Dear Editor, 

Here we go again. Trump is spewing falsehoods as facts, this time about the election in 2020. It aggravates Trump that he lost Georgia to Biden, the first time Georgia went to a Democrat since Bill Clinton. This was settled long ago.

First, the facts. Biden narrowly won Georgia by a 49.47% plurality over Trump's 49.24%, a margin of 11,779 votes. (Hence the call from Trump to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, asking him to find 11,780 votes).  

Because the margin was so close, Raffensberger, a Republican, ordered a recount, and then a hand count of the ballots before the state certified Biden as the winner. Raffensberger later told FOX 5 Atlanta that he simply “followed the law and followed the Constitution.” These are paper ballots which can be verified. Raffensperger stated “Georgia has the most secure elections in the country and all voters were verified with photo ID and lawfully cast their ballots.”

According to a 12 November 2020 joint statement of U.S. election officials, the 2020 U.S. presidential election “was the most secure in American history. That success was a result not of accident, but instead of deliberate, sustained, and comprehensive efforts at the local, state, and federal levels to ensure that it was secure from foreign interference.” (One needs to recall the multiple Russian attempts to support Trump in the 2016 election, which were successful enough to collapse the Hillary Clinton lead.)

Because we have collective amnesia in this United States, it is also worth noting that Trump and Co. went to court over 60 times to claim election fraud and lost every one of them. Judges kept asking for evidence, not allegations.  

Remember the claims that Dominion Voting systems were flipping votes from Trump to Biden? Fox News (aka Fox Noise) lost that defamation case and had to pay nearly 3/4 of a billion dollars. Just reflect on the magnitude of that judgement. How about the “theory” that somehow Venezuela had flipped votes, despite the fact that voting machines are not connected to the internet? How could this even be possible? 

This is why it is even more unsettling that the FBI, under the guidance of Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of national Intelligence (DNI), seized over 700 boxes of voting records from Fulton County, Georgia, this past week. DNI’s job is to oversee the many ways foreign countries spy on the U S, not be involved in domestic election issues. This is part of a Trump strategy to leverage these allegations to cast doubt on the results of the upcoming election. 

The backdrop to all this is that Democrats have been winning ALL the special elections of late. The most recent one was in Texas, where a Democrat, Taylor Rehmet, an air force veteran, won by over 14% in a district that Trump had carried by over 17%, making this a 32% swing, for a seat held by Republicans since 1990. 

Both Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Trump himself publicly supported the Republican. Republicans are in full panic mode that they may lose the House and possibly the Senate. Trump said that he loses elections only because Democrats import undocumented immigrants to vote. Voting by undocumented immigrants, or any noncitizens, is both illegal and incredibly rare, but Trump has made it part of his standard rhetoric since 2016.

Heather Cox Richardson in her “Letters from an American” states there is no proof of these claims of illegals voting. “In 2016, fact-checkers established that, for all of Trump’s insistence that the 2016 election was marred by voter fraud—he claimed “millions” of undocumented immigrants voted illegally—there was virtually no voting by undocumented immigrants in that election. 

Douglas Keith, Myrna Pérez, and Christopher Famighetti of the Brennan Center reached out to 42 jurisdictions across the nation with the highest population share of noncitizens in the states Trump claimed had returned fraudulent numbers.

Election officials in 40 of those jurisdictions told the journalists that they had had no instances of noncitizen voting. Two said they referred only about 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting. If all of those were, in fact, illegitimate votes, it means that out of 23.5 million votes cast in their jurisdictions in the 2016 general election, about 30—or 0.0001 percent—of those votes were problematic.”  It’s a red herring. 

The Constitution gives control of elections exclusively to the states but Trump said recently that the Republicans ought to nationalize the voting. Using these unsubstantiated assertions of voter fraud, Republicans are trying to pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act, which would require a document proving citizenship in order to register to vote and in order to vote. This would require voters to show either a passport or a birth certificate.

Richardson elaborates, “Half of Americans don’t have a passport, others don’t have their birth certificates, and the names of married women who took their husband’s last name and transgender Americans would not match their birth certificates. All of these groups tend to vote for Democrats. The bill also calls for state officials to purge voter rolls. The Brennan Center for Justice found that if the measure passes, about 21 million Americans could lose their votes.”  

For context, in the Bush v Gore election of 2000, the Secretary of State for Florida purged or blocked 100,000 voters in toto, which Bush won by 537 votes out of almost six million cast (0.009%). According to the Palm Beach Post (among other issues), though blacks accounted for 88% of those removed from the rolls, they made up only about 11% of Florida's voters. Another way to rig the voting. 

Voting by an informed public is the backbone of democracy. Stay tuned and be skeptical of these false claims. 

Bill Thibedeau

Gilpin County