Memo to Chris Christie: Voters Care About Election Integrity - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
Memo to Chris Christie: Voters Care About Election Integrity
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Say what?

Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has decided to pick a fight with his friend, former President Donald Trump.

And it’s a head scratcher.

In a speech in Las Vegas to the annual leadership meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC), Christie said this as reported by Fox News:

“We can no longer talk about the past and the past elections,” the former governor, a supporter of Trump but vocal critic of the former president’s litigating of the 2020 election, said to applause.

“No matter where you stand on that issue, it’s over,” Christie argued. ‘Every minute we spend talking about 2020, while we’re wasting time doing that, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are laying ruin to this country. We better focus on that and take our eyes off the rearview mirror and start looking through the windshield again.”

Minutes later, Christie warned in a Fox News interview that Republicans “lose if we look backward. We’ve got to go forward, we’ve got to move on. We’ve got to move on and talk about issues that voters care about.”

Does Governor Christie really not understand that voters care about election integrity? Does he really not understand that unless there is a guarantee of election integrity this isn’t about the just the past — it’s about the future?

As a resident of Pennsylvania’s neighboring state of New Jersey, is he seriously unaware that Pennsylvania alone has had repeated problems with voter fraud and stolen elections?

As I have detailed right here in this space:

Let me recount — again — but a handful of reasons why the Republicans in my own state of Pennsylvania have every reason to audit the 2020 vote, not to mention be concerned for election integrity in 2022 and 2024.

In the 2016, 2015, 2014, 2012, and 2008 elections, not to mention back there in the dinosaur age of 1994, there were repeated examples of voter fraud in Pennsylvania. All seriously documented.

Pennsylvania officials have been indicted and convicted for their role in voter fraud. And as noted in that 1994 example that involved a special election for a vacant Pennsylvania State Senate seat, the New York Times reported:

Saying Philadelphia’s election system had collapsed under “a massive scheme” by Democrats to steal a State Senate election in November, a Federal judge today took the rare step of invalidating the vote and ordered the seat filled by the Republican candidate.…

With all due respect to Governor Christie, it is precisely for reasons like that that make election integrity a critical issue — and former President Trump is exactly right to keep speaking about it.

The Virginia and New Jersey elections we just had indicate that 2022 and 2024 can in fact be very good elections for Republicans. That can happen if — and it’s a big if — the elections in all fifty states are run honestly.

It is completely the wrong thing to do to pretend, as Governor Christie is apparently doing, that there is no problem with election integrity. There is a problem — a well and repeatedly documented problem in Pennsylvania alone.

Not to mention what journalist Mollie Hemingway outlines in detail in her new book Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections.

Says Mollie in her book’s opening:

Never was there such heavy-handed meddling in an election by the most powerful institutions in the country. The press brazenly concealed unfavorable news about Joe Biden and his family while continuing its long disinformation campaign against President Trump. Big Tech censored dissenters from the established narrative, while the Democratic Party manipulated a public health crisis to change the voting process in ways that left it laughably insecure.

Bingo.

Yet there is Governor Christie saying that Republicans will “lose if we look backward. We’ve got to go forward, we’ve got to move on” and that “this is not an argument that I’ll walk away from.”

With all due respect, he should walk away from it. And drop the idea that election integrity is neither relevant or a problem. It is both.

This fight with President Trump makes no sense — unless, as the Governor admits — that he is thinking about a 2024 run for the nomination. A run that, one suspects, would pit him against President Trump.

If in fact Governor Christie does run, effectively telling GOP voters that election integrity is no big deal hands the former President one more way to illustrate the problems with a GOP Establishment that is deaf to voters’ concerns.

Not to mention that ignoring the election integrity issue puts both the 2022 and 2024 elections at risk for the GOP.

Not good.

Jeffrey Lord
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Jeffrey Lord, a contributing editor to The American Spectator, is a former aide to Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp. An author and former CNN commentator, he writes from Pennsylvania at jlpa1@aol.com. His new book, Swamp Wars: Donald Trump and The New American Populism vs. The Old Order, is now out from Bombardier Books.
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