The Presidential Endgame, by the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board.
Mr. Biden is leading in enough states to win the Presidency, and if those votes survive recounts and legal challenges, he will be the next President. But whoever wins needs the other to concede to be able to govern. The result Americans on both political sides should want is one that most people think was decided fairly.
Mr. Trump has every right to demand recounts if state votes are close, and to go to the courts for relief if there is evidence of fraud. … As for fraud, the Trump campaign will have to prove it to prevail in court. It won’t be enough to charge that Philadelphia is historically corrupt, though it is, or that state election officials are partisan. …
[In] Philadelphia … the Trump campaign had to go to court so its poll-watchers could observe vote counting. Incredibly, Democratic lawyers opposed that Trump request. This is exactly the wrong way for Democrats to behave, feeding GOP suspicions. The vote-counting standard should be transparency for both sides to ensure public confidence….
But it’s also important to note that Pat Toomey, the GOP Senator from the Keystone State, says he has seen no evidence of fraud in his state’s counting. We’ve also seen no concrete evidence. The delivery of a batch of votes all for Mr. Biden at one time can be explained by the practice of some jurisdictions to divide and report the votes of each candidate at different times.
The Trump campaign has made a substantive claim that thousands of votes in Nevada failed to meet the state’s residency requirement. That ought to be provable one way or another. If the campaign has other evidence, bring it on and test it in court. …
Election concession hypocrisy:
Democrats never accepted Mr. Trump’s victory in 2016, and Hillary Clinton still prattles on that the Russians did it.
So do the media partisans who promoted the Steele dossier and served as an echo chamber for the Russia collusion farce. The FBI’s abuses in 2016 were a genuine scandal that the media would have called out had it been aimed at a Democrat. Instead they treated Rep. Adam Schiff’s lies as gospel. …
They want a gracious concession — after the counting and litigation — but they never mention how ungracious the Democrats were when Trump won in 2016. Did they ever concede that Trump won and stand back and acknowledge that he legitimately held the power of the presidency?
