Joseph Sabino Mistick: Facts on a lost, not stolen, election

If you are one of those Trump supporters who believes what you believe, no matter what, reading “Lost, Not Stolen: The Conservative Case that Trump Lost and Biden Won the 2020 Presidential Election” is not for you. But if you are on the fence looking for facts from an honest source, this report released last week may be just what you’ve been waiting for.

Eight of America’s leading conservative Republicans — including election law attorney Ben Ginsberg (who successfully litigated Bush-Gore 2000 in Florida) and several retired Republican judges and senators — prepared a report that addresses every election fraud case filed in the six battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

They also examined, point by point, every fraud accusation made in social media and in the public forum by those who claim the election was stolen, including claims of improper vote counts, voting machine rigging, absentee ballot fraud, voter identification fraud and blocking access of observers during the vote count. They found no fraud.

“We are most concerned that even after failing in more than 60 court cases to produce evidence of fraud or irregularities that would change the 2020 election results, the repetition of the false charges of a stolen election continues,” they wrote.

These are not RINOs, or “Republicans in name only,” as Trump and his followers often call those who dispute the Big Lie. As they describe themselves in the report, “Every member of this informal group has worked in Republican politics, been appointed to office by Republicans, or is otherwise associated with the Party. None have shifted loyalties to the Democratic Party, and none bear any ill will toward Trump and especially not toward his sincere supporters.”

They are concerned about the future of our democracy, but they are also good Republicans who are concerned about the effect that lying about the election could have on the future of the Republican Party.

“To have 30 percent of the country lack faith in election results based on unsubstantiated claims of a ‘stolen’ election is not sustainable in a democracy, and it discredits the political party making those charges.”

The Big Lie persists, despite what some of Trump’s closest advisers and top appointees have told him and the public. Conservative writer Ayn Rand could have been talking about the election deniers when she wrote, in her novel “The Fountainhead” from 1943, “The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody has decided not to see.”

Trump’s Attorney General William Barr told the House Select Committee, “My opinion then and my opinion now is that the election was not stolen by fraud.”

Trump’s Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia told the committee, “I told him that I did believe, yes, that once those legal processes were run, if fraud had not been established, I believed that what had to be done was concede the outcome.”

And Trump’s own White House Counsel Pat Cipollone told the committee that he repeatedly demanded to see evidence of election fraud, and no one could produce it. “At some point you have to put up or shut up,” he testified.

The “Lost, Not Stolen” report can be found at lostnotstolen.org. It is a good read and a gift to the nation.