Understanding Election Integrity: Election Deniers, or Fraud Deniers?
A veteran policy expert compares the US Election process to the norms of International elections to illustrate the integrity issues we face and highlight the partisan double standard
Guest post by Tim Meisburger
In the run up to the 2022 midterm elections, Democrat party leaders and their allies in the media are labeling any voters who express any level of doubt about the integrity of the 2020 elections as “election deniers”. They call the claim that fraud may have affected the 2020 elections “the Big Lie”, thereby suggesting that any voters who question the integrity of the 2020 election are akin to Nazis.
Interestingly, recent surveys indicate a majority of Americans now believe it likely that cheating affected the 2020 elections (including more than a third of Democrats), and more than half think cheating at least somewhat likely to affect the mid-terms. Are all of these doubters really Nazis? I have my doubts. Actually, I also have doubts about the integrity of the 2020 elections.
I spent most of my working life overseas, evaluating the quality and fairness of elections, and providing democracy and elections assistance in authoritarian one-party states for the United Nations, the OSCE, various NGOs, and the US Government. Currently, I am the Director for Election Integrity at the America Project, and in recent weeks I have been interviewed by email by both Reuters and the New York Times. They subsequently wrote articles characterizing the America Project as “election deniers”, but neither mentioned me or my credentials (ABC also did a piece recently on the America Project, and did mention me, but never actually contacted me).
Since my rationale for doubting the 2020 election wasn’t articulated by the traditional media, I thought I would do it myself, applying the same standards I would as an international election observer overseas.
First, international observers know that you cannot evaluate the quality of an election based solely on what happens on election day, as there are many things that can occur before an election that will affect the integrity and fairness of the process. Consequently, an observer might evaluate the pre-election environment by looking all the way back to 2016, when the Obama White House and the FBI conspired to spy on an opposition party campaign (shades of Watergate).
The same year the Hillary Clinton campaign, in collaboration with corrupt officials in the FBI, paid foreign agents to concoct the infamous Steel dossier, which was used to both distract the public from scandals surrounding the Clinton campaign, and to smear her political opponent in the runup to elections. Although this disinformation campaign surely reduced Donald Trump’s total votes in 2016, its impact was insufficient to deny him the presidency, so it was subsequently re-purposed to undermine the Trump Administration.
When the “Pee Tape” narrative lost traction, many of the same bad actors came up with the Ukraine hoax and impeachment, which again served a dual purpose by undermining the Trump presidency, while diverting attention from corrupt behavior of other politicians involved in shady business deals in Ukraine.
Throughout the President’s term left wing activists launched hoax after hoax, which the corrupt media eagerly and uncritically disseminated and amplified. These included the Kavanaugh hoax, the Smollett hoax, the Charlottesville hoax, the Covington hoax, the Russian bounties on US soldiers hoax, etc. One by one, these were disproven, but the propaganda media never acknowledged this. Instead, the issue simply disappeared, replaced in the news cycle by the next unfounded allegation. Finally, just before the election, corrupt media outlets colluded with the FBI, big tech, and former intelligence officials to suppress and censor any information about the Biden family corruption revealed when Biden’s drug-addled son forgot his laptop at a computer repair shop.
All of these illegal and immoral acts, conducted by partisan activists, propaganda media outlets, corrupt government officials, and unaccountable corporations, aimed to remove the president, or undermine his ability to implement the people’s agenda, or reduce his chances of reelection. In any election I ever observed overseas, facts like these would cause a nonpartisan international election observer to doubt the fairness of the pre-election environment.
In the months preceding the election, many last-minute changes were made to election processes at the state level in response to the Covid pandemic. These included changing standards for voter registration and voter ID, extending the voting period, allowing billionaires to privately fund election processes, allowing universal absentee voting through mail in ballots and drop boxes. Overseas, covid adaptation was accomplished at in-person voting through masks and social distancing.
An international observer of American elections might notice that, beyond masks and social distancing, all of the diverse adaptations adopted for Covid had one thing in common; they all reduced the safeguards and security of the election process.
On election day itself, and in the days following, there were many events reported that might have caused international observers to question the integrity of the election. For example, there were many reports and some video of poll watchers being prevented from observing the election process. If prevention of observation occurred during an international observation mission it would be all team leaders needed to conclude the process unverifiable, as transparency is the key to credible elections.
During the counting process there were seemingly coordinated pauses in the counting in key battleground states, and after the counting resumed there were unexplained vote dumps and spikes in the totals for Biden that moved him from losing to winning. These seemed suspicious to ordinary voters, and might cause an international observer to question the integrity of the counting process.
To help assess the quality of elections overseas, organizations like the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute worked with the National Academy of Sciences to develop statistical tools that would reveal fraud in election processes. When these are applied to the 2020 elections, they indicate fraud occurred. Other statisticians compared results in neighboring districts and in some cases found massive differences in results, even though the populations were demographically identical. This type of statistical evidence would probably prevent an international observation mission from judging an election overseas as free and fair.
In the weeks and months following the election, other evidence emerged suggesting fraud and malpractice occurred during the election process. Analysis of private funding provided to state election officials for get-out-the-vote activities revealed that almost all of it went to Democrat-leaning districts. Recently, a comprehensive study used geo-tracking of cell phones and surveillance video to reveal a coordinated effort across many states to stuff drop boxes with presumably fraudulent absentee votes.
Although there is more, given the evidence already cited, it would not be surprising if an international election observer had doubts about the integrity of the 2020 elections. Should he or she be called an “election denier”?
Should Stacey Abrams, Elizabeth Warren, and Kamala Harris, all of whom expressed doubt about the integrity of the 2018 elections, be called “election deniers”? What about Hillary Clinton, who denied the legitimacy of the 2016 election, and recently preemptively denied the legitimacy of the 2022 midterms? Is she an “election denier”?
Currently, the label is only applied to the ordinary Democrat, Independent and Republican voters who express doubt about 2020 election. Does it really make sense for Democrat party leaders, and their allies and minions in the corporations and propaganda media, to call all of these people, more than half of all voters, Nazi purveyors of the Big Lie? Or would it be more accurate to label those in the minority—the administration, much of Congress, the FBI, the CIA, big tech and the propaganda media—people who are surrounded by and enveloped in evidence of election corruption but refuse to see or acknowledge it, fraud deniers?
The post OPED: People Like Joe Biden Who Are Enveloped in Evidence of Election Corruption but Refuse to Acknowledge it Are the Real Fraud Deniers appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
