by David Crisp:
Two things we can be sure of about the 2024 election: Millions of Americans will be disappointed, and Donald Trump will accept the results only if he wins.
Trump has never backed down from his claims that the 2020 election was stolen, even though no solid evidence of that has surfaced. Dozens of lawsuits failed. Recounts confirmed that Trump lost. “2,000 Mules,” a widely promoted documentary arguing election fraud, was withdrawn by its distributor this year after settling a defamation lawsuit over its false claims.
Trump’s whining has infected the entire Republican Party. A CNN poll in July 2023 found that 69 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents still do not believe that Joe Biden legitimately won the 2020 election.
Montana has not been exempt. Republican central committees in Ravalli and Liberty counties passed resolutions in 2022 stating that Biden had not legitimately won.
The 2022 platform of the Montana Republican Party called on the Montana Legislature do everything in its power to “complete any ongoing investigations into the 2020 election, and mandate and fund a conversion to a manual or mechanical vote count.” Similar language appears in the 2024 platform.
Republican state Rep. David Bedey unsuccessfully argued in 2022 that “These unfounded attacks on Montana’s election system do nothing but degrade the confidence our citizens have in this fundamental process.”
Evidence of this abounds. On a radio talk show in July 2023, Attorney General Austin Knudsen implied that local election officials “stonewalled” state investigations into illegal voting. The Montana Free Press, despite extensive efforts, was unable to find any evidence of that, and Knudsen refused to explain his remarks.
In March 2023, according to the Flathead Beacon, all three Lincoln County election officials resigned after what they called unjustified allegations from county commissioners that they had falsified election documents. The clerk and recorder in Sanders County also resigned, citing health concerns and “multiple threats.”
The clerk and recorder in Cascade County told the Great Falls Tribune weeks before the 2022 election that she was still getting demands for a recount of the 2020 results, even though Trump won 59 percent of the vote there and Republicans for the first time in history won all seats in the county. The demands bordered on harassment, she said.
“They have no idea what the process is, and they’re literally making our lives miserable,” she said.
Issue One, an advocate for election integrity, says that roughly 40 percent of chief local election officials in the 11 western states have left their positions since 2020.
Efforts to undermine faith in U.S. elections continue. The Heritage Foundation maintains a database of 1,546 “proven instances of voter fraud” dating back to 1982. Given the number of elections that have been held since then, the odds that any particular vote was cast illegally are millions to one.
Consider the two cases the foundation uncovered in Montana. A Gallatin County voter was given a six-month suspended sentence and fined $250 for requesting two absentee ballots under the name “Miguel Raton,” a rough Spanish translation of Mickey Mouse. He received two ballots illegally but did not use either to vote, instead pinning them to the wall of his shop as “trophies” showing how easy it was to commit voter fraud.
Doesn’t look so easy now, eh Miguel?
In the other case, a Liberty County man received a similar penalty for casting the absentee ballot of his ex-wife without her permission. The foundation’s database did not include a third case involving a Whitefish man who pleaded not guilty last year to a charge that he fraudulently used the ballot of another elector.
The Montana cases seemed typical. The three cases in Wyoming, for instance, involved a convicted felon who twice voted illegally, a couple who cast absentee ballots in Wyoming although they had moved to another state, and a former state representative who used a false address to vote after selling her home in 1997.
The Heritage Foundation acknowledges that its database is not comprehensive, and it cannot, of course, include instances of voter fraud that have gone undetected.
But other studies confirm that nearly all votes are legal. The Brennan Center for Justice’s compilation of research “reveals that fraud is very rare, voter impersonation is virtually nonexistent, and many instances of alleged fraud are, in fact, mistakes by voters or administrators. ”
That makes sense. Isolated instances of voter fraud are foolish, except possibly in races where few votes are cast. At a national level, fraud is pointless unless it is conducted on a massive scale involving at least tens of thousands and possibly millions of votes.
You can trust your vote will count. Just don’t listen to the whiners.
