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I write in response to West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner's guest editorial in the Dec. 14 issue of the Inter-Mountain. Secretary Warner concludes that the 2020 Presidential election was "improperly influenced by federal officials" and therefore was "stolen". As evidence of this he relies heavily upon a May 10, 2023, U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee report. The report Secretary Warner refers to is actually an interim staff report prepared for the Committee's Republican members. It is a patently political document and is not a final report from a full bipartisan Congressional Committee.
If you actually read this interim Republican report, you'll find it largely deals with Hunter Biden's laptop and the U.S. Government's early response to its appearance as an issue in the 2020 presidential campaign. The laptop's existence was originally made public through Rudy Giuliani who at that time was President Trump's personal lawyer. By the time it came into the hands of the FBI, it had passed through the hands of an unknown number of people since it had last been in Hunter Biden's possession, and so there were significant chain-of-custody issues. As a result of this, any respectable law enforcement agency should have initially at least, shown a healthy skepticism towards the legitimacy of its contents. This in fact is what the FBI did because Russian disinformation or domestic political tampering were both very real possibilities at the time. Trump's political team elevated the laptop as an issue just before the November election and Biden's team hurriedly pushed back. That is simply politics as usual and in the heat of the final days of a presidential election, missteps and misstatements are commonly made by both sides. Some of these are minor, and some are not. While the laptop did eventually prove to be Hunter Biden's, it has also proven to contain no evidence showing that Joe Biden is guilty of any crime or even of any legally questionable action. If the laptop issue had any effect on the outcome of the 2020 election, it seems likely that it cost Joe Biden votes rather than favoring him. The back-and-forth charges concerning Hunter Biden' laptop were all simply political theatre and had virtually no effect on the legitimacy of the 2020 election.
Secretary Warner also claims that there were, "numerous improper actions by state officials in other states that did not receive prior legislative approval". Among these are: 1. accepting ballots days after the election was over, 2. using unsupervised drop boxes, 3. allowing massive volumes of no-excuse mail-in ballots, 4. curing ballots in some areas but not others, 5. accepting ballots without signatures or addresses. He clearly wants the reader to believe that these actions are all illegal. They may or may not be, depending on the state in which you live.
Here are the facts: (1) Accepting ballots after the election is legal in most jurisdictions if they are postmarked by election day. (2) Ballot drop boxes must be supervised in many states but not in others. Many states require video monitoring rather than personal supervision. Like West Virginia, quite a few states do not permit the use of drop boxes to collect ballots. (3) West Virginia is one of only 15 states that does not permit no-excuse absentee voting, while the other 35 do. (4) "Curing ballots" is a process to allow voters to correct certain types of irregularities with their ballot. Laws governing this process vary from state to state, but all states allow some form of ballot curing. There is no clear reason for this to have affected the election outcome in any measurable way. (5) Signatures and addresses are required in all states in order to receive a ballot. It does not seem possible that violations of this requirement could occur in more than a tiny percentage of cases, and certainly not on a scale that could have affected the outcome of the election. After all, Biden won the popular vote by a margin of over 7 million votes.
Following the 2020 election, Trump or his representatives filed more than 60 suits asserting that there had been widespread fraud. Many of these dealt with the same claims that Warner makes in his editorial. In all cases, both state and federal courts found these suits to be without merit. To date, no one has presented unrefuted evidence of fraud on a scale anywhere large enough to change the outcome of the election. For Warner to continue to perpetuate the "big lie" that the 2020 presidential election was stolen is a grave disservice not only to West Virginians but also to the United States as a whole. The lie undercuts the fairness and legitimacy of our elections and directly threatens our democracy because if you can't trust that your elections are fair, there is no democracy. Mr. Warner is West Virginia's Secretary of State and is a public official whose duties require a broad knowledge of election law, both in the state of West Virginia and nationally as well. As such, he almost certainly knows better. Mac Warner should be ashamed of himself.
James Van Gundy
Elkins