Enough about election fraud, already

Forgive me if I have told this story before. When the Navy sent me to security management school, our instructor — a salty lieutenant commander with sharp eyes and prematurely grey hair — had us do an exercise that went like this: “If you believe that there are people in the U.S. Navy right now who are selling secrets to our adversaries, raise your hand.”

Every one of us raised our hands.

“Okay. Now, if you believe that someone at your command is selling secrets to our adversaries, raise your hand.”

Not a single hand went up. The instructor laughed, and said, “That’s the same response I get no matter where I do this.”

I have found that this story illuminates a lot of situations in life. It is common for people to believe that some journalists are biased, but not the journalists they read. Or that some athletes cheat, but not their favorite athletes. Or that some politicians lie, but not the politicians they support.

So this week, when this paper ran a story covering a recent Franklin and Marshall poll on voter confidence in Pennsylvania, it was not at all surprising to see that voters are much more confident in the elections held in their own county than they are in elections held in other counties across the commonwealth.

Voting is at the core of our democracy and our national identity. Even though it is not explicitly spelled out as a right in the Constitution, we treat it as a right and we speak of voting with the same passion we would of a right. Our votes are borderline sacred and the election process is inviolable.

The fact that normally lawabiding people were willing to strike down uniformed police officers, breach barricades, and force their way into the Capitol on January 6th makes clear the lengths to which American voters will go if they believe that they have been disenfranchised.

That is why — political points of view aside — coming into this general election I think it is more critical than ever that we talk honestly about the integrity of the vote, especially in Pennsylvania.

The issue has been thoroughly explored by Pennsylvania’s Chair of the State Government Committee, Assemblyman Seth Grove (a Republican). In 2020, Grove fell squarely into the category of “election skeptic.” He organized a letter with the signatures of over 60 fellow Assembly members urging the U.S. Congress to reject Pennsylvania’s presidential election results.

Grove spent a large part of 2021 holding public hearings on the 2020 election, gathering testimony from dozens of witnesses and experts. Grove’s conclusion was that there was fraud, but “not like this mass amount of fraud,” and that it was mostly committed by voters in his own party.

Last month, Grove downgraded his comments, saying that he does not “have evidence of fraud to bring forward,” and that the heavily repeated claim that there were more ballots cast in parts of Pennsylvania than there were registered voters was “not factual information.”

In a recent column, I quoted a Heritage Foundation fundraising letter that urged me to help them “strip tyrants like Joe Biden of the power they’ve stolen.” Yet this extremely conservative think-tank lists no cases of election fraud in its database for Pennsylvania in 2020. Not even one.

These are highly motivated, well-positioned, and heavily biased investigators conducting research on election fraud, and unable to find any evidence of it, which is completely consistent with every recount, court case, and forensic audit made since 2020.

Which means that it is time for our leaders — all of our leaders — to publicly acknowledge the proven integrity of our elections and put an end to the narrative that somewhere else in the state some other people are getting away with massive amounts of voter fraud.

Quietly acknowledging that fraud was not a factor in 2020 — as Grove has done — is nowhere near enough to restore faith. Our leaders must return to the job of leadership and speak loudly, clearly, and honestly about our election officials and systems. They must restore our faith.

Those who would continue to knowingly purvey election lies or sit on the sidelines while others do are not likely to produce a victory, but they could easily produce another bloody insurrection.