‘Nonsense’: The Wall Street Journal Debunks ‘Stolen’ Election Story in Takedown of Trump’s ‘Delusion’

Left: (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky) Right: (AP Photo/Godofredo A. Vásquez)

The Wall Street Journal rejected the latest stolen election conspiracy theory to be proffered by allies of President Donald Trump in a new editorial published on Sunday night.

Earlier this month, an attorney representing Georgia’s Fulton County admitted that election workers failed to sign tabulator tapes back in 2020. The admission went viral online, with many members of the MAGA faithful claiming that it proved that Trump was right to claim that the state’s electoral votes — and perhaps even the presidency — was stolen from him.

But the Journal categorically rejected that framing.

“The refrain on the right is that the unsigned tapes somehow prove Mr. Trump has been correct about the election all along. Yet Georgia’s ballots in 2020 were counted three times, twice by scanner and once by hand, five million of them,” ‘In 73% of Georgia’s 159 counties, the margin of the hand count varied from the original by 10 voters or fewer,’ these pages reported at the time. ‘In a quarter of counties, the two numbers exactly matched.’ In other words, the hand tally validated the machine count,” it reminded readers.

And while the influential center-right newspaper’s editorial board called the mistake a “problem,” it argued that “an error by poll workers isn’t a reason to throw out tens or hundreds of thousands of ballots cast by Georgians who did nothing wrong.”

It also went on to offer a theory as to why the inaccurate characterizations of the story have gained steam:

This is all getting more attention than it deserves because Mr. [Brad] Raffensperger is running for Governor, and his GOP primary opponents are using the Fulton County mistake against him. But his opponents offer no evidence that the error produced fraudulent ballots.

Elections are supposed to run by the book, and Fulton County’s blunder is bad for public confidence. Yet so are Mr. Trump’s constantly shifting claims that the 2020 election was stolen, with every irregularity claimed as supposedly proving history’s biggest fraud.

“The important question for people who want the truth is what any particular goof says about the underlying ballots, and whether it involves enough votes to be decisive. For 2020 the evidence says no. Even if Mr. Trump had won Georgia, he’d have lost the Electoral College to Mr. Biden by two states,” concluded the Journal. “Mr. Trump will never admit his 2020 claims were partisan nonsense. But Republicans who care about the future could do their man a favor by refusing to keep indulging them.”

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