Shame on them: Kansas leaders’ plan to challenge election is misguided and dangerous
We wish we hadn’t seen this coming.
But Senator-elect Roger Marshall rarely misses an opportunity to kowtow to Donald Trump — from fighting the Affordable Care Act to taking hydroxychloroquine — so why not jump on the bogus “election fraud” bandwagon?
Marshall announced Saturday that he will back a plan to object to President-elect Joe Biden’s electoral victory.
Before the holiday weekend was through, three more Kansas Republicans — U.S. Rep. Ron Estes and U.S. Reps.-elect Tracey Mann and Jake LaTurner — announced their intent to support the effort as well.
Let’s be clear: This contemptible quartet of Trump loyalists wants to overturn a certified election and throw away the votes of millions of Americans.
It’s the latest act in a shameful circus of absurdity, in which Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt signed our state’s name to a baseless lawsuit to overturn the will of voters. That one, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected in short order.
Trump’s claims of election fraud would be laughable if they weren’t so tragic and dangerous to democracy. Judges, including several appointed by the president himself, have soundly rejected claims that Trump was somehow cheated out of hundreds of thousands of votes in key swing states.
(Interesting, isn’t it, that widespread fraud happened only in states where votes didn’t go Trump’s way?)
It’s bad enough that the president continues to trumpet unfounded conspiracy theories, as illustrated in a shocking telephone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
Trump claims (without evidence) that scores of dead people voted. He claims (without evidence) that an Atlanta election worker repeatedly scanned 18,000 forged ballots and that “100 percent” were for Biden. He claims (again, without evidence) that people living outside Georgia returned to the state illegally just to vote in the election.
As Trump threatens election officials and stubbornly refuses to concede the election, he has propagated outlandish stories of ballots being altered by voting software, sneaked into election offices, and dumped or destroyed by election workers.
It’s all unproven, ridiculous nonsense. The only so-called evidence cited to support claims of fraud in the 2020 election is polling data showing that 67% of Republicans believe the election was rigged.
But that hasn’t stopped Marshall, Estes, Mann and LaTurner from bolstering the claims and delaying the inevitable.
If they truly believe there was widespread fraud, why haven’t they opposed seating members of congress from the states in question? After all, those were the same elections that gave Biden his victory.
And spoiler alert, gentlemen: On Jan. 20, Biden will become the next president.
Until then, the circus continues. But Kansas voters should pay attention to what our elected representatives say and do — and hold them accountable for undermining democracy.