ELECTIONS: No evidence of fraud

Brent Reagan’s article on June 6 addresses the issue of election integrity. Unfortunately he bases most of his article on a flawed premise, that we have a serious problem with election integrity in the United States.

Regan is correct that, across the nation, the requirements for voting and registration differ widely. That is, in fact, a problem. It is so large a problem, in fact, that the 24th Amendment was added to the Constitution in 1964, forbidding poll taxes — a thinly veiled attempt to suppress Black votes in parts of the South.

The premise of Regan’s article is that U.S. election integrity is in question. For national elections there is simply no evidence to support this. Although many continue to assert that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, there is simply no evidence to support this. There were no “ballot dumps”; the movie “2000 Mules” has been thoroughly debunked, Italian satellites and the ghost of Hugo Chavez were not involved.

In the 2020 election there were approximately 500 known cases of election fraud carried out by individuals. Of these, about 300 were performed by Republicans, 100 by Democrats, and 100 who could be described as “other.” In no state did these actions come close to changing a state’s electoral college distribution. As famously captured in a recorded phone call, Trump asked for 11,800 votes in Georgia. There weren’t enough fraudulent votes in the nation to change Georgia.

The simple point is this: nearly all of the “election integrity” laws passed in the last few years have the primary effect of suppressing legitimate votes. They’ll stop relatively little voter fraud simply because there is so little voter fraud to stop.

JOHN D. SAHR

Otis Orchards