In what appears to be an attempt to throw shade on GOP lawmakers challenging the legitimacy of U.S. president-elect Joe Biden’s electoral college victory in Washington, D.C., Democrats in South Carolina are demanding an investigation into alleged voter fraud at the state level.
Wait … wasn’t the 2020 election in South Carolina a Republican romp?
Yes … it was a “red storm,” as we termed it.
Still, the S.C. Democratic Party (SCDP) – which is getting blasted (here, here and here) for its failures leading up to the November elections – wants S.C. attorney general Alan Wilson and a pair of ranking “Republican” lawmakers to “open and conduct full investigations into election and voter fraud in South Carolina.”
“This is the logical step after learning that numerous members of the South Carolina (congressional delegation) plan to oppose the Electoral College because of their concerns relating to fraud and attorney general Wilson’s decision to join a Texas lawsuit seeking to overturn the 2020 presidential election in the supreme court,” a statement from the party noted.
Actually, Wilson did not join the Texas lawsuit. His office merely joined other states in submitting an amicus curiae (or “friend of the court”) brief urging the supreme court to consider the case on its merits.
“You can’t claim election fraud in only places you lost,” SCDP chairman Trav Robertson said in a statement. “My guess is the reason the (congressional delegation members) are screaming about election fraud is because they know how to commit fraud – so let’s find it. We agree with attorney general Wilson that free and fair elections are the foundation of democracy. This is why in this moment we need AG Wilson to conduct a full audit of South Carolina’s voting and election systems, a bipartisan project able to eliminate voter doubts about fraud.”
The party also challenged S.C. Senate judiciary committee chairman Luke Rankin and S.C. House judiciary chairman committee Chris Murphy to open investigations – although as was the case with its request of Wilson, no specific incidences of voter fraud accompanied the request.
Which begs the question: What exactly are Wilson, Rankin and Murphy supposed to investigate?
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Wilson’s spokesman Robert Kittle said his agency would refer any legitimate, specific electoral fraud allegations to the S.C. State Law Enforcement Division (SLED) for review.
“If there were credible allegations of election fraud here in South Carolina, and we haven’t heard of any, we would ask the State Law Enforcement Division to investigate them and report back to us,” Kittle said. “Otherwise, it is not our office’s role to audit elections or recount votes. The attorney general’s comment about protecting our voters and ensuring election integrity was about states in which there were legal questions about how state voting procedures were changed. There are no such questions here in South Carolina.”
Again, we believe this effort is less about uncovering voter fraud in the Palmetto State and more about discrediting its congressional delegation.
Four of South Carolina’s seven members of congress – Jeff Duncan, Ralph Norman, William Timmons and Joe Wilson – are objecting to the certification of Biden’s electoral college tally this week. All four are Republicans. Two South Carolina Republican members of congress – Nancy Mace and Tom Rice – are not.
And obviously neither is Jim Clyburn, who more than anyone in Washington, D.C. is responsible for Biden’s come-from-behind victory in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary.
Mace’s decision came as a surprise seeing as she previously worked for Trump’s 2016 election campaign.
“I will solemnly cast my vote to certify the results of the Electoral College,” Mace wrote in an opinion editorial published in The (Charleston, S.C.) Post and Courier on Wednesday morning. “Certifying the results is the only way to preserve our republic and our Constitution. We must follow this course, even when we don’t like the outcome. Even when we hate the outcome.”
Our view? As we have said from the beginning, we believe there are serious and credible questions about the validity of the 2020 election results – but the burden of proof is on those alleging fraud. Not only must they show where and how irregularities transpired – but also how these irregularities changed the outcome of the race.
Sadly, much of this uncertainty could have been avoided had the stringent mail-in voting safeguards we supported been put in place months ago.
Having said that, as of this writing we have seen nothing to suggest there were any voter irregularities in South Carolina during the 2020 election cycle. In the event evidence or credible speculation to the contrary emerges, however, we will certainly pursue those lines of inquiry – and encourage others to do the same.
More importantly, we will continue to push for election reform that safeguards the integrity of the ballot box … as opposed to the politically malleable, dangerously unaccountable system currently in place.
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