GOP Sen. Jake Corman
“The top Republican in the Pennsylvania state Senate said Monday he would kick off hearings into the results of the 2020 presidential election, the latest Republican-led investigation into an election that President Biden won handily,” The Hill reported on Tuesday, August 24, 2021. Read story here.
Pennsylvania state senator Jake Corman (photo, above left) is only one of many GOP legislators around the country pushing evidence-free claims of election “shenanigans.” The most extreme example is Arizona state senator Karen Fann (photo, below right), the driving force behind a sham “audit” of Maricopa County’s 2020 election ballots.
Biden won both states. Corman and Fann are leaders of GOP state senate majorities, and therefore state senate presiding officers, in both states.
These people have no evidence of election fraud, because there wasn’t any, nor was the election stolen from Trump. They do have an agenda of making voting much more difficult, because their party doesn’t believe in democracy. Their narrative goes like this: We’ve told our supporters don’t trust America’s elections, so they don’t, and because they don’t, that justifies the restrictions on voting we’re enacting. It doesn’t.
Back in June, Bernard Kerik (photo, below left), a rightwing freak best known as a former NYC police commissioner, wrote a piece for Newsmax, the conservative equivalent of Pravda, that said, “The Arizona audit is being run impeccably, utilizing security and surveillance procedures with a longstanding track record of effectiveness.” Cue laugh track (here). No election official in the country, including Republicans, agrees with that. (You can read the rest of Kerik’s rant, if so inclined, here.)
Republicans don’t like democracy, period. They don’t want you to vote, unless you’re one of them — i.e., just as racist as they are, because a lot of this is directed at suppressing black voters.
In America, elections are decentralized. They’re run by local officials, generally trained professionals overseen by elected office holders, according to well-established and time-tested procedures and best practices. Absent court-quality proof of misfeasance or malpractice, election administrators and election results deserve our trust and the benefit of doubt.
But all over the country, Republican elected officials like Corman and Fann are promoting baseless election conspiracy theories and attacking our right to vote. Corman can hold his legislative hearings, and Fann can stage her “audit,” but this is political theater. It’s the Republican Party, not our elections, that can’t be trusted.