OPINION:
President Trump has an annoying habit of being right. Recently, Fulton County, Georgia, officials admitted they didn’t follow the rules when tabulating ballots for the hotly contested 2020 race between the current president and Joseph R. Biden.
A Georgia State Election Board hearing this month featured testimony from a county representative saying 315,000 ballots were counted without the required signatures verifying there had been no hanky-panky with the equipment.
State law says a poll manager and two witnesses must sign a document “attesting that the ballot box was empty prior to the opening of the polls” along with a form guaranteeing the machinery started from zero. This ensures data from a test run isn’t “accidentally” added to the final result.
Each extra vote could matter in Fulton County, where Mr. Biden took home 73% of the vote while campaigning from his basement compared with the 26% Mr. Trump captured after holding multiple, standing-room-only rallies throughout the Peach State.
Mr. Trump suspected the figures were off. He called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and recited numerous irregularities hoping to persuade him to investigate.
“But where were the poll watchers, Brad? There were no poll watchers there. There were no Democrats or Republicans. There was no security there,” Mr. Trump said during the lengthy conversation.
Mr. Raffensperger decided not to do anything. He insisted that the state’s numbers were accurate, handing Georgia’s 16 electoral votes to Mr. Biden on a margin of 12,670 votes out of 5 million cast.
A recording of the call was leaked to agenda-driven journalists who focused on Mr. Trump’s use of the phrase “find votes,” conveniently omitting the context. Each time the president used that verb, he did so while urging a legitimate inquest.
“A real check of the signatures going back in Fulton County you’ll find at least a couple of hundred thousand of forged signatures of people who have been forged. And we are quite sure that’s going to happen,” Mr. Trump said.
The leak served as pretext for disgraced Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to charge Mr. Trump with the apparent crime of challenging a Democratic victory. The case was dismissed after Ms. Willis was caught deceiving the court to hide her illicit dalliance with the case’s lead prosecutor.
This month, The New York Times published another call from Mr. Trump to then-Georgia House Speaker David Ralston. “We won, we won, we won your state massively. They took votes away,” Mr. Trump said.
We may soon know whether that’s true. Harmeet Dhillon, chief of the Justice Department Civil Rights Division, just filed a lawsuit ordering Georgia to submit 2020 election records to the federal government. Under the Civil Rights Act, they must be delivered at the attorney general’s request.
Democrats and Never Trumpers thundered against the tariffs, saying the president’s trade policies were a Smoot-Hawley 2.0 that would trigger a Great Depression. That didn’t happen. They said Mr. Trump wouldn’t be respected on the world stage because he wasn’t a statesman like Mr. Biden.
Now that Mr. Trump has returned to the Oval Office, prime ministers and heads of state fly to Washington on a moment’s notice when he beckons. Formal confirmation that poll workers in Georgia ignored proper procedures raises the prospect that Mr. Trump may have had a point about 2020.
Not much can be done about it now, but fixing 2020’s procedural goofs should contribute to more reliable outcomes in 2028.
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