The Friday Letter / #501 / July 15, 2022
Edited with a correction at 10:09 E.T. July 18.
Our nation has one federal and 50 state supreme courts. Our question is, why did it take 612 days for one of these courts to acknowledge that ballot fraud was evident in the 2020 election?
(In January, a state court threw out Pennsylvania's unconstitutional no-questions-asked mail-in ballot law, but the 5-2 Democrat majority on the Commonwealth Supreme Court is expected to uphold the law. Pennsylvania's election laws may only be changed by constitutional amendment.)
Last Friday, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that the Wisconsin Elections Commission violated state law by conducting the 2020 election under its own rules and not those enacted by the Wisconsin State Legislature as required by the U.S. Constitution. WEC members are appointed by the governor, not elected by the voters.
That is a big deal, because the court got right what SCOTUS and other courts got terribly and catastrophically wrong. The implications go much wider, as the ruling Democrats try to nationalize elections for the purpose of instilling one-party rule in perpetuity.
In its ruling, Wisconsin's high court corrected its earlier error. Trump sued the WEC soon after the election, but the court refused to hear the legal arguments. Three justices dissented from that 4-3 ruling, arguing that, “When the state's highest court refused to uphold the law, and stands by while an unelected body of six commissioners rewrites it, our system of representative government is subverted.”
In the months following the election, Trump and his allies filed something like 50 lawsuits contesting specific voting irregularities in six states. Trump won five of those states in 2016 for a total of 73 electoral votes. All shifted to Biden in 2020. Left-wing publications like Business Insider like to point out that Trump lost every one of these court challenges. He did not lose them. No court ever heard them, until now.
Wisconsin's is the first state supreme court to hear arguments of voting fraud. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court, for example, was unconcerned that the governor and state election commission overrode commonwealth law by fiat in allowing unsigned, undated mail-in ballots to be counted even when they arrived several days after the election. The court was unbothered by this violation of commonwealth law, which under the authority of the 10th Amendment to the Constitution was enacted by the Pennsylvania General Assembly.
In Teigen v. Wisconsin Elections Commission, the court ruled that the commission allowed the use of ballot drop boxes and allowed voters to hand their ballots to third parties, both in violation of state law.
“Voters,” the court ruled, “are entitled to have the elections in which they participate administered properly under the law. . . Allowing WEC to administer the 2022 elections in a manner other than that required by law causes doubts about the fairness of the elections and erodes voter confidence in the electoral process.”
This is what constitutional conservatives have argued since the election. Only one person in the country – Donald Trump – is still trying to overturn the 2020 election. Everyone else on our side merely wants it noted that the election was corrupted by fraud, and it wants the corruption stopped.
Some believe Democrats did steal the election wholly through fraud, while others believe Biden's win was a combination of fraud and dishonest media reporting of deceptions that polls show shifted about 17 percent of the vote to Biden. Either way, they want the states to enforce existing duly-enacted law and make whatever changes are necessary to insure fair elections in the future.
Democrats, of course, don't want fair elections, knowing they can't win them. They want universal mail-in balloting – the primary source of fraud – along with same-day registration, no proof of citizenship, and no photo identification. Those truly hanging over the left edge want voting rights for anyone who enters the country, and they support the current Biden policy of keeping the gates open for all who care to enter from anywhere in the world.
This is not to discount the legitimate claims that the election in fact was stolen. It's difficult to find support here, however. We plugged the Brave search engine with different key words for the 2020 election: stolen, voter fraud, election fraud, etc. and looked at the first seven pages of entries.
Now Brave purports to deliver the unbiased search results that Google doesn't even pretend to. But the first seven pages – as far as we went – on each search produced nothing but stories refuting any suggestion of election fraud. The key words that popped up the most were “baseless claims” and “lies.”
To this day, the Associated Press, the Wall Street Journal, and even the self-styled conservative New York Post continue to refer to election challenges as “baseless claims” as if that were unbiased reporting.
Eventually we came across a piece by John R. Lott, Jr., published at RealClear Politics: “New Peer-Reviewed Research Finds Evidence of 2020 Voter Fraud.” Lott links to another piece he wrote, a peer-reviewed study forthcoming at the economics journal Public Choice. Lott is an economist and is president of the Crime Prevention Research Center.
Warning: it's a heavy read. An excerpt:
“The voter turnout rate data provide stronger evidence of significant excess Biden votes in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The estimates imply that the counties wherein vote fraud was alleged returned between 146,000 and 334,000 excess Biden votes. While the findings reported here are dramatic, they may be underestimates because the voter turnout estimates do not account for ballots cast for the opposing candidate that are lost, destroyed, or replaced with ballots filled out for the other candidate.”
For more on this story, see Margot Cleveland's piece at The Federalist.
AP stands for 'All Propaganda'
Researching the above report led us to an Associated Press story about a state court throwing out Pennsylvania's mail-in ballot law that was changed just in time for the 2020 election without an amendment to the commonwealth's constitution, which Pennsylvania requires. Unlike most states, not even Pennsy's legislature can change its voting laws without voter consent. For the 2020 election, the Republican-controlled legislature caved to Democrat Gov. Tom Wolfe's demands and allowed a Wild West-type anything-goes voting scheme that included anyone dropping off ballots of questionable origin and accepting unsigned ballots days after the election. And we are supposed to dismiss Trump's claims as “baseless”?
I apologize for coming back to my high school newspaper advisor Bob Reichley, but I am reminded of his admonition that a reporter has exactly zero authority to inject his opinion into a news story. I don't think Bob was even much of a conservative, though he never said. So look at the following quotes from this AP story and ask yourself if this is objective reporting. We begin with the lede:
HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — A court declared Friday that Pennsylvania’s expansive 2-year-old mail-in voting law violates the state constitution, agreeing with challenges by Republicans who soured on the practice after former President Donald Trump began baselessly attacked it as rife with fraud in his 2020 reelection campaign.
Our question here is how could Trump's attack be baseless if the court agreed that the mail-in ballot law violates the state constitution?
AP: “Even Republicans who avoid repeating Trump’s baseless election fraud claims have perpetuated the idea that Democrats cheated in the 2020 presidential election, routinely distorting the actions of state judges and officials as 'unconstitutional' or 'illegal' in settling legal disputes and questions over the mail-in voting law.”
In all, the AP used “baseless” or “baselessly” five times in its editorial disguised as news that seeks to convince readers that ignoring the rule of law is perfectly kosher when it supports the desired outcome. The end justifies the means.
The AP does acknowledge its motives: “Just over 2.5 million people voted under the law’s expansion of mail-in voting in 2020′s presidential election, most of them Democrats, out of 6.9 million total cast.” This explains everything.
Short takes on the news
Gun Owners of America endorses Florida Sen. Anthony Sabatini for Congress in the Republican primary for Florida's 7th District. The open seat is occupied by retiring Rep. Stephanie Murphy, whose rating by the American Conservative Union is 6.8%. Redistricting could help Sabatini, the GOP frontrunner. . .
An Army training slide obtained by Breitbart News orders G. I.s to shower with self-described trannies, even those who have not undergone sex mutilation surgeries, thanks to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. Our question remains: Whom will Trump put first on his list of first-day firings: Austin, Mayorkas, or Garland? From where we sit, the odds look pretty even. . .
A Harvard law professor calls for violence against SCOTUS justices who voted to overturn Roe. In a tweet, Alejandra Caraballo said that “The 6 justices who overturned Roe should never know peace again. It is our civic duty to accost them every time they are in public. They are pariahs. Since women don't have their rights, these justices should never have a peaceful moment in public again.” At post time she had not been arrested for advocating violence on a federal official, defined as anyone from POTUS to a postal worker.
Recommended reading
“Republican Voters Want 'Blood' – Will Their Leaders Deliver?
Julie Kelly at American Greatness
After John Durham's “investigation” into the Russian collusion hoax turns into a farce, the Republican base wants action, not sternly-worded letters, Kelly writes. “It’s unclear whether Durham will issue a final report on the matter; what is clear, however, is Durham’s effort has been an abysmal failure in terms of holding anyone criminally responsible for the biggest political fraud in modern history.”
Kelly points to something never before seen in our history, a totally partisan court of inquisition hand-picked by the House Speaker “working seamlessly with a highly partisan Justice Department to criminalize political dissent. Contrary to the solemn insistence of known liars like Schiff and Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), none of it has anything to do with the four-hour disturbance on Capitol Hill more than 18 months ago but everything to do with dragging America into banana republic-style territory complete with political prisoners, kangaroo courts, secret police, forced confessions, and nonstop propaganda under the guise of 'news.'”
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I told ya. As a resident of Pennsylvania, I can testify to the corruption in the Keystone State.
"For the 2020 election, the Republican-controlled legislature caved to Democrat Gov. Tom Wolfe's demands ... that included anyone dropping off ballots of questionable origin and accepting unsigned ballots days after the election." Both sides of the aisle.