GOP Election Fraud Deniers Face Reckoning

By Julie Kelly January 25, 2021 American Greatness

One cannot simultaneously defend the integrity of the 2020 election and demand new laws to ensure election integrity.

So here’s the official company line promoted by establishment Republicans to defend the outcome of the 2020 presidential election: Of course the election had some irregularities like all elections but nothing that would change the result and, by the way, the country needs some major election integrity reform before this happens again.

The doublespeak designed to refute what election fraud deniers call “the big lie” was best expressed over the weekend by Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor, failed presidential candidate, and now paid ABC News shill. While attempting to shame fellow Republicans for bolstering Donald Trump’s complaints about how the election was handled in states that flipped to Joe Biden in 2020, Christie falsely claimed there wasn’t any evidence of vote fraud. “I don’t think there’s any question that the country needs to focus on in terms of our elections is making sure we have some effective electoral reform . . . we need to make the system better for 2022,” Christie told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos on Sunday. “But this election was not stolen.”

Others have set up a similar trap for themselves. Just hours before the so-called “insurrection” began, ex-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) slammed his GOP colleagues planning to protest the results and demand an election audit. Like Christie, McConnell defended the integrity of the election while supporting election reform at the state level. “Last year’s bizarre pandemic procedures must not become the new norm,” McConnell lectured January 6.

Which raises the question—why not?

If the 2020 election was legitimate and, as McConnell and others insist, featured no evidence of decisive fraud outside the normally acceptable level of illegalities, then why should anything change?

Tens of millions of mail-in ballots without signature verification or documented chain of custody or other legally required proof should indeed be the “new norm” if their analysis is to be believed. Election Day will last not weeks but months; every voter will receive an absentee ballot, even those who didn’t request one, and it can be returned past Election Day without a postmark or delivered to drop-boxes manned by partisans in deep blue counties and cities.

Unelected government bureaucrats can override state election laws with impunity. Republican observers will be kept far from the counting process. Judges, motivated either by fear or malice, will refuse to consider lawsuits that carefully detail the unlawfulness. Even the United States Supreme Court will insist states that properly followed the Constitution in administering their own elections lack any “standing” to sue other states that did not follow the Constitution.

This is the conundrum created by election fraud deniers in the GOP. One cannot simultaneously defend the integrity of the 2020 election and call for new laws to ensure election integrity. It’s an exercise in cognitive dissonance, a self-own as the kids would say, that will backfire one way or another. By refusing over the past few months to acknowledge, let alone address, provable instances of voter fraud, Republicans now find themselves between a rock and a hard place.

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