[NOTE: It turns out I have more to say on this topic than I originally anticipated, so this will be a two-parter.]
Lake’s loss of her election fraud suit was a foregone conclusion. And yet the court is closing the barn door after the horses have escaped, because you can’t force people to trust elections by shrieking, “You must trust us!” Trust must be earned, and once lost it must be regained or it continues to be lost.
I have been consistent in saying that election fraud must be prevented because courts will not redress it after the fact except in very minor cases such as a person submitting two ballots instead of one. The Kari Lake trial is a good example, because the plaintiffs (Lake’s side) had unusually good evidence for mass fraud that may indeed have mattered in the outcome. And yet it was always clear that the evidence wasn’t enough for a verdict in her favor and could not possibly be enough. Here’s a discussion of the ruling against Lake [emphasis mine]:
Judge Peter A. Thompson ruled in favor of the defendants on all counts on December 24 2022. A copy of the opinion is here 4531 (maricopa.gov).
The court permitted two counts from the original ten in the Complaint to proceed to Trial: 1) the claim that ballot-on-demand (“BOD”) printer malfunctions experienced on Election Day were caused intentionally and that these malfunctions resulted in a changed outcome (Complaint Count II); and 2) the claim that Maricopa County violated its own election procedures manual (“EPM”) as to chain of custody procedures in such a way as to result in a changed election outcome (Complaint Count IV).
After laying out the “clear and convincing” burden of proof Lake needed to carry, the court summarized and evaluated the witnesses and evidence Lake presented. The court looked to Arizona case law going back to 1898, before we became a state in 1912, for the proposition “it is . . . unwise to lay down any rule by which the certainty and accuracy of an election may be jeopardized by the reliance upon any proof affecting such results that is not of the most clear and conclusive character.”
I submit that, realistically, that standard cannot be met. I also submit that the standard’s existence is understandable. It would be enormously chaotic if every suspicion of election fraud – even a strong suspicion that many people share – could overturn any election. Nothing would be certain, every election that wasn’t a landslide (and even some of those) would be challenged, the remedies might have to be to repeat elections over and over, and might result in a rapidly ever-changing succession of public officials none of whom were trusted or respected. It would be a nightmare.
But it’s another kind of nightmare to see obviously suspect elections, exacerbated by the omnipresence of computers and the prevalence of mail-in voting (especially in states where everyone on the obviously-flawed voter rolls is mailed a ballot whether requested or not, and once ballots are taken from envelopes there’s no saying where those ballots actually originated), with no redress in the courts. The frustration and distrust builds and builds and builds in the losers and it’s not even just limited to them.
In a case such as Kari Lake’s, what sort of proof would be enough for the court? The only sort of thing I can imagine would be a set of emails or recordings in which those in charge of the machines are seen or heard while plotting to reprogram them in order to aid the left. Or a mass confession on the part of said officials. Short of that sort of thing, forget about it.
We have to be able to trust our elections. But the only way to foster trust or restore it is to have more safeguards in place at the outset against fraud. In the name of voter inclusion as they define it, Democrats seem determined to jettison even many of the elementary and obvious safeguards such as voter ID, and this effort raises the amount of suspicion that their goal is to enable fraud – which is easiest to perform in the populous blue counties they usually control (Maricopa County is a GOP-controlled anomaly, but the GOP there detests Trump supporters such as Lake). Calling people who see the evidence as strongly indicative that fraud occurred “election deniers” might actually work to demonize them in the eyes of others, but it does absolutely nothing to increase the trust that is so necessary to a functioning democracy or a functioning republic. And we have most definitely lost that trust.
I don’t see us getting it back anytime soon.
Whenever I write about this sort of topic, many commenters write to say that the GOP doesn’t care and has made little effort to fix things. I often see statements like that all over the right side of the blogosphere. But it’s not the case; there have been many efforts, and I’ve documented some of them in many posts and comments of my own. I want to call your attention to this post as well as this one. In both of those posts I describe only a fraction of those efforts and why they have mostly failed unless a state is already quite Republican/conservative to begin with.
I strongly suggest you take a look at those posts if you haven’t already. And no, my motive isn’t to defend the GOP. It’s to inject more reality into the discussion. Has the GOP left no stone unturned? I very much doubt it. But they’ve done quite a bit and the deck is stacked against them. This is the last paragraph of that second post of mine that I linked, and I’ll repeat it for emphasis:
It’s instructive to do some basic research and discover what actually was tried, and what failed, and why, and what the obstacles are that need to somehow be overcome. But the left feeds on ignorance – not only of its own voters, but of some GOP voters as well.
[NOTE: Part II will be specifically about the efforts that were made to tighten voting security in Arizona prior to this election, and why so many of them failed.]
The post The Kari Lake election fraud verdict: Part I appeared first on The New Neo.