EDITORIAL: Trump’s claims under the microscope

The true believers will never let go, but a group of esteemed conservatives has put together a comprehensive report refuting Donald Trump’s allegation that the 2020 election was stolen from him through fraud and other nefarious activity.

It’s a must read that assembles in one package all the former president’s grievances and then documents how only a single case carried the day in court based on the evidence presented.

The authors of “Lost, Not Stolen” (lostnotstolen.org) include two former U.S. senators — John Danforth of Missouri and Gordon Smith of Oregon — former U.S. solicitor general Ted Olson, three respected former federal judges and a prominent GOP election law expert.

“We are political conservatives,” the report explains, “who have spent most of our adult lives working to support the Constitution and the conservative principles upon which it is based: limited government, liberty, equality of opportunity, freedom of religion, a strong national defense and the rule of law.” Efforts to “overturn or discredit” the 2020 election are “deeply troubling” and undermine confidence in our democratic republic, they argue.

To the point, they note that, in the aftermath of the 2020 balloting, Mr. Trump and his supporters filed a total of 64 cases containing 187 counts in six states, including Nevada. Thirty of those cases were heard by a judge on the merits and in a lone instance — a Pennsylvania case involving far too few votes to change the outcome — did Mr. Trump prevail.

The idea that all these courts — state and federal, some run by Trump-appointed judges — would be working in unison to quash legitimate election complaints defies reason. A more likely explanation for the consistent losing streak is that Mr. Trump and his supporters lacked the evidence to back up their scattershot allegations.

In Nevada where the president lost by more than 30,000 votes, for instance, Team Trump claimed to have “thousands and thousands of examples of real people in real-life instances of voter illegality” and that the state was the “treasure trove of illegal balloting.” Yet when given a chance to prove this allegation in court, the report notes, the president and his backers “failed to even offer sufficient evidence.” The idea, still prevalent in some circles, that Mr. Trump and his attorneys never had an opportunity to make their argument is patently false.

“In many cases, after making extravagant claims of wrongdoing,” the report concludes, “Trump’s legal representatives showed up in court or state proceedings empty-handed, and then returned to their rallies and media campaigns to repeat the same unsupported claims.”

That doesn’t mean, of course, that there weren’t irregularities.

“Election fraud is a real thing,” the report observes, “there are prosecutions in almost every election year, and no doubt some election fraud goes undetected. Nor do we disparage attempts to reduce fraud. States should continue to do what they can do to eliminate opportunities for election fraud and to punish it when it occurs. But there is absolutely no evidence of fraud in the 2020 presidential election on the magnitude necessary to shift the result in any state, let alone the nation as a whole. In fact, there was no fraud that changed the outcome in even a single precinct.”

The credibility of those who produced this report is beyond reproach, especially when compared to those who continue to indulge Mr. Trump. As Wall Street Journal editor at large Gerard Baker advised recently, compare the scorecards. On the side of common sense, you have reputable and reliable conservatives such as former Attorney General Bill Barr and attorney Eric Herschmann, who defended Mr. Trump in his first impeachment hearing. On the other side still crying “stolen” election “you have a coterie of self-serving lawyers of shredded reputations” and “a crowd of hangers on whom we last saw as walk-on characters in ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.’ ”

Add the authors of “Lost, Not Stolen” to the former camp, making this akin to a contest between the ’27 Yankees and a T-ball squad. Rational Republicans and conservatives will know where to throw their lot.