Armchair_Politician wrote on Sep 12
th, 2024 at 11:32am:
Trump has repeated the lie that the election he lost was stolen, rigged, riddled with fraud so many times I don't think anyone is still keeping count of how many times he says it. But he also says that he has proof, he refers to this proof almost as many times as he repeats the lie. But thus far, he has not produced any. He has told others to search for it - look it up, he says. I'm sorry, but that isn't how it works. When you make a claim, the burden of proof lies with you - not the people you're trying to convince. As they say in science, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and so far neither Trump nor his supporters or campaign staff have offered any proof whatsoever - none. Indeed, he lost dozens of court cases at the hands of Judges he himself had appointed in his attempt to discredit and/or overturn the election.
So I'll say this once and for all. There's a saying that I think should be asked of him. Put up or shut up!
Are Fair Elections Possible?
The 2020 elections raised serious questions about foul play in the American voting process.
by Andrew E. Busch
The 2020 elections raised serious questions about foul play in the American voting process. Many observers voiced concerns about election integrity in both a narrower sense—the processes and administration of elections—and a broader sense—the overall context in which elections play out. Mollie Hemingway’s Rigged and John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky’s Our Broken Elections: How the Left Changed the Way You Vote address these issues in distinctive but overlapping ways. Hemingway, a senior editor of the Federalist blog and senior journalism fellow at Hillsdale College who earlier this year won the prestigious Bradley Prize for her writing, examines the broader context of the 2020 election and concludes: “The powers that be did whatever it took to prevent Trump from winning his re-election bid in 2020.” Her subtitle discloses who those powers are: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections. Fund is a journalist and von Spakovsky a legal scholar who served a stint in the U.S. Department of Justice, both with a longstanding interest in studying and preventing election fraud. Their focus is on election integrity more narrowly defined, both in 2020 and before.
Hemingway provides a very good overview of the forces working against Donald Trump’s presidency and re-election: an unhinged Left, a seemingly interminable Russiagate investigation based largely on cooked information, a coronavirus pandemic, race riots welcomed (if not fomented) by Trump’s adversaries, a mainstream media that acted as an adjunct of the Democratic Party, social media curators who picked favorites and censored conservative opinions, biased debate organizers and moderators, a massive get-out-the-vote drive funded by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and aimed at Democratic voters, and an unprecedented legal push by Democrats and their allies to revise election rules radically in their own favor. Republicans, Hemingway argues, saw themselves as “victims of an election that was rigged from the day Trump won the presidential election in November 2016.”
She carefully describes and documents many of these factors, providing example after example of “a media complex that moved from extreme partisan to unabashed propaganda in the defense of the Democratic Party.” The press accused Trump of everything from standing by while Russia paid the Taliban to kill American soldiers to pleading with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to conjure up 11,780 new votes. The “Russian bounties” claim proved bogus, and Hemingway argues that Trump was really asking Raffensperger to identify ineligible voters who voted, not fabricate votes where there were none. She also exposes the hypocrisies of many of Trump’s critics, starting with Democratic challenges to the legitimacy of Republican election victories in 2000, 2004, and 2016. As she notes in her first paragraph, “the last time Democrats fully accepted the legitimacy of a presidential election they lost was in 1988.” And there are many other instances of “situational thinking.” Democrats downplayed the danger of the novel coronavirus prior to March 2020, at which point it served their political interests to reverse course and become COVID hawks. They also shared concerns about Dominion electronic voting systems with Republicans until November 2020, when they suddenly abandoned those concerns.
https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/are-fair-elections-possible/Read the whole article.
Forum
Pages: 1 
