Letters

In her recent Letter to the Editor, reader Jacqueline Smith suggests that voter fraud must have been rampant in our presidential election, because she knows people who received more than one mail-in ballot [“Don’t Be Biased,” Letters, January 7].

What she fails to say is whether any of these people actually voted more than once. It is entirely possible that some citizens received multiple ballots. But there is no evidence whatsoever that people voted multiple times in our district.

Submitting a fake absentee vote is a Class E felony punishable by a possible four-year prison sentence. How many people do you think would be willing to go to jail for four years just to get one more vote for Joe Biden? And assuming that Democrats were able to stuff the virtual ballot box somehow, do you think Lee Zeldin would still be our representative?

Reader Smith also brings up the old canard that the Dominion Voting Systems machines used in the election were somehow manipulated to steal votes from Mr. Trump. I cannot blame her for thinking so, because Lou Dobbs and other Fox News personalities have been pushing this lie for weeks. But when faced with the threat of libel lawsuits from Dominion, Dobbs and the other Fox conspiracy peddlers quickly backtracked from these allegations.

The Republican Georgia secretary of state shot down these Dominion lies during that infamous phone call from the president. Additionally, during audits in every contested state that used Dominion machines, subsequent counting of the actual paper ballots revealed nothing but the most minor discrepancies.

Any suggestion that the presidential election was anything but free and fair is a lie. Every state election official, Republican and Democratic, have said so. Trump-appointed former Attorney General William Barr has stated that there was no meaningful fraud. Christopher Krebs, the Trump-appointed head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, stated that this was “the safest election in American history.” More than 50 courts either refused to hear cases alleging fraud or threw them out for lack of evidence.

However, Trump supporters, egged on by our congressman, Lee Zeldin, continue to embrace these falsehoods. Mr. Zeldin went so far as to challenge the votes of two states in Congress last week, using as a justification the fact that many people believe the election to have been rigged. That is true. But this mistaken belief is the result of the lies spread by our president and our congressman.

Mr. Zeldin is now disavowing the violence perpetrated in our Capitol this week. But having told his supporters that the election had been stolen, what did he expect would happen?

John Neely

Westhampton Beach