Politico: “More than any policy enacted or court vacancy filled, Trump’s legacy will be his unprecedented assault on the legitimacy of the ballot box. And it will not be considered in isolation. Future iterations of the GOP will make casual insinuations of voter fraud central to the party’s brand. The next generation of Republicans will have learned how to sow doubts about election integrity in one breath and in the next breath bemoan the nation’s lack of faith in our elections, creating a self-perpetuating justification to cast suspicion on a process that by raw numbers does not appear conducive to keeping them in power.”

“Look no further than John James. It took three full weeks after Election Day—despite his race being called for Gary Peters on November 4, despite the certified county totals proving he had lost by 92,000 votes—for the Republican Senate nominee to concede defeat. In the interim, he released a series of videos calling for independent investigations into Detroit’s voting irregularities, insisting that such efforts are needed to ‘restore trust’ in the system. ‘This is not some whacked-out fringe,” James said in one taping. ‘When half the votes in our state believe we just had the most secure election in U.S. history, and the other half believe they were cheated, we have a problem.’ James is right. We do have a problem. Our elections continue to be underfunded. Our election bureaus are chronically understaffed. Our election workers are badly undertrained. Our elections are prone to a significant amount of human error—and any municipal or county clerk will tell you that concerns over not catching those errors keep them up at night. But errors are not fraud. And when James says he’s troubled that half of Michigan’s voters feel they were cheated, he would do well to remember that he was the one telling them they got cheated in the first place.“