The wolves crying election fraud are at it again

"I voted" stickers at the Alaska Division of Elections. (Mark Sabbatini / Juneau Independent)

By Rich Moniak

In late August 2008, I boarded a morning Alaska Airlines flight bound for Ketchikan.  Before the cabin doors were closed, the passenger sitting in front of me stood up and declared “I can’t believe it. John McCain just killed himself.” 

The shock of that statement was quickly erased when the man, who identified himself as a lifelong Republican, explained that McCain conceded defeat in the upcoming presidential election by choosing Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. He implied she would become an embarrassment for the party and Alaskans. 

But the current White House occupant makes Palin look like she was a well-informed, well-spoken, vice-presidential candidate and a very gracious election loser. 

On Meet the Press last weekend, Kristen Welker conducted a long interview with President Donald Trump. After half an hour, it went off the rails.

The question that triggered Trump’s meltdown was about the anti-weaponization fund that was supposed to settle his lawsuit against the IRS. He angrily insisted that people who pled guilty or were convicted of crimes committed during the Jan. 6 insurrection “did nothing wrong.” 

Then without being prompted, he retreated to his favorite fantasy.

“The election was rigged,” he said, referring to 2020. “It was a dirty election.” In reference to last week’s mayoral election in Los Angeles, he added “it’s happening again right now in California.” 

When asked if he had any evidence, Trump replied “All I have to do is look.” And after telling Welker that she, ABC and CBS and CNN are all crooked, he walked out.

What happened in LA is a Trump-endorsed Republican was comfortably in second place three days after the election. If Spencer Pratt held onto that position, he would have faced incumbent Major Karen Bass in a runoff in November. But he dropped into third place after mail-in ballots were counted during the next few days. 

On Monday, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) defended Trump’s inability to provide evidence the election was rigged by arguing “Some of these efforts are so diabolical and so far upstream, it is impossible to prove.” 

That’s a page right out of Trump’s corrupt attempt to remain in power after losing in 2020. Having no evidence of fraud to make his case to the U.S. Supreme Court, his attorney accused election officials of “systematically loosening the measures for ballot integrity so that fraud becomes undetectable.”

Evidence-free accusations run all the way down the right wing food chain. 

Podcaster Bennie Johnson said “statistically impossible ballot drops” were responsible for Pratt’s loss. “This can’t be allowed to keep happening in America.” 

“If you don't want us to assume cheating, maybe make it a little less obvious,” the spokesperson for Turning Point USA posted on X. 

“Election fraud right in front of our very eyes,” declared an Alaskan who followed the LA election from thousands of miles away.

But as Jonah Goldberg noted, how long it takes California to count their votes is “a scandal of incompetence and self-indulgence, not a scandal of corruption.”

The slow count explains why Hillary Clinton’s 600,000-vote lead on election night in 2016 grew to over 4 million after final results were released in December.

Late counts of mail-in ballots played a bigger role in the 2020 election. And because Trump frequently claimed the system was rigged, far fewer Republicans voted that way. 

In Texas and Ohio where they were counted before Election Day, early vote tabulations made the election appear close. But Trump easily won both states. 

They were counted first in Arizona too. After Joe Biden raced off to a sizable lead, Fox News projected he’d win. The Trump campaign cried foul. The Stop the Steal movement demanded the state keep counting votes. 

The opposite happened in other swing states. Because he was ahead, Trump called for the counting to stop. But the mail-in wave of blue ballots vaulted Biden to victory, spawned dozens of conspiracy theories, and Trump became the biggest poor loser in the history of democracy. 

Now I don’t like mail-in voting. And I’m not a fan of Alaska’s ranked choice system that Win Gruening thinks should be repealed. 

But neither is why public trust in our elections is at an all-time low. That dishonorable distinction belongs to Trump and Republican loyalists who are either all in on promoting his Big Lie or are passively keeping it alive by masking their embarrassment with silence. 

• Rich Moniak is a Juneau resident and retired civil engineer with more than 25 years of experience working in the public sector.