{"id":1560510,"date":"2022-07-19T08:05:05","date_gmt":"2022-07-19T12:05:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1560510"},"modified":"2022-07-19T08:05:18","modified_gmt":"2022-07-19T12:05:18","slug":"nevertrumps-latest-attempt-to-dismiss-election-concerns-is-particularly-dishonest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/nevertrumps-latest-attempt-to-dismiss-election-concerns-is-particularly-dishonest\/","title":{"rendered":"NeverTrump\u2019s Latest Attempt To Dismiss Election Concerns Is Particularly Dishonest"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">20<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fnevertrumps-latest-attempt-to-dismiss-election-concerns-is-particularly-dishonest%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1560510&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><div><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/50564518207_d50ff02312_k.jpg\" class=\"ff-og-image-inserted\" alt=\"image\" \/><\/div>\n<p>A group of establishment Republicans <a href=\"https:\/\/lostnotstolen.org\/\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/Lost-Not-Stolen-The-Conservative-Case-that-Trump-Lost-and-Biden-Won-the-2020-Presidential-Election-July-2022.pdf\">released a report<\/a> last week claiming to make \u201cThe Conservative Case that Trump Lost and Biden Won the 2020 Presidential Election.\u201d <\/p>\n<p>It is not news that Joe Biden won the 2020 election. The report\u2019s strawman-slaying title is intended to suggest that concerns about the integrity of that election are without merit. But the report itself simply goes through court decisions and recounts, listing how they turned out. It focuses on questions about \u201cfraud,\u201d rather than the significant and extremely well-substantiated concerns Republican voters have about the election.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cTheir methodology obscures the vast majority of actual material to consider if one were honestly engaging the problems,\u201d said Capital Research Center President Scott Walter. His group has documented the significant role played by Mark Zuckerberg\u2019s private funding of government election offices, a massive issue that the report almost completely elided.<\/p>\n<p>Other major issues were also downplayed or ignored, even as court cases and investigative reports <a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/2022\/07\/11\/dissent-in-wi-ballot-drop-box-victory-highlights-much-bigger-issue-our-top-jurists-dont-care-about-election-integrity\/\">vindicate some of those concerns<\/a>. In just the last few weeks, the Wisconsin Supreme Court, for example, ruled that unsupervised ballot drop boxes and third-party ballot trafficking both violate state law.<\/p>\n<p>In its report, the group claimed its conservative Republican bona fides were beyond question, asserting that no members \u201chave shifted loyalties to the Democratic Party, and none bear any ill will toward Trump and especially not toward his sincere supporters.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In fact, the group is a combination of NeverTrumpers and people who thought the Republican Party had gone off the deep end long before Trump\u2019s arrival. The report uses misdirection and red herrings regarding \u201cvoter fraud\u201d to avoid talking about genuine and substantiated concerns regarding illegal voting and election integrity. And it is sourced to left-wing corporate media outlets such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, hardly places to go to make any case, much less a credible or conservative one, about the 2020 election.<\/p>\n<h2>From the Voter-Rejected Wing of the GOP<\/h2>\n<p>Report co-author Thomas Griffith, a former federal judge whose <a href=\"https:\/\/www.deseret.com\/2022\/2\/25\/22951163\/president-joe-biden-supreme-court-nomination-byu-lds-mormon-counsel-thomas-griffith\">enthusiastic support of Ketanji Brown Jackson<\/a> was singled out by President Biden in his speech when he nominated her to the Supreme Court, told NeverTrump publication The Dispatch: \u201cThe idea is that it\u2019s written by conservatives, for conservatives. We recognize the people who are watching [Morning Joe and CNN] are probably not the people we\u2019re primarily interested in.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Paul Ryan\u2019s former chief of staff David Hoppe, another co-author, admitted the group got much support for its project from volunteers at <a href=\"https:\/\/thedispatch.com\/p\/a-2020-election-report-by-conservatives\">high-powered, inside-the-Beltway law firms<\/a>. Still, corporate media accepted the group\u2019s framing of itself as \u201cconservative.\u201d Even a cursory look at the list revealed that to be overly generous if not completely misleading.<\/p>\n<p>Ted Olson served as former President George W. Bush\u2019s solicitor general, but he is most well known for being the brains and muscle behind the legal campaign to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.aspenideas.org\/sessions\/the-supreme-courts-marriage-equality-ruling-the-most-consequential-ruling-in-our-lifetimes\">redefine marriage to include same-sex couples<\/a>. When President Trump sought to have his help to fight against the Russia collusion hoax that so undermined the country, Olson <a href=\"https:\/\/www.businessinsider.com\/bush-lawyer-ted-olsen-slammed-trump-refused-to-join-legal-team-2018-3?op=1\">declined to help<\/a>. He did go on television to <a href=\"https:\/\/thehill.com\/homenews\/administration\/380330-gop-attorney-who-turned-down-offer-to-join-trump-legal-team-rips\/\">publicly disparage the president<\/a> after declining his request. Olson even tried to get Mitch McConnell to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nationalreview.com\/bench-memos\/ted-olsons-shameless-pandering\/\">backtrack on his policy<\/a> of not holding hearings for Justice Antonin Scalia\u2019s replacement until after the 2016 election. Olson is routinely derided by critics as a \u201cconservative attorney for sale,\u201d and someone who has \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nationalreview.com\/bench-memos\/ted-olsons-shameless-pandering\/\">always been a hired gun<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Former federal judge Michael McConnell <a href=\"https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/newshour\/show\/a-constitutional-scholar-on-why-trumps-impeachment-trial-should-proceed\">argued on PBS in support of the second impeachment trial<\/a> for President Trump. <\/p>\n<p>Former federal judge Michael Luttig is already well known for <a href=\"https:\/\/newrepublic.com\/article\/166843\/january-6-trump-pence-luttig-electoral-count-act\">helping out the Democrats\u2019 Ja 6 Committee<\/a>. He rather famously left the federal bench for Boeing \u2014 \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/abovethelaw.com\/2010\/07\/lawyerly-lairs-luttigs-lap-of-luxuryplus-info-about-his-current-compensation\/\">taking his toys and going home<\/a>,\u201d as some put it at the time \u2014 after President George W. Bush didn\u2019t put him on the Supreme Court. The Wall Street Journal noted that his resignation letter <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wsj.com\/articles\/SB114727449814548996\">pointedly didn\u2019t mention the younger Bush<\/a>. <\/p>\n<p>Luttig also serves on the advisory board of \u201cThe Safeguarding Democracy Project,\u201d led by <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2022\/07\/08\/opinion\/trump-democracy-states.html\">Richard Hasen<\/a>, an election law professor who criticizes voter ID laws. Its <a href=\"https:\/\/www.influencewatch.org\/organization\/safeguarding-democracy-project\/\">mission statement<\/a> claims Republicans who questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 election were acting in bad faith, and that election integrity laws passed after the 2020 election \u201cthreaten the cornerstone of American democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Gordon Smith, one of the report\u2019s co-authors, wasn\u2019t even considered a conservative in the old Republican Party back when he served as a senator from Oregon from 1997-2009. Before he became a high-paid lobbyist for the National Association of Broadcasters, he was assessed the <a href=\"https:\/\/electoral-vote.com\/evp2009\/Senate\/lib_senator_ratings-2007.html\">fourth most liberal GOP senator<\/a> after Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, both of Maine, and Pennsylvania\u2019s Arlen Specter, who officially joined Democrats in 2009. By 2008, when he was defeated, Smith scored only a 33 out of 100 by the American Conservative Union. Just this year, he <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wweek.com\/news\/2022\/05\/19\/former-gov-ted-kulongoski-and-former-us-sen-gordon-smith-both-endorse-betsy-johnson-for-governor\/\">declined to endorse<\/a> a Republican for Oregon\u2019s gubernatorial race.<\/p>\n<p>Former Sen. John Danforth of Missouri, another co-author, thought the Republican Party was too conservative by 2005, arguing in The New York Times that it had become a party <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2005\/03\/30\/opinion\/in-the-name-of-politics.html\">overtaken<\/a> by conservative Christians. Danforth, an Episcopal priest, was a public supporter of efforts to redefine marriage to include same-sex couples. He has said the worst mistake he ever made was supporting Sen. Josh Hawley\u2019s political aspirations.<\/p>\n<p>All of the report\u2019s authors are or were Republican, including Hoppe, but they tend to inhabit parts of the old Republican Party that voters are increasingly rejecting, not just for their weak policy proposals but for their habit of cooperating with left-wing media in its unceasing attempts to undermine the new Republican Party\u2019s political strengths.<\/p>\n<h2>The Man Who Lost the Decades-Long Battle for Election Integrity<\/h2>\n<p>Two days before the razor-thin 2020 presidential election, report co-author Ben Ginsberg, the long-time dean of establishment Republican election lawyers and former counsel to Bush\u2019s presidential campaigns and Mitt Romney\u2019s presidential campaigns, did one of the most hostile things imaginable to Trump and his voters. He went to The Washington Post to beg Americans to vote for Democrat nominee Joe Biden (\u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/opinions\/2020\/11\/01\/ben-ginsberg-voter-suppression-republicans\/\">My party is destroying itself on the altar of Trump<\/a>.\u201d) He and other NeverTrumpers represent exceedingly little of the Republican Party outside of the Beltway, but in an election that came down to 43,000 votes across three states, they should get at least some credit \u2014 or if you\u2019re a Republican voter, blame \u2014 for pushing Biden and other Democrats over the finish line and bringing the country to where it is today.<\/p>\n<p>Ginsberg, it turns out, bears more responsibility for how the election turned out than most, and his op-ed explains why.<\/p>\n<p>It wasn\u2019t just that Ginsberg used his Republican pedigree in order to elevate his hatred of Trump when Republican campaigns desperately needed unity and strength. By November 2020, such tantrums were common among the Republicans who used to control the party. No, it was that he went on an absolute tirade against election integrity itself, adopting every Democrat Party talking point against Republican efforts to secure the ballot box. <\/p>\n<p>Two days before the 2020 election had even occurred \u2014 and long before this report came out last week \u2014 his mind was made up. Proof of systemic fraud simply \u201cdoesn\u2019t exist.\u201d He compared concerns about election integrity to a hunt for the \u201cLoch Ness monster.\u201d <\/p>\n<p>He praised practices enabling widespread unsupervised voting, including unattended ballot drop boxes, drive-through voting operations, and third-party ballot trafficking. He belittled concerns about even weak and insufficient verification systems, such as signature matches. He said Republican lawyers fighting against such practices were engaging in \u201cvoter suppression,\u201d a common Democrat talking point.<\/p>\n<p>Months after Ginsberg\u2019s 2020 op-ed mocking election concerns, Time magazine itself confirmed what many Republicans suspected: the existence of a \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/time.com\/5936036\/secret-2020-election-campaign\/\">conspiracy<\/a>\u201d by powerful Democrats to push through these unsupervised voting practices, creating an election system to ensure the outcome they desired. As Time wrote, it was \u201ca <a href=\"https:\/\/time.com\/5936036\/secret-2020-election-campaign\/\">well-funded cabal of powerful people<\/a>, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, <a href=\"https:\/\/time.com\/5936036\/secret-2020-election-campaign\/\">change rules and laws<\/a>, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The successful effort to change hundreds of laws and processes across the country to enable tens of millions of unsupervised ballots to flood the system was led by Marc Elias, the same Democrat attorney who had been behind the creation of the Russia collusion hoax, the lie that Trump didn\u2019t win in 2016 but stole the election by colluding with Russia.<\/p>\n<p>Democrats had been working for decades to accomplish these changes. For nearly four decades, it was Ginsberg\u2019s job to fight them. As the Republican Party\u2019s top election lawyer, Ginsberg was supposed to be the person responsible for pushing back against coordinated and well-funded Democrat efforts to expand unsupervised voting and to make it difficult to scrutinize the resulting ballots that were far more susceptible to fraud.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s not surprising that Republicans fared so poorly against the coordinated Democrat campaign to water down election integrity over the last 20 years given that Ginsberg was the guy supposedly leading their fight.<\/p>\n<p>Early on in my reporting for my <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Rigged-Media-Democrats-Seized-Elections\/dp\/168451259X\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">best-selling <\/a>book on the 2020 election, I spoke with dozens of Republican attorneys at the state and federal levels who had found themselves battling this widespread and coordinated takeover of the 2020 election. I asked some of them about Ginsberg\u2019s op-ed and work, and how he compared to Elias.<\/p>\n<p>They told me that Elias doesn\u2019t have much going on in his life other than his election work, and he wakes up each morning with big plans on how to manipulate elections. (A look at his active social media presence supports the characterization.) They explained to me that Elias isn\u2019t as good of an attorney as he promotes himself to be, but he\u2019s the type who will argue whatever he needs to for a client. If that means <a href=\"https:\/\/dailycaller.com\/2021\/02\/05\/marc-elias-voting-machines-new-york-ted-brindisi-claudia-tenney\/\">arguing that voting machines aren\u2019t secure<\/a> \u2014 as his group did in 2020 when trying to overturn the results of Rep. Claudia Tenney\u2019s election in New York, he\u2019ll do it. If it means <a href=\"https:\/\/freebeacon.com\/democrats\/virginia-based-voter-suppression-group-paid-thousands-to-voting-rights-champion-marc-elias\/\">mocking the idea that voting machines aren\u2019t secure<\/a> \u2014 as his group did in 2020 when battling Trump election challenges that same year, he\u2019ll do that too. He takes whatever side of an issue he needs to in order to secure a favorable outcome for his clients.<\/p>\n<p>These sources noted that Ginsberg, by contrast, usually managed to help Elias and other Democrats in their efforts. They said he was a decent and well-connected Beltway attorney, but he didn\u2019t seem to care much about election integrity, relative to his Democrat counterpart\u2019s efforts. He was a fine lawyer who tended to do a mediocre job, they said. In fact, as soon as he retired, Ginsberg\u2019s written and spoken statements have sounded like they could have come from Elias.<\/p>\n<p>Ginsberg even recently co-founded a group to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.npr.org\/2021\/09\/08\/1034811510\/election-workers-are-under-attack-a-group-of-lawyers-plans-to-defend-them\">fight election integrity efforts<\/a>, claiming that such efforts to ensure transparency and accountability put election officials at risk. His co-founder David Becker, formerly with radical left-wing group <a href=\"https:\/\/www.influencewatch.org\/non-profit\/people-for-the-american-way\/\">People for the American Way<\/a>, now runs the Center for Election Innovation and Research, one of the two groups Zuckerberg funded during the 2020 election with $419 million. Those funds enabled the private takeover of government election offices in the blue areas of swing states. With Luttig, Ginsberg serves on the advisory board of the <a href=\"https:\/\/law.ucla.edu\/academics\/centers\/safeguarding-democracy-project\">Safeguarding Democracy Project<\/a>, the group opposed to election integrity efforts.<\/p>\n<h2>So What About the Report\u2019s Substance?<\/h2>\n<p>The report was presented as an exhaustive look at what happened in the 2020 election. In fact, it only really looked in a cursory fashion at a limited set of lawsuits officially raised by Trump attorneys in the days and weeks after the election. <\/p>\n<p>The report\u2019s co-authors admitted to The Dispatch that the information in the report wasn\u2019t new. Indeed, it\u2019s seemed mostly to be a summation of what law associates might find in Lexis-Nexis \u2014 a recitation of legal cases and brief mentions of a few reports and audits in six battleground states. It did not dig deep into any of them, merely restating the circumstances by which cases were dismissed or resolved. And it doesn\u2019t even do a good job with that.<\/p>\n<p>For instance, it characterizes a report from the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty as finding, \u201cno evidence of widespread voter fraud and no evidence of significant problems with voting machines \u2014 in fact, they found that Democratic candidates performed worse than expected in areas with Dominion machines.\u201d Of course, \u201cwidespread voter fraud\u201d and \u201cvoting machines\u201d are red herrings, intended to divert people from dealing with what actually happened to control the election outcome in Wisconsin. <\/p>\n<p>Contrast the report\u2019s summation of the issue in Wisconsin with the actual first statement from the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty on its <a href=\"https:\/\/will-law.org\/election-integrity\/\">website for election integrity<\/a>, which says, \u201cIt is almost certain that in Wisconsin\u2019s 2020 election the number of votes that did not comply with existing legal requirements exceeded Joe Biden\u2019s margin of victory.\u201d The Supreme Court of Wisconsin has shown that claim isn\u2019t even up for debate, and while that is not \u201cvoter fraud,\u201d per se, many Americans would describe the efforts to enable illegal voting methods as \u201cwidespread election fraud.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty\u2019s report was a particularly modest account. Other independent analysts and econometricians analyzing Wisconsin have found that <a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/2022\/01\/28\/why-the-wall-street-journal-is-wrong-about-the-2020-election\/\">Zuckerberg\u2019s meddling<\/a> had a far greater impact than they realized. Here\u2019s what a team of academics wrote about the Center for Tech and Civic Life\u2019s takeover of government election offices in Wisconsin\u2019s biggest cities:<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\">\n<p>Without CTCL involvement in Wisconsin in 2020, Wisconsin would be a solidly red state. We estimate that CTCL\u2019s investment in seven Wisconsin counties resulted in 65,222 votes for Biden that would not have occurred in CTCL\u2019s absence. That\u2019s more than three times as big as the final 20,800-vote margin between Biden and Trump in 2020.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Private funding of elections overwhelmingly went to Democrat areas of swing states, produced skewed results, and violated legal requirements prohibiting partisan effects to nonprofit work. The situation in Wisconsin was so bad that leftist activists funded by the Zuckerberg operation led to multiple resignations of local officials in protest.  <\/p>\n<p>The report barely mentions, and therefore fails to adequately deal with, Zuckerberg\u2019s funding and what it paid for, merely mentioning that some legal challenges had cited it. This is despite its <a href=\"https:\/\/www.realclearinvestigations.com\/articles\/2022\/06\/07\/team_zuckerberg_masks_the_heavily_pro-democrat_tilt_of_2020_election_zuck_bucks_study_finds_835470.html\">central role in the outcomes for multiple swing states<\/a>, including Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Georgia.<\/p>\n<p>The report does a poor job dealing with Georgia as well. In its opening paragraph on Georgia, the report\u2019s authors write, \u201cGeorgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a conservative Republican, conducted a full manual recount of the five million ballots cast, confirming Biden\u2019s victory. At Trump\u2019s request, election officials then conducted a post-certification recount, which also confirmed Biden\u2019s victory. Secretary Raffensperger, with the assistance of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, evaluated and rejected numerous claims of fraud.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>There are multiple major problems with this characterization of Georgia. The report authors didn\u2019t seem to understand, or failed to accurately convey, the situation with the Trump lawsuit filed there. To take just one example from that lawsuit, it alleged a serious problem with illegal voting. Shortly after the election, voting data expert Mark Davis noticed a problem of 40,000 votes cast by people who had registered to vote in a county different from the one they had claimed to move to. It was one of the dozens of categories mentioned in the Trump lawsuit, and in the intervening months, it has been <a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/2022\/07\/01\/the-j6-show-trial-is-lying-about-election-fraud\/\">confirmed that more illegal votes were cast in this manner than comprises the margin of victory for the race<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>One could perform a recount a thousand times and not detect, much less deal with, that problem. A recount would simply recount the ballots, whether they were legal or not legal. As for the suggestion that Raffensperger took seriously, much less rejected, claims of illegal voting, the evidence does not support the claim. He fiercely fought the campaign\u2019s efforts to determine the precise number of illegal votes during the time they needed the information for their lawsuit. After The Federalist <a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/2021\/07\/09\/new-evidence-indicates-enough-illegal-votes-in-georgia-to-tip-2020-results\/\">reported<\/a> on this issue last year, and a television station confirmed the existence of the problem, his <a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/2021\/07\/16\/georgia-secretary-of-state-explains-why-hes-just-now-discovering-more-than-10000-illegal-votes-cast-in-2020\/\">office was cagey<\/a> about whether they were going to investigate, much less do anything about it. His office also <a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/2021\/07\/19\/georgia-voting-official-makes-excuses-for-residents-who-illegally-voted-in-2020\/\">made excuses for the illegal voting<\/a>, suggesting it was not a major concern for his office.<\/p>\n<p>The issue isn\u2019t even addressed in the report, and discussions of the lawsuit and how it was handled are completely inadequate and erroneous. The problem with the lawsuit \u2014 which did not allege fraud and which had many substantiated claims \u2014 was that it could not get a hearing before Jan. 6. The <a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/2021\/03\/17\/medias-entire-georgia-narrative-is-fraudulent-not-just-the-fabricated-trump-quotes\/\">problems the campaign\u2019s legal team had getting a hearing were Kafka-esque<\/a>, and the report doesn\u2019t seem to understand what the issues were, much less how they were handled.<\/p>\n<p>Other major issues are neglected in the report. Because of the limited scope and lack of depth to the report, it doesn\u2019t even acknowledge, much less give credit, to a 2022 Pennsylvania court decision ruling that <a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/2022\/01\/31\/pennsylvania-court-strikes-down-mail-in-voting-law-as-unconstitutional\/\">all no-excuse mail-in voting in the commonwealth is unconstitutional<\/a>. In its discussion of the Arizona audit, which found large and systematic problems in election administration, it quotes the response from the hostile Maricopa County Board of Supervisors as definitive. Likewise, it quotes news articles from the Associated Press, Washington Post, New York Times, and other left-wing media outlets as definitive responses to election concerns. This is laughably unserious.<\/p>\n<h2>Reports Like This Harm the Republic<\/h2>\n<p>When Luttig went to the one-sided Jan. 6 star chamber, he concluded his remarks by saying that Trump and his supporters were \u201ca clear and present danger to American democracy\u201d because of their ongoing concerns about election security.<\/p>\n<p>The report repeatedly asserts that the reason why there is a lack of trust in elections is because of Trump and his supporters. In fact, one of the most important reasons to fight the coordinated campaign to weaken election integrity is that the lack of controls that make fraud easier to commit and more difficult to detect is responsible for the lack of trust in elections.<\/p>\n<p>Following the contentious 2000 election, former President Jimmy Carter and Republican James Baker co-chaired the bipartisan Commission on Election Reform. Its 100-plus-page report was called \u201cBuilding Confidence in U.S. Elections,\u201d and it treated election integrity as vitally important to that goal.<\/p>\n<p>Rather than mocking or dismissing concerns about election integrity as unimportant, the Carter Commission stressed the problems caused by bloated and inaccurate voter rolls, nonexistent or faulty voter-identification procedures, and unsupervised voting. It said these practices threaten elections and democracy, as do misconduct by partisan election officials, the use of inconsistent procedures in different precincts, and an overall lack of transparency. The report noted that mail-in balloting is associated with higher risk of fraud and could also undermine faith in elections.<\/p>\n<p>Making sure that voting is fair is one of the most important issues in the country. That\u2019s why it remains a top concern to Republican voters, even as Washington, D.C., rolls out every member of the establishment to try to force them to fall in line with weak and insecure voting provisions.<\/p>\n<p>If they want to convince voters outside their bubble, they should try far harder than they did with this report.<\/p>\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator\" \/>\n<div class=\"article-author-description fst-italic\">\n  Mollie Ziegler Hemingway is the Editor-in-Chief of The Federalist. She is Senior Journalism Fellow at Hillsdale College. A Fox News contributor, she is a regular member of the Fox News All-Stars panel on \u201cSpecial Report with Bret Baier.\u201d Her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, the Guardian, the Washington Post, CNN, National Review, GetReligion, Ricochet, Christianity Today, Federal Times, Radio &#038; Records, and many other publications. Mollie was a 2004 recipient of a Robert Novak Journalism Fellowship at The Fund for American Studies and a 2014 Lincoln Fellow of the Claremont Institute. She is the co-author of <em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Justice-Trial-Kavanaugh-Confirmation-Supreme\/dp\/1621579832\">Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court<\/a><\/em>. She is the author of &#8220;<em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Rigged-Media-Democrats-Seized-Elections\/dp\/168451259X\/\">Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections.<\/a><\/em>&#8221; Reach her at <b><a href=\"mailto:mzhemingway@thefederalist.com\">mzhemingway@thefederalist.com<\/a><\/b><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A group of establishment Republicans released a report last week claiming to make \u201cThe Conservative Case that Trump Lost and Biden Won the 2020 Presidential Election.\u201d It is not<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":605,"featured_media":2315279,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1560510","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1560510","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/605"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1560510"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1560510\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2315279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1560510"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1560510"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1560510"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}