Following the contentious 2000 election of President George W. Bush, former President Jimmy Carter and Republican James Baker co-chaired the bipartisan Commission on Election Reform. It issued a 100-plus-page document called “Building Confidence in U.S. Elections,” which treated election integrity, public accountability, and transparency seriously, and as vitally important to that goal.

Following the much more contentious 2020 election, we have instead been treated to an endless stream of official apologetics which seeks to convince the general public that this election “was one of the most secure in our history,” and that anybody who questions the results is acting in bad faith.

Now we have a recently released “bombshell” report by prominent Never Trump attorneys and politicians claiming to make “The Conservative Case that Trump Lost and Biden Won the 2020 Presidential Election” (the Ginsberg Report), which seeks to assure us that even conservatives should believe that the 2020 election was beyond reproach and that there really is no useful point in continuing to discuss or debate it anymore

Rather than attempting an objective analysis of the 2020 election, the Ginsberg Report seems to have a different purpose. It appears to be intended to shut down reasonable debate about election integrity by linking all such claims with the most extravagant and unprovable theories of election fraud that were circulated by some Trump supporters in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election.

The objective is not to debunk the wild, baseless theories, but rather to dismiss valid election objections by tarring them with the same brush as the wildest conspiracy theories under the general rubric of “baseless claims of widespread election fraud,” and then dismiss the entire package out of hand.