“A fed-up CNN anchor Anderson Cooper cut off” ex-Rep. Scott Taylor (R-VA) for defending Trump’s assertion that a fifth of Pennsylvania’s mail-in ballots were “fraudulent” in 2020. This is a fable.
Mail-in ballots are verified just like polling place ballots. The voter has to sign the envelope, the signature is matched against voter registration records, and the mail ballots are batched and counted the same way polling place ballots are.
Every study has concluded that voting fraud is extremely rare. Roughly 6.8 million Pennsylvanians voted in 2020; of that number, election officials identified four cases of voting fraud.
Three of them voted their dead mothers’ absentee ballots; the other one tried to vote twice by impersonating his son (see story here). All were prosecuted. There’s Trump’s fraudulent ballots, all four of them.
Republican efforts to impugn elections are made up, based on lies, and their gullible supporters eat it up like pigs at the trough.
Taylor (photo, left; bio here) is a one-term congressman elected with Trump in 2016 and defeated by a Democrat in 2018. When Cooper asked him about Trump’s comment, Taylor wouldn’t repeat Trump’s lie, but said there are “literally millions of Americans who had a big problem with 2020.” They have a “problem” with it because they’ve been lied to.
This is the canned dodge used by Republicans who don’t want to participate in the lying, but don’t want to criticize Trump either. Of course you don’t expect a Republican to criticize Trump; he would be pilloried by his own party. Even admitting Trump lost the 2020 election takes more bravery than this former Navy SEAL apparently has.
When Cooper pointed out that “factually, they don’t have any evidence … there’s no evidence,” Taylor switched gears and replied there were there were “tons of irregularities in the 2020 election.” When Cooper asked “what irregularities?,” Taylor said, “There are many people including folks in my family who have issues with the way 2020 was handled.”
Cooper had an answer for that, and so do I. Cooper’s answer was “there’s people around the dinner table who think the Earth is flat” but that doesn’t make it flat. Mine is: I don’t care.
Let me repeat that: I don’t care if Republicans don’t trust elections. I would care if irregularities or voting fraud were changing election outcomes, but that’s not happening. Our elections are trustworthy, and if Republicans choose not to trust them, that’s their problem.
Every candidate and voter is entitled to a fair election, conducted impartially by election officials to the best of their ability. Whether people have confidence in elections is subjective, personal, and up to them. If an election was fair, but they don’t believe it was, they aren’t entitled to a remedy.
With Republicans systematically undermining trust and confidence in our elections, it’s inevitable their followers will believe there’s widespread cheating. But I don’t care what they believe, just as I don’t care that some people think the Earth is flat. That’s not my problem.
If these deluded people try to overthrow legitimate elections and install losing candidates in office, that’s everybody’s problem. The last thing we need is the media giving election deniers a soapbox. Kudos to Anderson Cooper for cutting off this blowhard, fact-checking him, and shutting him down.