NPR suddenly rediscovers that it’s dangerous for losing candidates to question the legitimacy of elections

“Without providing evidence,” NPR’s Twitter account declared this weekend, “Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin questioned the election’s legitimacy. And he isn’t the first politician to do so. Elections specialists worry that unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud erode confidence in democracy.”

The accompanying article, titled “Skeptics Urge Bevin To Show Proof Of Fraud Claims, Warning Of Corrosive Effects,” makes sure to mention that President Trump alleged once that “millions and millions of people” voted illegally in the 2016 election.

“There has seldom been any evidence of widespread fraud in elections,” NPR reports. “All the same, Americans’ confidence in elections has been slowly eroding over the past 20 years — and democracy-watchers put some of the blame on political rhetoric.”

Amazingly, the names “Hillary Clinton” and “Stacey Abrams” are nowhere to be found in the NPR story — which, again, is about the dangers of losing candidates disputing the results of major U.S. elections.

The publicly funded newsgroup has spent three years reliably amplifying the unsubstantiated allegations of two-time failed presidential candidate Clinton and failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Abrams, who claim they were robbed of their respective races.

In February 2019, for example, Abrams appeared on NPR’s Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me, where she made a crack about the “ghosts of votes uncounted.” In 2018, NPR parroted Abrams’s unsubstantiated allegation she was “almost blocked from voting.” That same year, Abrams joined NPR’s Michael Martin for an interview wherein she claimed, without evidence, that “voters in Georgia had a difficult time getting on the rolls, staying on the rolls, casting their ballots and having their ballots counted.”

These claims went unchallenged.

Also in 2018, NPR published an article, titled “Georgia Set To Remain A Battleground For Voting Rights Ahead Of 2020,” promoting both Abrams’s “gross mismanagement” lawsuit against Georgia as well as her new voter initiative to “pursue accountability in Georgia’s elections and integrity in the process of maintaining our voting rolls.”

Georgia experienced an explosion in midterm voting in 2018 compared to previous years. Moreover, many of Abrams’s specific allegations of voter suppression tactics have been debunked.

NPR has also been gentle in questioning Clinton’s claims of a rigged 2016 election. In September 2017, for example, the former secretary of state said explicitly that she would “not rule out” questioning the legitimacy of the 2016 election. At other times, she has cited conspiracy theories and alleged outright fabrications to explain her stunning electoral loss, including that “200,000 people in Wisconsin were either denied or chilled in their efforts to vote.” NPR has published no critical follow-up reporting warning that Clinton’s unsubstantiated allegations, which she keeps repeating, could erode confidence in American elections.

A funny thing about NPR hyping both Clinton’s and Abrams’s unfounded allegations of electoral foul play is that this all comes after the newsgroup dedicated a good amount of effort to chastising and condemning Trump, then the GOP nominee, for declining to say during the 2016 election whether he would respect the results of the race if he lost.

NPR is not even wrong about Bevin. He has failed to produce evidence of voting irregularities in Kentucky, which are already difficult to believe given his overall unpopularity in the state and the fact that Republican candidates elsewhere in the Bluegrass State cleaned up nicely on election night.

It is impossible, however, to miss that NPR’s concern for the eroding effects of a losing candidate questioning the legitimacy of an election hinges entirely on the losing candidate’s party affiliation.