OPINION:
There is something to be said for letting bygones be bygones, but the ones with grievous repercussions aren’t really gone. The anomalies, inconsistencies and apparent fraud revealed following the 2020 presidential election is poisoning the well-being of the nation. The damage cannot simply be forgotten like yesterday’s news. Sadly, even careful adjudication of the results by the highest court in the land may have no better effect, ultimately, than that of clamping a lid over a boiling pot.
President Trump saw himself prevailing on Election Day, but an overnight cascade of vote-total reversals apparently shifted victory to Joe Biden. The head-scratching aberrations that bedeviled ballot distribution and vote tabulation in a handful of swing states — thanks to Democrats’ coronavirus-excused crusade for easy mail-in voting and against ID verification — have left Americans wondering if the ship of state is in danger of foundering.
A Quinnipiac University poll published Thursday found that while 60% of registered voters believe Mr. Biden’s victory was legitimate, 34% of voters think it was not. Among members of Mr. Trump’s Republican Party, a preponderant 77% believe there was widespread voter fraud. The “safe harbor” deadline of Dec. 8 for states to resolve their election disputes has passed, but no one is safe so long as gales of suspicion tear at the result.
Texas, backed by 18 other states, bypassed lower benches to draw the U.S. Supreme Court into the fray. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton charged that Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Georgia, which all swung mysteriously from the Trump to the Biden column, violated the Electors Clause of the U.S. Constitution by making unlawful changes to their elections laws that prevented precise tabulation of ballots and rendered impossible accurate representation in the Electoral College. Some two-dozen states and territories rose to oppose the Texas-led effort.
Tens of thousands of ballots of dubious validity wouldn’t simply have had the effect of cancelling out legitimate votes in those critical swing states. If they ended up flipping the election in Mr. Biden’s favor, then the 74 million citizens who backed the president for a second term would have been disenfranchised.
The Founders established wise procedures for resolving legal battles over control of the White House, but history shows that ending residual enmity is less assured. When the Supreme Court ordered Florida to halt its interminable ballot recounts in 2000 and thus seal George W. Bush’s victory over Al Gore, seething Democrats settled the score later by turning against the Iraq War and fracturing national purpose that 9/11 had united.
Emotional divisions are not easily healed. Democrats may now chuckle over their success at gaming the election system, but patriotic Americans — millions of whom refuse to put away their red, white and blue Trump banners — show no interest in consigning fair elections to memories of a bygone era. At least a legal war between the states is preferable to the other kind.
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