J.D. Vance’s Claims About the 2020 Election
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To the Editor:
Re “J.D. Vance on Where He’d Take the Republican Party,” by Ross Douthat (column, June 16):
In his interview with Mr. Douthat, Senator J.D. Vance mounts an absurd defense of Donald Trump’s attacks on our electoral system in the aftermath of the 2020 election.
Mr. Vance says: “I think the entire post-2020 thing would have gone a lot better if there had actually been an effort to provide alternative slates of electors and to force us to have that debate. I think it would’ve been a much better thing for the country.”
Why? What “debate” was there to be had? Joe Biden won the election, fair and square. Can the losing candidate now rewrite our electoral laws, in order to give himself a second shot? I must have missed that section of the Constitution.
The irony is that Mr. Vance sees liberals as believing that “there’s no law, there’s just power.” Thereby demonstrating, once again, that Mr. Trump and his followers are very good at one thing only: projection.
Jesse Larner
New York
To the Editor:
J.D. Vance is correct that it is not in itself undemocratic to challenge the results of a given election. There were indeed voting irregularities in 1960 and 2000, and historians still debate the relevance and nature of these irregularities today.
But no such evidence of potential widespread voter fraud has been produced by those who insist that the 2020 election was stolen. Continuing to press this claim, then, is antidemocratic. Mr. Vance is wrong to insist that this is a “very legitimate grievance” that is “actually part of the democratic process.”
