Want to restore public trust in elections? Start by disputing lies, conspiracy theories

When a post appeared on the Erie County Republican Party’s Facebook page in early June calling for a so-called “forensic audit” of the 2020 presidential election, I asked Erie County Republican Party Chairman Verel Salmon what such an audit might achieve.

More:Erie County GOP Facebook post calls for audit of 2020 election. Laughlin, others push back

Weeks later, I posed a similar question to state Rep. Curt Sonney on why the GOP, with his co-sponsorship, had proposed so many drastic changes to Pennsylvania’s election laws two years after the Republican-controlled General Assembly approved some of the most monumental changes to those same rules in eight decades.

Both Salmon and Sonney gave similar answers: There was an alarming amount of distrust and unease from their respective constituencies — presumably many of the same people — over the results of the 2020 election. Something needed to be done, they contended, to restore faith in our electoral system.

More:Sen. Doug Mastriano vows ‘forensic investigation’ of 2020 presidential election in Pa.

“We need to protect the public trust and we want to encourage public trust. Both parties do,” Salmon told me when I asked him about the basis for a partisan audit. “When there’s some good information and some misinformation floating around and so forth, there’s an unease, a general malaise. And anything we can do to ensure that our elections are conducted fairly we should be doing.”

True, we do need to protect the public trust in our elections. But aren’t the proposed remedies nothing more than solutions in search of problems? 

The absurd Arizona-style audit proposal, pushed strongly by state Sen. Doug Mastriano, a Donald Trump loyalist, is the most glaring example.

It’s entirely partisan, cloaked in secrecy, and funded by dark money. Whatever “results” this audit produces will almost certainly be rigged for the people paying for it. It will only feed the misinformation machine that’s truly responsible for damaging public trust. Would Republicans trust Democrats to conduct a similar, third-party review of ballots and voting machines? Of course not.

Fact check:Arizona audit hasn’t found 275,000 fraudulent votes

To be fair, Salmon wasn’t behind the Facebook post, which was either taken down or removed from public view after the Erie Times-News reported on it. And he said that there’s a lot of “misinformation” going around. Salmon, however, said it seemed to be the consensus of his fellow Republicans that an audit was needed — even though county elections officials throughout the state had already conducted two bipartisan reviews of election results.

As for House Bill 1300, which Gov. Tom Wolf quickly vetoed, it was drawn up without any Democratic input and aims to fix problems that don’t exist in Pennsylvania. It would have required voters to show ID every time they vote — remember, you’re already required to show ID the first time you vote at your polling place — and it would’ve required voters to provide two forms of ID when requesting a mail-in ballot. It also would’ve placed tougher standards on drop boxes, like requiring them to be manned by two people at all times while in operation, and enacted stricter signature-matching requirements, which would create a cottage industry for handwriting experts not seen since law enforcement rushed to identify the Zodiac killer through his ciphers. 

More:Pa. Republicans say bill is ‘commonsense,’ Democrats dismiss it as partisan ‘sham,’ ‘farce’

Sonney insisted that in no way would the bill have disenfranchised voters and that, in fact, it would have expanded their access by implementing long-overdue in-person early voting in 2025, and requiring elections officials to add polling places if — at any location — people had to wait in line 30 minutes or more to vote. On the controversial voter ID provision, the bill would have required the issuance of voter ID cards — which would have been one of several forms of ID that a voter could show at the polls. 

The bill, though, was still problematic — even if you considered some of those merits — simply for the fact it was hastily crafted without bipartisan input. It was DOA from the get-go and the GOP knew it. 

The truth is, the only way to restore public trust in the results of the 2020 election is for Republicans to admit what most people have already come to accept — that there was no widespread voter fraud — and to vociferously reject the conspiracy theories, misrepresentations and outright lies that have eroded that trust in the first place.

A cockamamie, partisan audit — whether undertaken by the Republicans today or Democrats in the future — would only serve to further the public distrust in our democracy and stroke the egos of those upset by the outcome of the election by producing an entirely predictable (and rigged) counter result. A hastily drafted bill to remake our election laws largely in an effort to address problems that don’t exist would do the same, especially without input from both parties. 

More:Guest Opinion: It’s time for both sides to get real, and that’s not with an audit

Though he voted in favor of the latter, at least state Sen. Dan Laughlin, of Millcreek, R-49th Dist., is calling Mastriano’s efforts for an audit what it actually is: an “emerging spectacle” that “runs headlong into an unmistakable truth.”

Dan Laughlin:It’s time for both sides to get real, and that’s not with an audit

“While Donald Trump narrowly lost Pennsylvania,” Laughlin, a presumptive candidate for governor, said in a recent editorial, “the same ballots secured Republican control of the State Senate and House, sent several incumbent Democrats packing, and did so amid record turnout and an expanded voting franchise.”

Contact Matthew Rink at mrink@timesnews.com. Follow him on Twitter at @ETNrink.

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