The 2020 Election Mess

National Review's National Affairs editor John Fund has written a helpful explanation of why so many people believe the 2020 election was riven with fraud and why the courts failed to support efforts to gain redress.

Part of the article that stands out is Fund's summary of the irregularities that were alleged in Georgia. He writes this:

The Trump lawsuits may have had merit. In Georgia alone, Trump lawyers alleged, in addition to mail-in signature problems, there were:

• 92 mail-in ballots cast before voters requested them
• 217 voters whose mail-in ballots were “applied for, issued, and received all on the same day”
• 395 out-of-state voters
• 1,043 people who claimed to live at post-office boxes
• 2,560 ineligible felons
• 10,315 dead people
• 66,247 voters under the age of 18
• 305,701 voters who requested absentee ballots after the deadline

In Georgia, Joe Biden won by fewer than 12,000 votes.

Assuming these figures are correct, the frustration and anger many Trump supporters feel is understandable. Fund goes on to state that,

In the future, reforms must be made to ensure that the public believes in the integrity of the election. Many don’t believe that the 2020 election was fair. A Quinnipiac poll released on December 9 found that 38 percent of Americans believe that the election was marred by widespread fraud. That included 35 percent of independents and 77 percent of Republicans.

Needed reforms include requirements for a government photo ID to vote by mail (people could send a photocopy or smartphone image), as in Kansas and Alabama currently.

States should use Department of Homeland Security records to check the citizenship of registered voters.

Absentee ballots should go only to voters who request them — there should be no automatic mailing of such ballots to all registered voters, because those lists are filled with people who have moved or died or are ineligible.

The computer software used in voting machines must be shared with election officials and available to the public in court cases.

It should be added that making mail-in voting available also made it inevitable that perhaps millions of people would cast a ballot who would never have bothered to show up at a poll on November 3rd. It also made it extremely easy for party activists to "assist" tens of thousands of people to fill out their ballots.

That Republicans allowed this to happen without much objection prior to the election is incomprehensible. In Pennsylvania, for example, it was the Republican legislature, which, in 2019, joined 33 other states and the District of Columbia in actually passing legislation that enabled "no-excuse mail-in voting." Subsequently, roughly 2.2 million of Pennsylvania's seven million voters chose to submit a ballot that way.

Since Democrats formed the majority of that number and since Biden won Pennsylvania by 80,555 votes - stunningly scoring about 7800 votes more in the city of Philadelphia than Barack Obama did in 2008 - it's very likely that mail-in voting was directly responsible for Mr. Biden's victory in Pennsylvania.

Fund concludes his column with this paragraph:

Abuses, incompetence, and, yes, alleged fraud made the 2020 election suspect. Too bad Trump exaggerated his claims, failed to address some of the election’s ticking time bombs in court before the election, and took on lawyers unsuited to the task. Those errors, plus the fact that the media and courts often didn’t do their jobs, doomed his effort.

If these abuses aren't corrected by 2024, if opportunities for fraud continue to be permitted to infect the system, the American people will lose all confidence in our electoral process, and loss of confidence, the belief that the election isn't fairly conducted, will almost certainly lead to increased polarization, civil disobedience and turmoil.