From The Flogging Dead Horses Department: There Was No Widespread Voter Fraud

The president, and various pro-Trump sources and politicians continue to claim widespread voter fraud tainted the 2020 election. The claims continue to be false. Such claims have reached a point where they are lies in view of existing evidence. The AP writes:

WASHINGTON (AP) — It’s hard to put it any more bluntly: “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes or was in any way compromised.”

Rejecting President Donald Trump’s persistent claims and complaints, a broad coalition of top government and industry officials is declaring that the Nov. 3 voting and the following count unfolded smoothly with no more than the usual minor hiccups.

It was, they declare, resorting to Trump’s sort of dramatic language, “the most secure in American history.”

The statement late Thursday by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency amounted to the most direct repudiation to date of Trump’s efforts to undermine the integrity of the contest, and echoed repeated assertions by election experts and state officials.

The New York Times writes:

WASHINGTON — Hours after President Trump repeated a baseless report that [a Trump lie follows] a voting machine system “deleted 2.7 million Trump votes nationwide,” he was directly contradicted by a group of federal, state and local election officials, who issued a statement on Thursday declaring flatly that the election “was the most secure in American history” and that “there is no evidence” any voting systems were compromised.

The rebuke, in a statement by a coordinating council overseeing the voting systems used around the country, never mentioned Mr. Trump by name. But it amounted to a remarkable corrective to a wave of disinformation that Mr. Trump has been pushing across his Twitter feed.

The statement was distributed by the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which is responsible for helping states secure the voting process. Coming directly from one of Mr. Trump’s own cabinet agencies, it further isolated the president in his false claims that widespread fraud cost him the election.  

Across the country, election officials have said the vote came off smoothly, with no reports of systemic fraud in any state, no sign of foreign interference in the voting infrastructure and no hardware or software failures beyond the episodic glitches that happen in any election. (emphasis added)

Authoritarian Trump and the authoritarian GOP are directly attacking democracy

In continuing the charade, the president and GOP are undermining democracy, elections and the rule of law. The Washington Post writes: 

Republicans’ private talking point about how they can continue to aid President Trump in denying election results boils down to what a senior Republican told The Washington Post this week: What’s the harm in humoring him?

Plenty, say national security officials who are concerned about how other countries — and the coronavirus — could take advantage of a slowed transition for President-elect Joe Biden. Plenty, say democracy experts who warn that the Republican Party is undermining the foundations of the U.S. electoral system and that the GOP is mirroring authoritarianism.