‘Never Trump’ Republicans Are Providing Rhetorical Cover for Election Fraud

Election workers sort vote-by-mail ballots for the presidential primary at King County Elections in Renton, Wash., on March 10, 2020. (Jason Redmond/AFP via Getty Images)

Commentary

The Never Trump Republicans are determined to help the Democratic Party win this November—even if it means supporting the most dangerous voting scheme and recipe for fraud in our country’s history.

In a recent op-ed for The Washington Post, Benjamin L. Ginsberg, a former establishment GOP lawyer, blithely dismissed the threat of widespread election fraud, insisting—despite millions of unverifiable mail-in ballots being distributed across the country—that President Donald Trump is the real threat to the integrity of our democratic institutions.

The only people who refuse to admit the potential for fraud posed by these ballots—which can’t be identified, authenticated, or in many cases even received by the date of the election—are people who want to cause election chaos, uncertainty, and defeat Trump by any means possible, including illegal ones.

Ginsberg and his firm were hired by the Trump Campaign in 2017, raking in millions of dollars before Ginsberg’s recent retirement just two months left until the election.

Ginsberg blatantly misrepresented Trump’s recent remarks to voters in North Carolina, falsely claiming that the president had encouraged voters to break the law by double-voting. In reality, Trump questioned the reliability of the existing ballot verification system, urging voters to “see whether or not your mail-in vote has been tabulated” by showing up in person on Election Day and casting a provisional ballot in the event that poll workers have no record of the mail-in ballot.

Ginsberg claimed, “The truth is that after decades of looking for illegal voting, there’s no proof of widespread fraud,” adding, “At most, there are isolated incidents—by both Democrats and Republicans,” and declaring emphatically that American elections “are not rigged.”

In retrospect, Ginsberg should have held off on publishing this nonsensical take on election fraud. Hours before the op-ed appeared in the Post, Georgia’s secretary of state announced an investigation into nearly 1,000 instances of double voting that allegedly occurred across 100 counties during the June primary election and August runoff election.

Georgia isn’t alone. Wayne County, Michigan, also reported problems with mail-in ballots in its Aug. 4 primary election. In the recent Nevada primary, meanwhile, ballots were piling up on the sidewalk. New York City was forced to reject tens of thousands of ballots for various irregularities in its own primary elections over the summer.

More recently, authorities in both Minnesota and Texas have begun investigating allegations of systematic ballot fraud—including vote-buying and forgery—designed to benefit Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

Ginsberg continues to insist that voter fraud is nothing but a myth—an electoral bogeyman conjured up by Trump and other Republicans—but both facts and reason directly contradict him. He’s simply operating on the sick belief that if he repeats a lie often enough, people will believe it.

Only citizens are allowed to vote. Every fraudulent ballot cancels the vote of an American who was entitled to have his voice heard. Mail-in ballots can be filled out by anyone. The only secure vote is in person—or by requesting a formal absentee ballot if necessary.

The Postal Service itself, no matter how good, creates a major “chain of custody” problem and adds a significant layer of delay and uncertainty even under the best of circumstances. In a normal election, a manageable number of voters request absentee ballots and submit them through the mail after taking action to request the ballot from their local board of elections.

The universal vote-by-mail system that many Democrats are pushing for, however, involves sending out ballots to every registered voter, whether they want one or not—including non-citizens and voters who plan to vote in person on Election Day. If someone manages to obtain a generic “ballot” at any point during that process, however, they could fraudulently fill it out and return it, and the person whose vote was stolen in this way wouldn’t find out until they were turned away from the polls on Nov. 3.

In this scenario, there can be no confidence that a legal voter completed the ballot at all.

The real reason for the “mail-in ballot” plan is to create distrust and uncertainty. This is a deliberate effort to taint the election—pushed only by Democrats and Never Trumpers who lost their gravy train when Trump started putting Americans first. We must #FightBack to protect the votes of American citizens.

Traditional mechanisms that safeguard our election process weren’t designed for a vote-from-home model, and our preliminary experience in 2020 suggests they are woefully inadequate to the task. Millions of mail-in ballot applications have been sent out by third-party groups, including hundreds of thousands sent with incorrect information, or even addressed to dead people and pets.

Crossing our fingers and hoping that nothing goes wrong in November is no way to conduct free and fair elections. The only responsible approach to protecting our democratic institutions requires aggressively closing off opportunities for fraud and manipulation to protect the sanctity of the vote of each citizen.

Unfortunately, Never Trump Republicans such as Ginsberg are perfectly happy to ignore glaring threats to our electoral process because they anticipate that malfeasance will serve to advance their desired political outcomes.

Sidney Powell, a former federal prosecutor and veteran of 500 federal appeals, is the author of “Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice” and co-author, with Harvey A. Silverglate, of “Conviction Machine: Standing Up to Federal Prosecutorial Abuse.” She is a senior fellow at the London Center for Policy Research.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.