The ultimate fraud: False election claims

Since the 2020 election, no evidence of “widespread voting fraud” has been found. And no “narrow spread” either, although one guy in Pennsylvania voted twice electronically, casting a ballot for his dead mother. Trump got two Republican votes, instead of one. The living voter got five years’ probation. His mother couldn’t be reached. They were two among almost 7 million votes cast.

There was, at least, one other effort of fraud. Reuters, the highly respected news service, recently reported, “The revelation directly ties a senior figure in the former president’s political operation to an extraordinary late-night Jan. 4 meeting in which a $16-an-hour election worker faced pressure to implicate herself in a baseless conspiracy theory, stoked by Trump himself, as he sought to overturn his Georgia election loss.”

To revisit the question of fraud would be a waste of time if Donald Trump and his pet parrots didn’t persist in peddling fiction. To claim fraud was widespread when there is no evidence is beyond absurd. That 61 percent of Republican who voted for him believe Donald Trump’s claim is a triumph of fantasy over fact.

There are 3,143 counties in the United States, many with Republicans in charge. Not one has found any fraud, or even suspicion of wrongdoing. Every governor certified the results. That includes 28 Republican governors out of 50. It includes governors in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin where a change of 22,000 votes, might have made Donald Trump president. Arizona and Georgia have Republican governors.

Trump knows the truth and simply continues to lie. Otherwise, a man with serious political hallucination may be the Republican nominee in 2024. We must all hope that the lucid 40 percent of Republicans take back their party, agree that Joe Biden was, in fact, elected honestly.

Devoid of honor, honesty, or the presumed dignity of his office, Trump, still president, ordered the Department of Justice to just “say it was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.” His DOJ wouldn’t, but he continued with, as some scholars have said, his “big lie,” a term first used about Adolf Hitler who spoke of a widespread Jewish conspiracy. Only when Trump’s lips move is it clear that truth was elusive in the thirties and still is.

Why should anyone care? Biden is in the Oval Office and Trump is not. But the former president has not done only immediate and temporary damage, but a lingering, maybe permanent, poisoning of trust in government. 31 percent of Republicans say they will never accept Biden as president. They, like Trump, cannot accept the truth and defeat. I know it is hard from what I have seen up close.

A few years after he lost the presidential election to Ronald Reagan in 1984, Walter Mondale asked George McGovern, who had lost in 1972: “George, how long does it take to get over it?” McGovern replied, “I don’t know. It hasn’t happened yet.” Losing is tough, whether it is by large margins, like McGovern and Mondale, or close like Trump. You accept defeat gracefully. It is the American way called democracy.

Norman Sherman of Coralville has worked extensively in politics, including as Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s press secretary.