Reblogged:Either They Saw It Coming Or They Didn't

[Gus Van Horn blog]

There is much I disagree with in "They Stole It Fair and Square," a post at Power Line by conservative blogger Steven Hayward, but he at least admits that the case for election fraud that so many Republicans are clinging to wasn't strong enough to support a legal challenge to the presidential election.

Hayward also raises an issue that bothered me even immediately after the election, when I was initially suspicious of some of the results due to the possibility of ballot harvesting, which I wrote about some time back. Most notably:

f the mail ballot is not received by Election Day, it can still be counted if a sealed, completed ballot is dropped off with elections officials by hand -- and the voter does not have to drop off their ballot in person.

Image by Markus Winkler, via Unsplash, license.

Did this happen widely enough to alter the election? I have no idea, but given that it might have cost California Republicans seven congressional seats in 2018, it sure looked to me like something the GOP could stand to be proactive about -- as I also wrote.

Here is what Hayward says about this issue.

[T]he election was effectively stolen months ago before any ballots were cast when legislatures (and sometimes governors and state courts such Pennsylvania) changed the voting rules to allow expanded mail-in voting, and the cascade of related vulnerabilities that followed. Republican legislatures that went along with these COVID-induced panic changes were foolish if not derelict in their duty. And the Trump campaign was negligent in not fighting against this months ago. President Trump was correct to warn about this outcome. Why wasn't his campaign better organized to resist this months ago? (I know they did file a few lawsuits, a few of which had some effect, but it wasn't enough.) I suspect the long-rumored campaign infighting and attention to other things distracted Trump's senior campaign managers from paying sufficient attention to this. [bold added]

I don't know if these other hastily-passed mail-in voting laws are as easy to play games with as the one in California, but Hayward is absolutely right to note that the time for Trump and the GOP to have done something was sooner than ... after election day.

Based on a line of thought suggested by the philosopher Gregory Salmieri during an appearance on the Yaron Brook show, the passage above is damning: Were the GOP truly concerned about mail-in balloting being a means of voting fraud, it should have tried to stop it then, or at least raised all kinds of hell trying.

Conversely, raising a stink right after the election, as Donald Trump did, complete with mostly frivolous lawsuits, does not seem serious or befitting a President.

I reluctantly voted for Trump/voted against Biden and am concerned about the Georgia Senate elections at least providing us with divided government. I am on balance not convinced that fraud changed the result of this election, and am disappointed in the GOP and many conservatives for their cavalier treatment of this serious issue.

-- CAV

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