ICYMI! Laura Berland's piece appeared in yesterday's *Lincoln Squirrel *(please subscribe).
Last Thursday a group hosted by Lincoln residents Tom and Edith Risser came to Bemis Hall to make a presentation on “election integrity.” I decided to go see what it was all about. Upon entering Bemis, a man who seemed to be involved in the logistics of the event, upon seeing my mask, asked me if I was sick (not in a caring way). I responded “No, and I’m trying to keep it that way,” to which he responded, “Good luck with that.” Not off to a good start. Over the next few hours we would hear a lot about our individual liberties being eroded, but I guess my individual decision to protect myself from deadly disease is an affront to others’ “liberty” and not worthy of respect. The first speaker spent a long time questioning the legitimacy of the voting process in Massachusetts, deriding the evils of mail-in voting (haven’t members of the military voted via mail for a long time?) and urging the audience to oppose the implementation of permanent mail-in voting. She suggested that many town clerks across the Commonwealth are hiding something, although it wasn’t clear exactly what they are hiding. The speaker reported that one clerk told her “she had seen things.” The speaker didn’t share what those “things” were. She also took issue with Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s well-documented grants across the country for voting logistics in 2020. Zuckerberg is a name that can certainly rile folks up. The second speaker suggested nefarious things were going on in Rhode Island, particularly at universities. We saw lots of charts and slides and heard lots of phrases like “this raises questions” and “this is interesting” and “we’re not making any accusations, but we really need to look into this.” What we weren’t shown was any actual evidence of voter fraud. No reams of ballots that demonstrated that dead people voted, or people voted in more than one place or that voting machines were manipulated. There was no explanation of how their claims of voter fraud squared with the results from Cyber Ninjas, the company hired by the Arizona GOP-led Senate to carry out the audit (and which received roughly $6 million in donations from Trump supporters). Cyber Ninja issued results showing that Biden should have been credited with 99 more votes and Trump’s total was improperly inflated by 261 ballots. The third speaker revealed what seemed to be the underlying objective of this exercise when the Biden bashing started. These folks clearly were not happy with the results of the 2020 election. Well, I didn’t like the results of the 2016 election, but I didn’t question the vote tally. The third speaker told us that because he saw 55,000 people at a Trump rally the night before the election (and he assured us that he knew what 55,000 people looked like), that there was no way Trump could have lost fair and square. By this time, I was worn down with fatigue, so I departed, thereby missing the star attraction of the evening — a man dressed up in full Revolutionary War garb. This guy looked impressive, tall, and commanding, but I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to be getting any new information. I was beginning to think this all fell into the realm of theater. I love theater but not theater pretending to be something else. When I go in to cast my vote in Lincoln, I’m always impressed by the organized process and how confident I feel in our voting system. We all want our elections to be fraud-free and fair, but if you can’t point to an actual problem, then there’s no fix to be made. Simply undermining confidence in the voting process by suggesting that nefarious things are going on is a danger to our democracy and, to that extent, we should pay attention to this effort.
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