Will You Vote for An Election Denier?

If you are having trouble figuring out whom to vote for in the highly contentious midterm elections coming up on Nov. 8, Liz Cheney has a litmus test that could clarify your thinking. The Wyoming congresswoman who is co-chairing the congressional hearings on the Jan. 6 insurrection, said she will not vote for any “election deniers.”

In a recent interview, Cheney, one of the most conservative representatives in the House, said, “We have to vote for people who believe in democracy.”

The people who have worked to delegitimatize President Joe Biden’s victory in 2020 by continually attacking the integrity of the voting processes in the 50 states are essentially anti-democratic. On the bottom line, they really believe that the election was stolen and Donald Trump should be serving a second term.

The poorest loser of all time, Trump will never concede that he was defeated fair and square, that his views and those of his diehard followers were rejected by a majority.

By any standard, the deniers are dead wrong in their delusional, cult-like thinking:

• More than 60 courts have thrown out the allegations of fraud in the 2020 elections.
• Former U.S. Attorney General William Barr has thoroughly investigated allegations of election fraud brought to his attention. Each one was a dry hole that showed a lack of evidence.
• As I have written before, if you are in the manufacturing world that seeks zero defects through lean disciplines, the number of defective votes was miniscule in terms of defects per million votes. In the perspective of process controls, the election was extraordinarily clean and free of defects.
• Timothy Ramthun, Kewaskum Republican, ran for governor on the stolen election fiction, and I asked him five times as a journalist to show me even one fraudulent vote from his assembly district. He never responded. He lost big time in the Republican primary.

It is interesting to recall that 15 Wisconsin lawmakers, joined by 76 lawmakers from other states, asked Vice President Mike Pence for a ten-day delay in the certification on the day before the Jan. 6 mob riot to overturn the election results.

Area representatives who signed the letter to Pence included Rob Brooks of Saukville, Rick Gundrum of Slinger, Dan Knodl of Germantown, and Ramthun. Are they still election deniers almost two years later and one month from the midterm election?

As an example of Cheney’s resolve to purge her Republican Party of deniers, she said she would not support the Republican Kari Lake, an Arizona candidate for governor. Lake has referred to Biden as an “illegitimate president.”

The Republican Party is rife with candidates at multiple levels who are undercutting the integrity of our democratic voting processes. How can this be?

If you have talked to poll workers at the local level, as I have, you know they are the bedrock of our democracy. To allege they are crooked in some way is to undercut our republic.

It is important to note that Tim Michels, Republican candidate for governor in Wisconsin, has been equivocal on the election integrity issue. He said he would consider decertifying the 2020 election results.

There are many other issues in Wisconsin midterm elections, and you will take them all into account on your ballot, but Cheney’s test of your democratic principles has to come into play.

John Torinus is the chairman of Serigraph Inc. and a former Milwaukee Sentinel business editor who blogs regularly at johntorinus.com.