Andrew McCarthy of National Review Online addresses the important issue of voter fraud.
On the matter of vote fraud, there is law and there are facts. We’ll hear plenty about fraud, but we’ll have to remind ourselves to ask: Did it make a difference? Even if the Trump campaign has potential claims in law, they would collapse if, as a matter of fact, they would not affect the outcome of the race.
Pennsylvania … is a good example.
… [T]he state supreme court, by fiat, ordered a the three-day extension of the November 3 Election Day deadline for the state’s receipt of mail-in votes — i.e., until close-of-business November 6. I believe this was an unconstitutional usurpation of the state legislature’s power to set the rules for elections. …
… All of this only matters if there are enough late-arriving ballots to change the result. Right before I appeared on Fox News on Wednesday afternoon to talk about this legal terrain, Bill Hemmer interviewed an election official from Luzerne County, northeastern Pennsylvania’s most populous county with over 320,000 people. He explained that, for all the legal huffing and puffing over illegality and fraud, only about 200 ballots arrived by mail there on Wednesday. Obviously, each day we get further from November 3, we should expect fewer ballots, to the point where it is down to a trickle on Friday. …
… Now, it is certainly possible that the remaining 13 percent of the vote could break heavily for former vice president Joe Biden, and that he could eke out a razor-thin win, in which case every vote might count. If that happens, there could be a convincing legal claim.
It is at least equally likely, though, that either 1) Trump will hold on and win the state, or 2) the vote will break so sharply for Biden that he (Biden) wins by one or two points. …
… If it turns out that we are talking only about a few thousand late-arriving votes, and either candidate has prevailed by thousands more than that, it’s much ado about nothing.