Can we get our election-battered heads to calm down for one critical minute and lock in on the most critical word in the world? The word is “significant.” The GOP, and their MAGA leaders have been eroding our historically and internationally admired election process with lies about the 2020 presidential election. The main lie says that the election showed massive fraud. Now surveys say that 70% of registered GOP voters believe that the 2020 election was fraudulent and that Joe Biden is not legitimate as our President. This is preposterous and uniformly judged by over 60 judicial courts to be without any merit. President Trump’s own Election Security Director Chris Krebs continues to assure us that this 2020 election was the most legitimate and secure election in our US history. The point I would like to scream from the mountaintop is, “If any significant group of us is concerned about fraud in any election, we should investigate it, but only to learn if any significant fraud was found.” There are two or three critical factors, all of which need to be significant, before we can have any serious concern about an election. Number one, are there a significant number of questionable cases? For a presidential election, for each state, there would need to be many more cases than the margin of victory for one candidate. (In every case examined for 2020, there have been less than a dozen cases, not tens of thousands.) Number two, for the questionable cases, is there evidence of the mechanism that was used to change the votes and are they all or mostly changing votes from the loser to the winner of the state, fraudulently? (For 2020, there is no evidence for any of this in significant numbers, and a majority of the fraud cases were double votes for Trump, not for Biden.) Number three, is this mechanism and magnitude unique to this 2020 election, or has this been done in either of the past two elections? I think the world is desperately hoping we put our thinking caps back on, use common sense and statistical good practices, and build back (better) trust in our democratic and election integrity. We have work to do to get there!
- Bill Hirt, Dayton