. 3rd election

By JIM BROOKS
Nelson County Gazette

Tuesday, Nov. 10, 2020 — While votes in the 2020 presidential election are still being counted — and litigated — the one thing that’s clear is that Vice President Joe Biden will the our country’s 46th president.

While I didn’t vote for Biden, the writing is on the wall. You win some, you lose some.

“But what about all the voter fraud? The unsigned ballots? The absentee ballots that weren’t postmarked or were allegedly improperly postmarked for Election Day?” you might ask.

According to some of my fellow Republicans, hundreds of thousands of illegal or otherwise improper votes were cast in several states where President Trump was initially leading in the vote. Surely Biden coming back to win those states was fraud!

Or was it?

Like you, I have heard and read scores of anecdotes of what looks like voter fraud — particularly in the hotly contested battleground states.

While I don’t doubt that some voter fraud took place, I don’t think its going to matter. Why?

For starters, to come up with sufficient numbers of fraudulent ballots, to swing the election in several states you would need to have hundreds — if not thousands — of people involved in the swindle. Can you imagine trying to trust all of those people who are “in” on the fraud, and believing that one (or more) of them won’t blow the whistle on the whole scheme? Common sense tells you that the more people who are “in” on a secret, the more difficult that secret is to keep.

And imagine the difficulty of launching an operation with the required level of fraudulent voting in several states under the noses of experienced campaign officials whose job and reputation is on the line. If you stop and think of how widespread the conspiracy would need to be to generate the hundreds of thousands of votes, its hard to believe everyone would keep that secret.

Again, let me state that I’m sure election fraud happened. My public affairs reporting professor at Western Kentucky University used to say that after every election, a newspaper should list all of the local people who died in the past couple of years, and then check the voter rolls against those obituaries to see how many dead people voted. While he may have been saying it in jest, the truth is that such voter fraud can — and does — happen, and probably happened in this election.

I agree that allegations of election fraud need to be investigated. But Trump supporters who believe that investigators will find sufficient evidence to alter the election’s outcome — or that the courts will overturn the election — are clinging to hopes that will never be realized.

The investigations of fraud should continue, but its time to acknowledge one very likely fact: It is extremely unlike that any voter fraud uncovered is going to change the outcome of the Nov. 3rd election.

And while I’m a supporter of the president, I have to acknowledge that President Trump — for the past 3-1/2 years — has too often been his own worst enemy.

I can’t count the times when I told my wife that the president would be better off if he kept his mouth shut.

Every individual who has a child or family member with special needs remembers the instance at one of his rallies when President Trump made fun of a reporter with cerebral palsy. And that’s just one of the statements he’s made that cost him votes over the past 3-1/2 years. There are dozens more that made even his most ardent supporters cringe. But we also know that’s what you got with Donald Trump, and for all his loudmouth faults, we accepted him, warts and all.

I’m sure the liberal left have been shocked at how much support the president received in this election. The polls were certainly as wrong this election as they were in 2016, which calls into question the legitimacy of any political polling. But that’s the topic of another column.

The stock markets rose right after the election, but from what I understand, the rally wasn’t because of the the prospect of Joe Biden as president. The rally was fueled by belief that the Republicans would keep control of the Senate, and that Sen. Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans will serve as firewall against Democrat’s plans for tax increases and other left-wing initiatives.

I’m in favor of divided govenrment, and so far, it appears that the GOP will most likely cling to a majority in the Senate, though that too is subject to change with the outcome of the Georgia run-off elections.

I’m encouraged by the tone that president-elect Biden is taking in his recognition that winning a close election requires him to reach across the aisle to those who did not voter for him. With a new president, I’m hopeful that both political parties can focus on bipartisan agreement on the important issues ahead of us as a country.

We’ll see.

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