Election Transparency Essential to Restore Trust •

With numerous court cases filed across the country yesterday pertaining to the 2020 Presidential Election, it is now time that as a country we move beyond heated allegations and focus upon hard evidence contained within the specific filings. As stated earlier in our piece about alleged election fraud, so long as precincts have a paper trail that Board of Canvassers can cross-check for errors, it is highly unlikely that current margins can be overcome with anything other than systemic flaws in the authentication of ballots, which is where the focus needs to be.

On Monday we saw a series of localized affidavits and allegations of intentional fraud, particularly in Wayne County; yet, while there is no reason to presume fraud there is also no reason to demand concessions before we look at these allegations, particularly with the addition of 234 pages of sworn statements that were filed yesterday.  To be dismissive of these allegations is like insisting a patient with a low white blood cell level should halt all testing if you cannot conclusively say there is cancer. Indeed, these allegations may or may not be indicative of a more systemic problem.

Given that half of the country voted for Donald Trump it is not unreasonable for them to ask for a review of the challenges - a right that Democrats would be demanding if the positions in this close election were reversed.  Voters can rationally be dubious when hearing instant dismissals from media networks that previously predicted a sweeping victory for Biden and Democrats.  Even if these allegations are rejected, it’s important for our country to have a full and open consideration of these claims and the underlying evidence.

For reference we need to recall the 2000 election when Al Gore challenged the results and fueled an intense battle. Trump is simply doing now what Gore did then.    With George Bush leading in Florida by under 1,800 votes, his campaign sent him to claim victory and create the image of president elect. When Democrats challenged the results and filed lawsuits demanding recounts, they were viewed as fighting the will of the people. A meticulous recount led to a change of around 900 votes before the election was sent to a close with the Supreme Court ruling.  Sadly, because this recount was stopped, to this day we don’t truly know who won the election because what came next is often overlooked.

Several studies found Gore likely won Florida, but Bush was already sworn in as president. Democrats claimed that Bush was “illegitimate” and that the Supreme Court should not have ended the recount. As is often the case in our politics, the parties are now on different sides of the same issue. The consistent element is that the parties support the process to the extent that it is demonstrably in their favor. Trump appears to trust it when he is ahead but views any deficiency of votes as fraudulent, and Democrats want every vote included but not recounted.

We are finishing only the second of four stages in an election for president. After the voting stage, states began the tabulation stage. We will soon enter the canvass stage, in which local districts confirm their counts and face challenges or recounts. Finally, there is the certification stage, in which final challenges can be raised. In other words, Trump is not deceased yet, even though Biiden has reason to claim his lead as the odds are heavily against Trump.

But the public should welcome close scrutiny of these swing states. There are valid reasons to examine the figures based on the many unknowns in a new kind of election. The outcome will be determined by millions of mailed ballots in various states, some of which have never used such mailed ballots to this magnitude, and legitimate concerns about this process were indeed raised before the election.

Some states changed rules governing signature authentication or are accused of reducing the discrimination levels for machine authentication. In Nevada, the Trump campaign alleged that thousands of votes were cast from out of state and ballots that were sent to dead voters. We cannot judge the merits of these claims until we see the evidence. It is difficult to see any problems without greater access to the ballots and the records of tabulation.

Just as some of us remain skeptical of such claims of fraud, it seems as implausible that this untested form of voting was used across the country without major glitches.

Here is a link to the case filed in Wayne County yesterday.

More importantly, here is a link to one of the affidavits asserting voting machines used in Wayne County appear to have been connected to the Internet, which is the easiest way for hackers to interfere.

In another sworn affidavit, signed by Andrew Sitto, he states that  approximately 4:30 a.m., tens of thousands of ballots were brought in and placed on eight long tables at Detroit’s TCF Center.   “I heard other challengers say that several vehicles with out-of-state license plates pulled up to the TCF Center a little before 4:30 a.m. and unloaded boxes of ballots,” Sitto testified.

According to another sworn affidavit, the names on the ballots that arrived in the boxes did not appear on either the qualified voter file (QVF) or the supplemental lists for voters who registered shortly before Election Day.

“I saw the computer operators at several counting boards manually adding the names and addresses of these thousands of ballots to the QVF system,” Robert Cushman, a poll challenger in Detroit said in a sworn affidavit. “When I asked what the possible justification was to counting ballots from unknown, unverified ‘persons,’ I was told by election supervisors that the Wayne County Clerk’s Office had ‘checked them out.'”

Cushman challenged the process of counting those votes and noted that the poll workers entered the birthdays for each of the purported voters as 1/1/1900.   “When I asked about this impossibility of each ballot having the same birthday occurring in 1900, I was told that was the instruction that came down from the Wayne County Clerk’s office,” Cushman said. “I was surprised and disappointed at the preponderance of dishonesty, irregularities, and fraudulent tactics at the November 3, 2020 election at the TCF Center.”

We need a review of counts in critical states to resolve a crisis of faith. A recent survey found that almost half of Americans lack confidence their ballots will be counted fairly. A Harvard study also found that only half of young black voters believe their ballots are even counted. This lack of faith in the electoral process has been fueled by the shift to mailed ballots, but builds on growing distrust of our political system.

Past elections for president faced controversies over faithless electors who changed their votes after an election. The Supreme Court dealt with a number of such faithless electors from the 2016 election and resolved that states can force them to cast their votes in line with the wishes of voters. But this could be the year of faithless voters rather than faithless electors.

Sadly, we neither listen to nor trust each other anymore. Almost half the country voted for Trump. We need neither concessions of defeat nor declarations of victory. We need transparency so that whoever is the next president can govern with legitimacy.

This is why the involvement of the courts is not a bad thing.