Dec 31, 2020 2 min read

“The greatest crime in history was committed during the past election,” declared Dave Ball in Monday’s edition of the Observer-Reporter.

And yet, there have been no arrests.

It seems that all of the local police departments and sheriff’s offices, all the district attorneys and attorneys general, all of the other law enforcement officials and the courts up to and including the U.S. Supreme Court have been unable to bring any perpetrator of election fraud to justice because, so far, no crime has been detected.

The “evidence” Ball cites has been so flimsy, unsubstantiated, contrived and outright faked that no sane prosecutor would take such a case to a judge.

Certainly, with more than 150 million Americans voting, there are bound to have been some errors, some uncounted votes, some cases in which some people tried or even succeeded in voting illegally. But, considering the closeness of the race, would all of those miscast ballots go for one candidate over the other?

Ball builds his argument not upon facts but on internet rumors, the fantasies of conspiracy-theory hobbyists, partisan propaganda and social-media chatter. Some of the disinformation Ball parrots may well have originated in Moscow.

“The greatest crime in history”? How far down on his list might the Holocaust appear? Closer to home, might not two-and-a-half centuries of slavery qualify for such recognition? The Trail of Tears? The assassination of Abraham Lincoln, or of Kennedy? The Oklahoma City bombing? September 11?

Fortunately, the O-R provided on the same page an antidote for Ball’s hyperbolic poison: Kent James’ commentary of good character, which he concluded with this thought: “We need to move away from the transactional politics of the Trump era and aspire to be virtuous, willing to sacrifice for the greater good.”

Parker Burroughs

Washington