Election truthers, including former President Donald Trump, are an existential threat to the long-term stability of our great republic, the Washington Post editorial board argued this week.
Then again, the editors argued, some election truthers, including failed Democratic Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, also have a point.
What a strong, principled statement.
The Washington Post published a column this week lightly rapping Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe on the knuckles for claiming, against all facts and evidence, that Abrams would be in the governor’s mansion right now were it not for Republican electoral trickery.
“[She] would be the governor of Georgia today” had not the state “disenfranchised 1.4 million Georgia voters before the election,” McAuliffe told supporters this week. “That’s what happened to Stacey Abrams. They took the votes away.”
This is a lie and a conspiracy theory, which the Washington Post editorial board can barely bring itself to condemn. The Washington Post editors instead couched their criticisms in terms of how dangerous it is that Trump claims the same about the 2020 presidential election.
“If there’s one thing that former president Donald Trump has taught us, it’s how toxic to the system it is to question the legitimacy of election results,” the board wrote.
However, the piece added, “Unlike Mr. Trump’s wild lies about millions of fraudulent votes, there’s some basis for Mr. McAuliffe’s statement. He was referring to the number of people purged from the voting rolls, for various reasons, between 2012 and 2018; in the year before the election, nearly 700,000 were purged, more Democrats than Republicans; and the person in charge of the operation was Brian Kemp, who was both secretary of state and Ms. Abrams’s opponent in the race for governor.”
Laughably, the board then conceded many names were cut from the voter rolls in Georgia for “legitimate reason,” including the fact that they were dead. The board also conceded that voter turnout in the 2018 Georgia midterm elections was unusually high that year.
Yet, the board is still willing to make excuses for and flirt with Abrams’s fantastic claims of election fraud by writing, “There is no way to know whether Ms. Abrams would have won if Georgia’s registration laws and practices had been different.” The board also quoted “election expert” Richard Hasen, who argued it is irrelevant whether Abrams would’ve won or lost: “The question is whether Georgia had a good reason to put these suppressive measures in place, and for the most part, the state did not have good reasons.”
Sure, no good reasons, except for the ones the Washington Post itself conceded, such as the fact that dead voters and people who moved out of state don’t need to be on the rolls.
Is it really this difficult to concede that Abrams lost the 2018 election by more than 55,000 votes, in a midterm election cycle that saw voter turnout in Georgia increase by more than 1.6 million from the previous cycle (voter suppression, indeed)? How can one condemn what Trump is doing while also arguing that maybe Abrams has a point? It’s almost as if the Washington Post is just going to agree with whatever the Democrat says.
