This Op-Ed Is Provided By Congressman Troy Nehls
The Democrat’s sham January 6 Committee is trying to make the case that President Trump was guilty of inciting a riot because he claimed in April of 2020 (almost 7 months before the election) that the massive Democrat push for absentee voting would inevitably result in massive election fraud. But Trump had history on his side.
If you look at the actual history of voting fraud in America, you’d be crazy not to suspect that there would be large-scale fraud in the 2020 election due to the historically unprecedented expansion of absentee voting. Anyone familiar with the history of voter fraud could have predicted 20 years before the election that such would be the inevitable result.
Democrat fraud using absentee voting actually began in the 1864 presidential election. According to historian Tracy Campbell in his Deliver the Vote (2005), Republicans discovered “countless false names in an investigation of the New York City registry roles, and the absentee soldier vote was a vulnerable point of corruption. Thousands of forged registration papers had been filed for soldiers, officers’ certificates had been forged, and numerous sick, disabled, and dead soldiers had been illegally registered.” All courtesy of the Democrat political machine. Lincoln had to send in 6000 troops to watch over the election.
Absentee voting has been a known problem ever since. As Campbell concludes, after looking at the history of voter fraud, “In terms of effectiveness, absentee ballots remain the easiest way of buying votes in advance, or swinging them after the results are in, whichever way works.”
Unfortunately, absentee voting grew far more prevalent as the 20th century drew to a close and the 21st began. Long before 2020, this uptick in the popularity of absentee voting caused grave concerns for those worried about election integrity.
Caltech and MIT published a report in 2001, responding to the controversies about voting integrity raised by the Democrats in regard to the Bush-Gore contested election of 2000. The report’s very first recommendation was to “restrict or abolish on-demand absentee voting in favor of in-person early voting.” The reason is simple. After studying the effects of absentee voting, they concluded that “The convenience that on-demand absentees produce is bought at a significant cost to the real and perceived integrity of the voting process.”
Writing in 2004 about continuing corruption in Democrat-dominated Chicago, journalist and election expert James Merriner asserted that “the favored techniques of fraud now occur not in the polling place but in manipulations of absentee voting.”
Historian Mary Frances Berry likewise makes clear in her Five Dollars and a Pork Chop Sandwich: Vote Buying and the Corruption of Democracy (2016), “Absentee ballots have proven particularly susceptible to vote buying because campaign workers collaborate with county clerks and voting registrars to accept ballots signed and submitted in bulk.”
I could include many more assessments just like these, but my point is this: if you read what historians and journalists were saying long before April 2020, you would conclude that the massive increase of absentee voting pushed by the Democrat Party would also vastly increase the potential for voting fraud. In other words, Donald Trump was right to sound the warning in April of 2020. Again, any student of the history of voter fraud could have sounded it twenty years earlier.
Because of its jaded history, the Democrats themselves knew that increasing the absentee and mail-in voting would be greeted with great suspicion. That’s why they engaged in an immensely well-funded campaign to convince Americans that, contrary to overwhelming historical evidence, “mail-in votes weren’t susceptible to fraud….” These are the words of Democrat insider Molly Ball. As we now know, historically that’s simply a false statement. There are few things more susceptible to fraud.
It’s true that Democrats are much more likely to vote by absentee or mail-in ballots than Republicans. So, the Democrat push for the expansion of both in 2020 could possibly be considered to have been simply a good strategy to increase votes for Biden. The problem with that “innocent take” is that they also, simultaneously (and often against state law and the Constitution itself), did everything they could to loosen state restrictions meant to safeguard against fraud regarding absentee and mail-in ballots.
I’ll provide an example of the kind of fraud that occurred. Biden won Wisconsin by a mere 20,467 votes. Against state law (and hence against the Constitution itself which gives that kind of authority only to state legislatures), County clerks in the two most populous counties of Dane and Milwaukee declared that anyone who didn’t have a valid ID could claim that he or she was “indefinitely confined” because of COVID, thereby entirely circumventing any voter ID requirements. The percentages of ballots cast as absentee were extraordinarily high in these two counties, 74.4 percent in Dane County and 70.6 percent in Milwaukee County, the two highest of all Wisconsin counties. These are the counties that delivered Biden his very slim victory in the state.
Anyone asserting that doing away with valid ID requirements wouldn’t lead to fraud, would have to believe that setting aside valid ID requirements for purchasing alcohol, tobacco, and guns wouldn’t lead to fraud.
I have many more examples, both from more distant history and the 2020 election itself, in my forthcoming book, The Big Fraud. But that’s enough to show that history teaches us that drastically expanding absentee voting would inevitably lead to fraud. President Trump was right to warn us.
About The Author:
Congressman Troy Nehls proudly represents the 22nd Congressional District of Texas in the U.S. House of Representatives. Texas’ 22nd Congressional District includes portions of Fort Bend, Brazoria, and Harris counties. Prior to his election to Congress, Troy served our district for nearly 30 years in law enforcement and served our country 21 years in the US Army Reserve.
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