”Are you still beating your wife?”

How do you answer this question? Built into the question is a hidden premise: that at some time or another, you have beaten your wife. Consequently, if you answer “yes,” you’re admitting that you are currently beating your wife and if you say “no,” you are admitting that you used to beat her but now you’ve stopped. Either way, you are a wife-beater.

“So what difference does a little election fraud here and there make?”

That question is at the beginning of the fifth paragraph of today's column by local editor Mike Myer. Note that built into the question is the premise that fraud took place. And in doing so, Myer uses another rhetorical trick -- he shifts the burden of proof on the existence of fraud to the Democrats:

On Nov. 3 and during the weeks leading up to it, 155,507,248 ballots were cast in the presidential election. And each and every one of them was voted honestly and counted accurately. Some politicians want us to believe that.

So, unless Democrats can prove that every single vote was honestly cast, Myer is correct – there is election fraud. (Sorry, that’s not how it works -- Myer makes the assertion; he needs to do the proving.)

Additionally, Myer makes no attempt to describe the extent of the supposed fraud. There is a big difference between isolated and widespread occurrences of fraud. I would assume that if you look hard enough, you might find a few isolated examples* of fraud in every national election including last month's presidential election. Obviously more important would be allegations of widespread voter fraud like those raised by the president and his supporters (including those in the media like Fox and Ogden). Thankfully, these supposed occurrences have been the subject of court cases and investigations by various local and national media. I did some research on this and the best summary I could find was in the New York Times a couple of days ago:

After bringing some 60 lawsuits, and even offering financial incentive for information about fraud, Mr. Trump and his allies have failed to prove definitively any case of illegal voting on behalf of their opponent in court — not a single case of an undocumented immigrant casting a ballot, a citizen double voting, nor any credible evidence that legions of the voting dead gave Mr. Biden a victory that wasn’t his.

“It really should put a death knell in this narrative that has been peddled around claims of vote fraud that just have never been substantiated,” said Kristen Clarke, the president of the National Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a nonprofit legal group, and a former Justice Department attorney whose work included voting cases. “They put themselves on trial, and they failed.”

So, does Myer offer any proof of widespread voter fraud?

Nowhere in today’s 463-word column does Myer offer a single word of proof that any election fraud has taken place. Nor has Intelligencer syndicated columnist Laura Hollis offered any proof in her Friday columns or has any been offered by other Ogden columnists or political cartoonists. The locals, simply put, are not about informing its readership about what happened in the 2020 presidential election. They are Republican propagandists asking loaded questions to cast doubt on Joe Biden’s election in order to weaken the public's support for his presidency.

*I did find this one example in Forbes:

Pennsylvania Man Charged With Voter Fraud For Casting Ballot For Trump Under Dead Mother’s Name

Update

Just in from Georgia (audit confirms zero cases of fraud):

Atlanta Journal Constitution: No fraud: Georgia audit confirms authenticity of absentee ballots.https://t.co/85jo7ytceL

via @GoogleNews

— Mark G (@MarkGi007) December 30, 2020