Democrats' dangerous fear-mongering over stolen elections is setting the stage for Americans to reject any result that does not declare their candidate the winner: Georgia Secretary of State BRAD RAFFENSPERGER
There is a dangerous trend that poses a serious challenge to the integrity of America's election system.
Yet, no one is talking about it; not the political world, not the media, not even elections experts.
In fact, most of the people in these groups are strengthening this clear attack on the integrity of America's elections, rather than helping solve the problem
What I'm referring to is the constant drumbeat of manufactured stolen election crises and the corrosive effect this narrative has on American's faith in their ability to choose their leaders.
The idea that elections were stolen, will be stolen, or are being stolen right now, right in front of the American people, has become the talking point of the day.
It is almost impossible to open a newspaper, turn on the TV, or listen to a political speech without someone claiming that there is a deep, QAnon-style effort to steal an election underway.
To be clear, Democrats are just as guilty as Republicans, if not more.
Raffensperger, a Republican, is Georgia’s secretary of state. (Above: Raffensperger announces the start of a hand recount of the Nov. 3, 2020, presidential election during a briefing outside of the Georgia State Capitol building.)
Failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams' false stolen election campaign is as culpable as Donald Trump's. Mainstream media pundits are as responsible as dark web bloggers.
Abrams still refuses to concede the 2018 Georgia governor's race to now-Governor Brian Kemp.
As recently as October of this year, she told a Virginia crowd that 'just because you win doesn't mean [you've] won.' Back in March 2019, only a few months after her failed campaign, Abrams claimed she 'did win my election. I just didn't get to have the job.' In March 2020, Abrams' voter activist group Fair Fight Action released an ad putting an asterisk next to Governor Kemp's name 'to suggest [Kemp]'s 2018 victory was illegitimate.'
Fresh off -- rightly -- warning the American people that the stolen election claims regarding the November 2020 elections do unprecedented damage to democracy, liberals and major media outlets repeat their own stolen election claims with reckless abandon.
It seems the extreme liberals and their allies in the media have taken a page out of the stolen elections playbook, one used by Abrams, to great effect.
Through constant fear-mongering, they are getting Americans used to the idea that their elections will be stolen and set the stage for Americans to reject any election result that does not declare their chosen candidate as the winner.
Case in point, liberal leaders continue to challenge the 2000 presidential election and the 2016 presidential election.
Democrats are also no stranger to challenging outcomes in Congress either.
Failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams' false stolen election campaign is as culpable as Donald Trump's. (Left) Trump speaks at a rally on the Ellipse on Jan. 6, 2021, shortly before his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol. (Right) Abrams made remarks on a federal lawsuit challenging the 'gross mismanagement' of Georgia elections
A handful of Democrats in the House of Representatives attempted to challenge the results of the 2016 election but failed to get a Senator to go along with it. Democrats in Congress filed objections to Ohio's electors after the 2004 presidential election due to alleged 'serious election irregularities,' even though President George Bush won Ohio's presidential election by 118,00 votes. In 2000, the Congressional Black Caucus 'attempted to block Florida's electoral votes from being counted.'
In addition, the years-long Russia collusion conspiracy theory gave credibility to the ultimately baseless idea that the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election.
Special Counsel for the U.S. Department of Justice Robert Mueller found there was no evidence of collusion in March 2019. It turned out that the Steele Dossier, on which much of the Russia narrative was based, relied on unverified rumors from Democratic Party-aligned individuals and sources with clear political bias.
That didn't stop major political figures from constantly challenging the elections though. In September 2019, months after the U.S. Department of Justice found no collusion, Hillary Clinton called Trump an 'illegitimate president.' So did late Rep. John Lewis in 2017.
Before the Special Counsel's report came out, countless major media outlets had already spent years repeating the conspiracy theory that Trump had stolen the election.
After the report, the New York Times said 'it's not our job to determine whether or not there was illegality.' CNN claimed 'we are not investigators. We are journalists.' MSNBC's Rachel Maddow was a fixture on cable news alleging repeatedly and without evidence that President Trump was compromised. There were no mea culpas.
In September 2019, months after the U.S. Department of Justice found no collusion between Trump and the Kremlin, Hillary Clinton called Trump an 'illegitimate president.' (Above) Hillary Clinton made her concession speech after being defeated on November 9, 2016
These outlandish claims are not just about past elections, but future electoral contests as well.
News outlets including The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, spend countless column-inches warning their readers that the next election, whether 2022 and 2024, will be stolen.
All of this has an eroding effect on the confidence of the American public and the cornerstone institutions that help democracy survive.
A May 2017 poll found that 65 percent of Democrats believed their own party did not accept that 'Trump won fairly and is a legitimate president.'
A March 2018 YouGov poll found that 66 percent of Democrats believed 'Russia tampered with vote tallies in order to get Donald Trump elected President.'
The same effect can be seen in Georgia's 2018 election where Kemp carried the state by 55,000 votes over Abrams, more than 4 times the size of Trump's loss.
In the days, months, and years since the election, liberal politicians fanned the flames of Abrams' stolen election claims. Though there has been no evidence of voting machines changing votes, in 2018 or 2020, a 2017 poll found that 85 percent of Democrats thought it was likely or very likely that 'obstacles to voting or problems with voting machines affected the outcome of Georgia's 2018 gubernatorial election.'
There is little hope that this will change.
Again, it seems that, in almost the same breath, major media pundits and political leaders will criticize Trump and his supporters for repeating baseless stolen election claims, then push some of their own.
With the advent of Georgia's new election law, which expanded early voting days, wrote absentee ballot drop boxes into law for the first time, and put in commonsense rules so voters could get their absentee ballots early enough to actually return them, a whole new wave of stolen election claims has taken over.
Abrams, Biden, and their allies in the media have compared the new law to Jim Crow, a system of segregation that ensured black people were treated separately under American law and did everything possible to disenfranchise them (as a legislator, Abrams voted for and defended a bill to cut early voting in Georgia in half).
The allegedly centrist Brookings Institution called the bill an 'assault on our democracy.' Then, the Washington Post and others have claimed Georgia's election law is part of a plot to steal future elections.
What happened after the bill passed?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported 'minor glitches and short waits' during the recent November election. Fulton County, Georgia's most populous county with a decades-long history of poorly managed elections, reported 'short lines and no major technical issues.'
The stolen election claims have become an unfortunate fixture in American politics.
Biden compared the new Georgia election law to Jim Crow, a system of segregation that ensured black people were treated separately under American law and did everything possible to disenfranchise them. (Above) Biden condemns Republican election reforms during White House news conference in March
Politicians can raise millions by claiming they didn't in fact lose their elections. But rather, the system was rigged against them. They can create or maintain a national profile, get lucrative speaking gigs, and hold sway over their parties by continuing to push baseless or disproven stolen election lies.
Mainstream media outlets are clearly too conflicted to be of help either.
The appeal of more clicks online and more eyeballs on the TV screen make stolen election claims too appealing for even those trying to be responsible journalists. The constant warning of an impending crisis of democracy and the chance to blame one party or the other attracts too much attention for major media outlets to not take part.
This is the real threat to democracy.
As the country remains trapped in a cycle of progressively more extreme apocalyptic rhetoric about the coup around the corner, more and more Americans are going to believe it. They in turn, are primed to listen to the next politician, biased talking head, or unreliable blog, that proclaims to know the truth about how the election was stolen.
It shouldn't be a shock that after 4 years of major politicians, prime time journalists, and supposed election experts talking about how Russia stole the last election, Trump would be able to convince a large number of people that the system was rigged against him.
The greatest challenge American democracy faces, pure and simple, is the constant stream of end-of-democracy rhetoric that is entirely divorced from reality. Aided and abetted by news cycles that reward this kind of nonsense, political doomsaying about threats to democracy are a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Tell people enough times that their democracy is being stolen, they will start to believe it.
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