In an opening statement for the December 16 Senate hearing on the 2020 presidential election, Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) said: "[A] large percentage of the American public does not believe the November election results are legitimate." That assertion goes to the heart of what has gone wrong since November 3. The media, the Biden-Harris campaign, the Democratic Party, and a disconcertingly large number of Republicans simply do not seem to care that this election is viewed with considerable skepticism by tens of millions of voters.
Anyone who honestly cares that future election results are universally trusted and accepted would want a thorough review of the ballot-counts and the voting procedures that were followed – or not followed – in every state. An honest media would demand it. Joe Biden himself would insist upon it, so that, should he still prevail, his presidency would be accepted as legitimate.
This lack of concern – and more than that, the outrage that has met any suggestion that this election result is questionable – suggests that Biden and his supporters care only about victory and not how it was obtained. The ends justify the means, apparently.
Gary Peters
The Ranking Democrat on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI), described the decision to hold the hearing as "dangerous." When a senior elected official describes an exercise in election oversight as dangerous, the very idea of democracy is itself in danger. Only those who do not believe in free and fair elections would consider it dangerous to question an election result that has defied all conventions, all trends, and all statistical evaluations of past elections.
Fraud Evidence Ignored
One of the witnesses, attorney for President Trump and former circuit court judge, James Troupis, laid out in very specific terms why some 200,000 ballots in the state of Wisconsin were illegally cast, according to that state's election laws. The claims, then, that there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud are seemingly debunked by this one attorney's testimony. Biden reportedly won the state by a margin of fewer than 21,000 votes. Around ten times that many ballots were cast in ways that violated Wisconsin law.
Jesse Binnall, another Trump attorney, described in detail how experts had identified, in Nevada, "130,000 unique instances of voter fraud." Biden supposedly carried the state by a margin of some 35,000 votes. Notably, Binnall stated: "Our evidence has never been refuted – only ignored."
Backing up that same point, another witness, Kenneth Starr, a former solicitor general, pointed out that the courts did not reject the vast majority of the 60 lawsuits brought by the Trump campaign and other interested parties for lack of evidence of voter fraud, but for procedural reasons.
Democrats on the committee focused only on one witness, their hero Chris Krebs, who had been the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Krebs was fired after claiming that the 2020 election was the most secure presidential election ever conducted. Clearly a man who dislikes the president, Krebs made the most of his fifteen minutes of fame, airing his contempt for anyone who suggested that the election was less than fair.
As Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) pointed out, though, the agency that Krebs ran had nothing to do with domestic election integrity. CISA was explicitly focused on detecting and preventing foreign interference in the political process.
Nothing to See Here
All in all, those Democrats present at the hearing, along with Mr. Krebs, did exactly what the president's lawyers say the courts did in the face of their various legal actions: they refused even to consider the specific, verified, and cross-checked evidence of fraudulent ballots. Instead, they argued that questioning the election result was itself a threat to democracy and that everyone should accept the reported result and, basically, get over it.
Senator Ron Johnson
As Chairman Johnson pointed out, this was a case of gross hypocrisy, coming from the same people who held endless hearings on alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election, claiming, at the time, that nothing was more important than ensuring the integrity of U.S. elections.
The Improbable Numbers
Even without getting into the weeds, two remarkable numerical comparisons should stand out, to any honest observer, as signals that something about the 2020 election was very, very wrong.
The first of those comparisons is between President Trump's number of votes and the number of votes his opponent reportedly received. The incumbent got more votes than any presidential candidate in American history yet still apparently lost by a margin of six million. The second comparison is between the number of votes cast for Barack Obama in 2008 and the number cast for Joe Biden in 2020. In 2008, Obama was virtually considered the new Messiah by Democrats. The enthusiasm for his candidacy was enormous. His campaign was dynamic and exciting. Obama got almost 69.5 million votes.
Biden barely campaigned. Most of his few stump speeches were conducted in strip mall parking lots, attended by handfuls of people. Even Obama himself, campaigning for his former VP, couldn't raise a decent crowd. And yet, Biden supposedly beat Obama's 2008 vote tally by over ten million.
For the intellectually honest, those two anomalies should be enough to warrant a very thorough investigation into what happened on November 3 and the following days.
Unfortunately, while the Senate hearing again cast a spotlight on that which the media and the Democrats refuse to acknowledge – the considerable, carefully-documented evidence of substantial electoral fraud – it will ultimately do little to rectify what Sen. Paul described as a "stolen" election.
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Read more from Graham J. Noble.
