The Founding Fathers’ views were subject to democracy, liberty, freedom, and citizenship that steer the United States till today. Elections allow people to determine their nation’s political makeup and policy directions, in turn ensuring democracy. Critical developments at state and federal levels are successful with democratic and legitimate elections. The 2020 election was free and fair, making Joe Biden accountable and responsible to all Americans. According to BBC News, the Republicans control the House of Representatives after passing the threshold of 218 seats, while Democrats retained the Senate’s control by gaining Pennsylvania from the Republicans (US midterm election 2022 results, n.d.). Given this, available evidence fundamentally detaches the notion that the presidential contest was stolen.
Contention one claims that the election was tainted by fraud that emerged during political primaries. States, concerned about the COVID-19 pandemic began rallying for mail-in voting systems that triggered a backlash from Donald Trump and his allies (Bump, 2022; Kaplan, 2022). Bump (2022) explains that the underlying argument was that mail-in voting would prevent a Republican from being elected as president of the United States.
However, these claims began as an effort to inherently subvert mail ballots for fear that the Democrats would cast more ballots. Therefore, the Republicans and their supporters played a critical role in widening the partisan divide in voting; Republicans by poll and Democrats used mail. The Republicans recognized that their votes would be counted faster and reported first, giving the impression that they had the lead. With Joe Biden’s votes eroding this impression, it allowed Trump’s supporters to claim that the election was being rigged.
Second, there is no credible example demonstrating any scale of a systematic effort to steal the presidential election. The idea that a multistate effort to gain more votes for Joe Biden without detection is essentially noncredible in a democratic government. While there is no shortage of evidence about alleged rigging, the affirmative should demonstrate that such efforts were made. Nonetheless, the claims fall into three categories: unseen, vague, and dispelled statistical analyses and evidence.
Additionally, it is worth highlighting the assessments of election rigging and fraud: use of voting machines to guide the totals, mail-in partisan patterns, the odds of Biden’s win, and the process that led to him gaining more votes. However, the articulated claims are made on unseen evidence. For one, there is neither evidence that the votes were changed nor the collection of illegal ballots. In this view, the purported evidence was either misleading or contrived.
Secondly, electronic voting machine audits found no evidence of voting irregularities. In addition to this, counties that used Dominion voting systems machines mostly cast votes for Trump (Bump, 2020). Third, inaccurate vote totals in some states were largely due to improperly configured machines. Fourth, vote totals in most states were dependent on registered voters (Bump, 2022). Therefore, it can be deduced that there was a pattern of voters, not understanding voting tools and systems. The 2020 presidential election was relatively close and propagated the claim that the election had been stolen. Trump’s efforts to convince his base of rigging and fraud were but an effort to retain power. While there is no confidence in a legitimate and accurate vote count in 2020, there is insufficient evidence echoing that the election was stolen. Simply put, claims of the 2020 presidential election being stolen were self-serving.
References
US midterm election 2022 results. (n.d.). BBC News. Web.
Bump, P. (2020). Swing-state counties that used Dominion voting machines mostly voted for Trump. The Washington Post. Web.
Bump, P. (2022). The 2020 election was neither stolen nor rigged: A primer. The Washington Post. Web.
Kaplan, E. (2022). Donald Trump is (still) president of White America. Politico. Web.