"It is past time for State Chair Nick Langworthy and other Republican elected and party officials to put country over party and endorse the overall honesty and fairness of the national election. While I do not take issue with their calls for “every legal vote” to be counted, I condemn their baseless, unsubstantiated accusations of wide-scale fraud or other malfeasance in the conduct of these elections. Chairman Langworthy knows full well that the opening and counting of Absentee or Mail-In ballots in many states – including New York - has ALWAYS occurred after Election Day. Moreover, he knows that all of these ballots are opened under the legally required bipartisan supervision of Democratic AND Republican vote counters. No ballot that is not approved by BOTH gets counted unless an independent judge orders it to be.
To cast doubt NOW on this longstanding process without ANY
specific meaningful examples of fraud or unfairness is nothing short of
Un-American. We are a democracy. A democracy depends upon the confidence of the
people it seeks to represent. In a
democracy we choose who governs us by elections. When you undermine the people’s confidence in
free and fair elections, you give rise to the fair consideration of the alternative.
If something is unfair, call it out. But neither party has the luxury, and surely
not the right, to only claim that the elections it wins are fair.
Never before in our nation’s history have the results of a
Presidential election, so clearly decided, been so overwhelmingly denied by the
losing party. Even in the 2000
Presidential election where Al Gore was defeated by 537 votes in the State of
Florida, a defeat that occurred 35 days after the election, only after the U.S.
Supreme Court intervened to stop the ongoing vote recount, Gore was gracious
enough to congratulate George W. Bush as the winner. The 2000 race was decided by 1 state – only 2
electoral votes separated the candidates.
And, again, that one state was decided by the Supreme Court stopping a
recount, leaving the winner with a 537 vote margin out of many millions
cast. Today, Joe Biden sits with at
least 279 electoral votes and, likely, 306 when all of the votes are counted. In no “contested” state is the margin less
than 10,000 votes. In no “contested”
state is it feasible that the counting of remaining unopened ballots or, for
that matter, a recount, will change the outcome. In no “contested” state, a full week after
the election, have any specific cases of material irregularities been
identified. Moreover, for Trump to win,
he would have to overturn the results in three or four of those “contested”
states. That’s not only unlikely, it’s
absurd.
The silence of Republican elected officials and party
leaders here in New York and around the country is deafening. And to President Trump, I would only say, in
America, that there IS something worse than being a loser. And that is being a sore loser."