Charles Cole - Election Integrity: What are the Facts? What is the Truth? Do we really want to know?

MORE DECEPTION FROM THE VAUNTED AP

This past week, readers of the Sheridan Press were treated to another dose of “real news” from the AP. They cited two obscure reports of alleged election improprieties – one from Kentucky and the other from Pennsylvania – taken from social media posts after recent elections in those two states. What people were supposed to take from these AP “reports” was apparently more “evidence” that our elections are pure as the driven snow. Never has been anything to see here, folks, move on.

AP continues to avoid potentially embarrassing facts from the now “settled” 2020 election. The conservative legal watchdog group Judicial Watch provided one such little known fact. In 2020, 353 counties in 29 different states had voter registrations totaling over 100% of the number of residents eligible to vote in those jurisdictions.

Add to that the truly absurd reality from Pennsylvania where at four in the morning after the election there occurred a huge "spike" in votes counted which gave Biden almost 580,000 votes while only 3,200 went to Trump. This is statistically and algorithmically impossible. How can any candidate for any office receive 99.5% of a vote count? Even Soviet officials didn’t get that level of lunacy in their “elections.”

And yet, AP and other “progressive” news outlets continue to rely on “fact checkers” such as the dubious NewsGuard and the outright fraudulent social media fact checkers. I would encourage folks to consult the documented research published in an outstanding 2023 book entitled “Checking The Fact Checkers” by journalist Matt Palumbo.  

Sadly, many establishment Republicans seem willing to accept ludicrous assertions about the 2020 election. They allow challenges to its integrity to be labeled as “election denialism” and doubts about that election to be called The Big Lie. If, as was claimed, the 2020 election were “the most secure election in U.S. history,” why have leftists stubbornly refused every attempt at analyzing it? They went so far as to slander Republican election officials who dared testify as to irregularities they’d witnessed.

If Democrats are so dedicated to “saving our democracy,” why do they continue ignoring the sage advice of the 2005 bipartisan Commission on Federal Election Reform and denigrate its recommendations? That report identified lax voter ID requirements and the overuse of mail-in voting as highly dangerous.

I think most Americans know the answer to such questions without the “help” of the AP.

Charles Cole,

Sheridan