It used to be that the media were obsessed with voter fraud and messy elections. As recently as 1999, Pulitzer Prizes were handed out to newspapers that dug into rigged elections and wrongly elected candidates.
But when former President Donald Trump made it one of his top issues, claiming his 2020 reelection was stolen in extensive fraud, the media looked away and even defended the systems they once investigated.
And when some of the former president’s election legal team bungled his effort to win audits of results in several states, much of the public gave up caring, too.
In hopes of changing those attitudes, two heavyweights armed with numbers and proof that fraud is real and potentially election-changing have entered the battle along with a Trump insider calling out some on the president’s team who killed his credibility.
Hans von Spakovsky and John Fund have teamed to write an emotionless history of voter fraud, filled with recent examples, especially in the 2020 election, and based on the Heritage Foundation’s election fraud database.
In Our Broken Elections: How the Left Changed the Way You Vote , the duo with three decades of voting study between them highlighted the 1,334 cases of fraud and 1,147 criminal convictions Heritage has collected dating to the 1982 conviction of 63 involved in a scheme to stuff 100,000 extra ballots in an Illinois gubernatorial primary.
Fast-forward to 2020: They detailed the allegations of how Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg spent millions on election tricks in mostly Democratic areas to help Biden and how his money is to be used in 2022 to skew elections.
In between, they pointed to politicians, including Biden, who used to decry the types of election “reforms” Democrats and the media are now championing, such as eliminating voter identification.
“They have pushed the false narrative that there is no fraud in our elections or that it is so minimal that we should not be concerned about it. They have also, with their willing allies in the media, falsely labeled any efforts to implement needed reform as ‘voter suppression,’” Fund and von Spakovsky wrote.
“It is hard to see their intent as anything other than to make it easy to cheat and manipulate election results and to do so without getting caught or prosecuted,” they added.
In his book, In Trump Time , former top aide Peter Navarro took a passion-filled path and ripped some on the president’s team for flubbing fraud claims, especially onetime legal ace Sidney Powell who said she had so much evidence she called it the “Kraken.”
He based his book on diary notes from his days as an Oval Office regular. One entry: “Sidney Powell remains a rogue cipher. If she truly has no evidence, she will have single-handedly destroyed our credibility.”
It was a sentiment Fund and von Spakovsky agreed with and hoped people would forget as they push a campaign in Washington to clean up elections.
“Fighting for election integrity measures must begin and end with a belief that voters deserve to have confidence in the fairness and accuracy of the system. The anger of a candidate or his supporters over election irregularities must also be accompanied by some restraint in making allegations that can’t be backed up or are supported by unreliable evidence,” they wrote.
Source: The Washington Examiner
