Will These Catholic Lawyers Stop the Steal?

Never mind what the mainstream media says. The presidential election is far from over.

That’s not a conspiracy theory: no presidential election officially ends until the following January. We’re still two months away from knowing the official winner of the 2020 election.

President Donald Trump and his allies are making the best possible use of that time. They’re filing lawsuits that bring real, tangible evidence of voter fraud in (at least) six crucial states: Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada.

In Michigan, there are sworn statements from over one hundred vote-watchers who witnessed illegal practices by vote-counters. Election officials in Detroit are accused of wearing partisan clothing and intimidating voters and official Republican vote-watchers. They also allegedly used coronavirus regulations to keep those vote-watchers six feet away from the ballots, rendering it virtually impossible for them to actually observe the vote-counting process.

In Pennsylvania, thousands of mail-in ballots were counted despite not carrying a postmark of November 3 or earlier, meaning that the votes were placed after Election Day. The state’s supreme court also ruled that mail-in ballots must be counted even if the “voter’s” signature doesn’t match the signature on file—leaving one to ask, What’s the point of having a signature in the first place?

Pennsylvania is the nation’s chief producer of rigged elections. In Delaware County alone, 47 thumb drives containing 50,000 votes were somehow “misplaced,” while an expert witness testified to the State Senate of Pennsylvania that Mr. Biden won a single batch of ballots—about 570,000 altogether—by the a margin of 99.4 percent.

Meanwhile, in Wisconsin, several major cities accepted funds from the Center for Tech and Civil Life (CTCL) as part of their get-out-the-vote efforts. The CTCL is a partisan organization led by Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, who recently appeared before Congress to face accusations that his website was suppressing news stories that were embarrassing to the Biden campaign.

In Georgia, several key counties also accepted funds from the CTCL. Also, just yesterday, a district judge in that state ordered election officials in three counties not to erase the data stored on their voting machines, which are operated by Dominion Voting Systems.

To call Dominion Systems dubious would be the understatement of the year. On November 7, the Associated Press published a report claiming that a Dominion machine in Michigan had malfunctioned due to a “human error,” resulting in Antrim County being called for Mr. Biden. Once the “human error” was corrected, the county flipped; in fact, Mr. Trump won by six percent.

Mind you, none of this is including the abundant anomalies that may not, in themselves, constitute hard evidence of electoral fraud. How is it that Mr. Trump earned 11 million more votes than in 2016, and yet still lost to Mr. Biden? Establishment hack Mr. Biden, in turn, allegedly earned 15 million more votes than the progressive icon Barack Obama in 2012. And, as Senator Rand Paul pointed out on Twitter yesterday, Mr. Trump lost his substantial lead on Election Night to two “data dumps” that occurred in a five-hour window between 1:34 and 6:31 in the morning.

Maybe—as Tucker Carlson argues—fraud exists, but not enough to flip the election results. It’s not impossible. Yet no objective observer can look at the evidence and feel one hundred percent confident that Mr. Biden won the election fair and square.

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Here’s the larger point: Republicans have complained for years about massive, coordinated voter-fraud campaigns being carried out by agents of the Democratic Party. This isn’t a conspiracy theory, either. Such claims have been commonplace going back to at least the 2000 election. As usual, however, only Mr. Trump is willing to put his money where his mouth is.

Senator Mitt Romney recently said that Mr. Trump “is wrong to say the election was rigged, corrupt and stolen.” He argues that such language “damages the cause of freedom here and around the world… and recklessly inflames destructive and dangerous passions.” And yet, in 2012, when Mr. Romney was the GOP’s presidential nominee, he allegedly received zero votes in 59 Philadelphia divisions.

Just eight years ago, Mr. Romney was the victim of fraud, and conservative voters stood up for him. Now, when another Republican is railroaded by the same bad actors, he sides with the fraudsters. It’s beyond the pale.

In his post-election analysis for The Atlantic, pseudo-conservative columnist David Frum accused the President of “making unfounded accusations of election fraud and declaring himself the victor, a malicious lie that is undermining the integrity of American democracy.” Yet, in 2012, he voiced many of the same concerns that Mr. Trump does now.

In 2012, Mr. Frum complained that, “When local Democratic officials saw themselves disadvantaged by the existing rules, they appealed to a judge for special treatment for its (likely) voters—and only for those voters.” In 2016, he’s not willing to entertain any doubt about the security or validity of mail-in voting.

In 2012, Mr. Frum complained that “Americans worry more about voter fraud than do voters in other countries, because they are the only country without a reliable system of national identification.” In 2016, he’s not even worried about the fact that the signatures on many ballots don’t match those on the official records.

What changed between 2012 and 2020? Why, the Republican nominee, of course. Mitt Romney was a conventional, “establishment” Republican. But Mr. Frum doesn’t approve of the Republican nominee in 2020, and so he’s willing to overlook the fraud this time around.

Conservatives—be they politicians or journalists—who suddenly turn a blind eye to election fraud just because they don’t like Mr. Trump are not only dishonest cowards who betray their own party (though they are both of those things). More importantly, they undermine all future efforts to restore fair, legal procedures to our elections. By refusing even to entertain the possibility of voter fraud, despite the abundant evidence, they give permission for progressives to dismiss all future anti-fraud campaigners as “reckless,” “dangerous,” and “malicious.” They’re also dishonest cowards who betray their own country.

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One of the third-party groups supporting the Trump campaign’s antifraud efforts is the Thomas More Society. The TMS is one of the country’s best-known defense funds. They specialize in religious freedom and pro-life issues; previous clients include David Daleiden, Lila Rose, and Bishop Thomas Paprocki. Today, their lawyers are fighting against voter fraud in the big six states: Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada.

Crisis Magazine spoke to Erick Kaardal, special counsel for the Thomas More Society. “Catholics and others of good will must now engage in election integrity because of the threat the 2020 election represents,” he said. “In close elections, government data shows remarkable error rates and government illegalities.  When the government loses its moral compass, the citizens must fight to restore the government’s commitment to law.”

That’s especially true in this election. Mr. Biden and his running mate, Senator Kamala Harris, have refused to rule out the possibility of stacking out the Supreme Court with activist justices. That would mean the highest court in the country would present no opposition to Mr. Biden’s radical, antireligious agenda. Another act of political fraud.

The self-declared President-Elect has promised to enshrine Roe v. Wade as “the law of the land”—a decision that even the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg felt was shoddy. Christian schools that refuse to hire “LGBT” teachers will have no recourse if sued under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Catholic organizations that refuse to supply their employers with contraceptives under the Affordable Care Act mandate will be left out in the rain.

In fact, Mr. Biden has made it a priority to bring the Little Sisters of the Poor back to the Supreme Court. This time, with a stacked-out judiciary, they’d almost certainly lose. Third time’s the charm, as they say.

Mr. Biden will certainly follow through with his promised draconian Covid regulations—which would, no doubt, include restrictions on public worship. Such an order would strike at the very heart of the First Amendment, which denies the federal government the right to prohibit free exercise of religion. But don’t expect to hear any complaints from a Bidenized SCOTUS.

It’s only through the firm resolve of Mr. Trump and his legal team, as well as their partners at the Thomas More Society, that we may be spared this fate. Let’s offer special prayers for both groups this Advent. Give to the TMS if you can, to support their good work. It may very well be our last chance.

Saint Thomas More, ora pro nobis.

[Photo credit: Mark Makela/Getty Images News]