The burden of proof is on Trump's campaign to show evidence of election fraud that will convince courts or state legislatures, and so far they haven't done it.
However, the public is under no obligation to work under the same standards of evidence as a court, and the public has different incentives than legislators. The public sees the smoke of electoral fraud and isn't convinced otherwise by establishment cries of "debunked" or "no evidence", no matter how loudly or frequently proclaimed. If Trump's legal and political challenges fail, the burden of proof will be on the establishment to convince the rest of America that Trump's protests are faulty, and so far they aren't even trying to make that case.
Their rough consensus is that GOP voters who still support the president are either treasonous or stupid, reinforced constantly by a brittle insistence that there was "no fraud" in the presidential election. A totemic front-page declaration by the New York Times, "ELECTION OFFICIALS NATIONWIDE FIND NO FRAUD," has been repeated everywhere, mantra-like. Any claims of voter fraud or ballot-counting irregularities, whether from President Trump or the tens of thousands who marched over the weekend, are "baseless," "unfounded," and have "no evidence" behind them.There's a palpable nervousness about the media's insistence that the election was as pure as the driven snow. Maybe they seem so nervous because they know what everyone in America knows: there was nothing pure or secure or even ordinary about the election.
How could there be? Under the pretext of ensuring "voter access" during the pandemic, Democrats, leftist nonprofits, and activist judges across the country unleashed a flood of changes to election rules in the months leading up to the vote, including an unprecedented expansion of mail-in voting, an inherently fraught method of casting ballots that removes almost all oversight from the process.
No matter. States pushed ahead, mailing ballots to outdated voter rolls en masse and recklessly loosening oversight for how those ballots could be collected and counted. Chain-of-custody for absentee ballots went out the window, along with whatever meager safeguards usually apply to absentee voting. Ballot harvesting, long a tradition of corrupt Democratic political machines in places like Detroit and Philadelphia, was introduced in some places for the first time. Take together, all these pandemic-inspired reforms presented an ideal opportunity for Democrats to flood absentee ballot-counting centers in major cities and run up the vote-count long after the polls closed on Election Day.
Despite judges dismissing the significance of hundreds of sworn affidavits, this testimony is pretty compelling to most people who are allowed to hear about it.
No wonder scores of Republican poll challengers in Michigan filed sworn affidavits claiming tens of thousands of fraudulent ballots were counted for Biden in Detroit. No wonder that in Philadelphia, poll watchers reported how they were forcibly kept from observing the counting of absentee ballots, as required under state law.Not all the reports of ballot-counting skullduggery amount to old-fashioned voter fraud, but as my colleague Margot Cleveland has noted, they're just as important because they undermine the integrity of an election just as much as, say, thousands of dead people voting.
Trump didn't cause the division and mistrust in America -- he is a symptom of a larger social trend that won't be extinguished when he leaves office. To paraphrase Princess Leia: The more the establishment tightens its grip, the more the public will slip through its fingers.
