Local Republicans and Democrats couldn’t be of more different minds on the question of whether the 2020 presidential election was a free and fair one. Some of the media has declared democratic candidate Joe Biden as the winner, while President Donald Trump has instead filed lawsuits in key swing states alleging election impropriety.
While some of the national media projects Joe Biden as the 46th president of the United States, President Donald Trump has not conceded and has instead filed lawsuits in key swing states alleging election impropriety.
Not unexpected given the divided nature of American politics, local Republicans and Democrats couldn’t be of more different minds on the question of whether the 2020 presidential election was a free and fair one.
In an interview with the News-Press, Santa Barbara County Republican chairwoman Bobbi McGinnis said she has no doubt that there was election impropriety, finding the large number of ballots that arrived in Pennsylvania after Election Day in favor of Mr. Biden particularly suspicious.
“Statistically, the numbers just don’t make sense that that many ballots would come in after the midnight hour,” she said.
Ms. McGinnis also cited whistleblowers such as an anonymous woman who worked as a poll worker in Nevada and released a sworn affidavit to the Trump campaign that has been submitted to the Justice Department. The anonymous woman appeared on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show “The Ingraham Angle” and said that outside the polling place where she worked, she witnessed two people by a Biden-Harris van opening and marking ballots.
“This gal had nothing to gain by coming forward,” Ms. McGinnis said.
Santa Barbara Republican Women president Julie Bischoff also suspects that there was chicanery in the election and mentioned a lawsuit in Michigan. In the suit, poll workers who worked in Wayne County, where Detroit is located, allege they were instructed to backdate absentee ballots and not verify the signatures on them.
According to Just the News, the lead attorney for the city of Detroit, David Fink, said the lawsuit “is not based upon actual evidence of any election fraud or misconduct.”
Perhaps the most hard-fought state during the election, Pennsylvania’s standing is still pending due to litigation.
On Monday, President Trump’s campaign filed a lawsuit against Secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Kathy Boockvar and the boards of elections in seven of the state’s counties.
It alleged that the state illegally allowed for a two-tiered election system, in which different types of ballots were held to different standards. While voters who voted in person at the polls were required to sign voter registrations, have their signatures checked against voter rolls, and be monitored by poll observers while they voted, the lawsuit claims that 2.65 million mail-in votes were cast in a way that “lacked all of the hallmarks of transparency and verifiability that were present for in-person voters.”
Should President Trump’s legal strategy not pan out, Ms. McGinnis said it is imperative for Republicans to retain control of the Senate.
“We need to hold onto the senate because that is going to be our only firewall against a very radical left agenda,” she said.
While state Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson, D-Santa Barbara, remarked that President Trump has a right to challenge the election results in court, she said him doing so is nonetheless “disgraceful.”
“There is absolutely no justification for this,” she said.
The senator criticized the president for not conceding the election and taking the first steps toward a seamless transition of power. As for the allegations of impropriety, Sen. Jackson said they’re not nearly sturdy enough ground on which to overturn the results of an election.
“Anybody can allege anything. In order to have it stick you need to have something that supports the allegation, and there’s absolutely nothing,” she said.
She added that she trusts the courts will properly handle the dispute and by the end of it, the president will not be able to make up enough ground in key states such as Michigan.
“He’s taking it to court. I have confidence in the judicial process. He lost Michigan by 150,000 votes,” she said.
Santa Barbara Democratic Party chairwoman Gail Teton-Landis echoed Sen. Jackson’s view that there is no proof of voter fraud. She said the president is heading down a “dangerous avenue” with his legal challenges, which are “putting the sacred democratic process of voting in jeopardy.”
“There are not two sides to every story and on this topic. There is only the truth that the election was fair, votes are being counted, and Joe Biden won,” she said.
To illustrate how there’s no evidence of voter fraud, Ms. Teton-Landis cited an exchange between Jonathan S. Goldstein, one of the president’s lawyers, and a Pennsylvania judge earlier this week.
During the exchange, when the judge asked if there was any fraud involved with 592 disputed ballots in Montgomery County, PA, Mr. Goldstein retorted, “To my knowledge at present, no.”
email: jgrega@newspress.com
