In an extraordinary interview with Maria Bartiromo of the Fox Business Network (FBN), a frustrated Donald Trump claimed that there was no way Joe Biden had secured 80 million votes to defeat him except for "massive fraud."
The president explained that he and his people had expected that he would win the election if he could secure 68 million votes (he won in 2016 with 63 million), and while he actually got at least 74 million — the highest of any president running for reelection — Biden’s 80 million appeared to secure Biden the victory.
To this day, most of the mainstream media maintains there was no evidence of fraud, and even a federal official has issued a report suggesting that there were no significant election irregularities.
How then can President Trump, and a majority of his Republican supporters, believe there was electoral chicanery?
What supports the president’s assertion that the election was stolen from him, and his belief — expressed to Ms. Bartiromo — that if the apparent Biden victory is permitted to go unchallenged no Republican has much of a chance of again being president, and even Republican Senate and House candidates may be blocked from succeeding?
The ever-Trumpers have four substantiated arguments, giving the lie to the Democrats’ and the media’s drumbeat that there was no evidence of fraud.
Still, the fact that there is evidence doesn't necessarily mean that the evidence is persuasive, and until a court so rules, or a state legislature so declares, no results will change.
It's still imperative, however, as efforts continue to get the courts and legislatures to act, to review the basis for the president’s and his supporters’ beliefs.
There are four pillars that support the president’s assertions — the use of suspect vote-counting-machines, hundreds of affidavits signed under penalty of perjury asserting fraudulent behavior on the part of election officials, statistical anomalies, and — just plain old common sense.
The president has alleged some machines (in use in several swing states) could be manipulated in a way to take votes away from him, giving them to Joe Biden.
It has also been suggested that those machines could also be used to determine how many fake ballots needed to be generated to secure a Biden-Harris victory.
It was that latter possibility, the president suggested, that accounted for the mysterious and seemingly coordinated stoppage of vote counting in urban areas in Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, and concomitant late-night arriving purportedly mailed-in ballots many of which had only votes for Biden, with no down ballot votes cast.
There have been reports that these machines and their software had been used in Venezuela to manufacture votes there, and the machines’ unreliability led Texas to reject them.
The Trump legal team, said the president, had secured signed eyewitness accounts regarding not only the (purportedly Dominion) machines, but also the counting of ballots from deceased voters, the securing of mail-in voting applications in the names of dead individuals, the fraudulent backdating of ballots in order to meet cut off dates, the ejection of Republican observers by "thugs," and the refusal to accept in-person ballots cast where that person’s name had earlier been unlawfully used for a mail-in vote.
The president claimed that these irregularities amounted to enough votes to shift the election away from him.
The statistical anomalies included such oddities as Biden losing most of the bellwether counties as well as the states of Ohio and Florida, and still winning the election, Biden securing a much lower percentage of primary votes than did Mr. Trump, and the fact that "Biden underperformed Hillary Clinton in every major metro area around the country, save for Milwaukee, Detroit, Atlanta and Philadelphia."
These were feats that no other presidential candidate had managed.
Finally, and equally curious, were the commonsense observations that Biden was the weakest and least impressive presidential candidate in memory, with an inability to excite voters in the manner that Trump did, and yet Biden still secured more votes than any presidential candidate in history.
Similarly, the fact that Biden’s vote count was 16 million more than that for Barack Obama, and 14 million more than for Hillary Clinton is difficult to credit.
None of these matters, standing alone, offers conclusive proof of irregularities, but taken together they cry out for examination by the press, the courts, and the state legislatures.
The American people will lose faith in our elections and our democracy unless it can be shown that those elections are transparent, fair, and free from manipulation.
That showing remains to be made, and should occur in the litigation now underway, and in the proceedings currently before several state legislatures.
The president claimed to Ms. Bartiromo that if the courts and legislatures do their jobs, enough tainted votes will be disqualified to secure his rightful reelection. We’ll soon know if that happens.
Stephen B. Presser is the Raoul Berger Professor of Legal History Emeritus at Northwestern’s Pritzker School of Law, the Legal Affairs Editor of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, and a contributor to The University Bookman. He graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School, and has taught at Rutgers University, the University of Virginia, and University College, London. He has often testified on constitutional issues before committees of the United States Congress, and is the author of "Recapturing the Constitution: Race, Religion, and Abortion Reconsidered" (Regnery, 1994) and "Law Professsors: Three Centuries of Shaping American Law" (West Academic, 2017). Presser was a Visiting Scholar in Conservative Thought and Policy at the University of Colorado's Boulder Campus for 2018-2019. Read Stephen B.Presser'sReports — More Here.
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