Your view: Letters discuss masks, voter ID, press

15 min readNov 29, 2020

HARRISBURG, Pa. — Pennsylvania’s highest court on Saturday night threw out a lower court’s order preventing the state from certifying dozens of contests on its Nov. 3 election ballot in the latest lawsuit filed by Republicans attempting to thwart President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the battleground state.

The state Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision, threw out the three-day-old order, saying the underlying lawsuit was filed months after the expiration of a time limit in Pennsylvania’s expansive year-old mail-in voting law allowing for challenges to it.

Justices also remarked on the lawsuit’s staggering demand that an entire election be overturned retroactively.

“They have failed to allege that even a single mail-in ballot was fraudulently cast or counted,” Justice David Wecht wrote in a concurring opinion.

The state’s attorney general, Democrat Josh Shapiro, called the court’s decision “another win for Democracy.”

President Donald Trump and his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, meanwhile, have repeatedly and baselessly claimed that Democrats falsified mail-in ballots to steal the election from Trump. Biden beat Trump by more than 80,000 votes in Pennsylvania, a state Trump had won in 2016.

The week-old lawsuit, led by Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly of northwestern Pennsylvania, had challenged the state’s mail-in voting law as unconstitutional.

As a remedy, Kelly and the other Republican plaintiffs had sought to either throw out the 2.5 million mail-in ballots submitted under the law — most of them by Democrats — or to wipe out the election results and direct the state’s Republican-controlled Legislature to pick Pennsylvania’s presidential electors.

In any case, that request — for the state’s lawmakers to pick Pennsylvania’s presidential electors — flies in the face of a nearly century-old state law that already grants the power to pick electors to the state’s popular vote, Wecht wrote.

While the high court’s two Republicans joined the five Democrats in opposing those remedies, they split from Democrats in suggesting that the lawsuit’s underlying claims — that the state’s mail-in voting law might violate the constitution — are worth considering.

Commonwealth Court Judge Patricia McCullough, elected as a Republican in 2009, had issued the order Wednesday to halt certification of any remaining contests, including apparently contests for Congress.

It did not appear to affect the presidential contest since a day earlier, Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, had certified Biden as the winner of the presidential election in Pennsylvania.

Wolf quickly appealed McCullough’s decision to the state Supreme Court, saying there was no “conceivable justification” for it.

The lawsuit’s dismissal comes after Republicans have lost a flurry of legal challenges brought by the Trump campaign and its GOP allies filed in state and federal courts in Pennsylvania.

On Friday, a federal appeals court in Philadelphia roundly rejected the Trump campaign’s latest effort to challenge the state’s election results.

In that lawsuit, Trump’s campaign had complained that its observers had not been able to scrutinize mail-in ballots as they were being processed in two Democratic bastions, Philadelphia and Allegheny County, which is home to Pittsburgh.

Trump’s lawyers vowed to appeal to the Supreme Court despite the judges’ assessment that the “campaign’s claims have no merit.”

Thank you, Abbie Covington, for your prayers for wisdom for the Joplin City Council. The prayers worked because six divinely inspired council members did the right thing and voted to protect the health of area residents.

Council members who voted for a mask ordinance deserve our gratitude, not a recall petition.

Passing the ordinance took courage in light of fierce opposition from a vocal group of residents. Covington, leading the recall petition, claims that anti-maskers at the council meeting presented scientific evidence.

What scientific evidence? Surely she’s not referring to the Danish study cited a number of times at the meeting. Even that study’s authors, acknowledging major flaws, urged people to wear masks. They wrote in their news release and in the study itself that their work does not prove that masks are ineffective.

“In truth,” the authors wrote, “the intent of our article was to push for more masking, not less.”

Perhaps Covington is referring to another study from doctors at Harvard, Stanford and Oxford universities that also was cited. But those doctors are proponents of the so-called Barrington Declaration, a dangerous fringe theory that promotes natural herd immunity. Epidemiologists have called herd immunity “mass murder” because it requires that at least 60% of the U.S. population get infected, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people.

Another study cited was from the medical journal The Cochrane Review. However, even the authors of that study concluded that, “the high risk of bias in the trials, variations in outcome measurement, and relatively low compliance with the interventions during the studies hamper drawing firm conclusions and generalizing the findings to the current COVID-19 pandemic.”

They described their confidence in the results as “generally low.”

Misinterpreting or incorrectly citing such studies ignores the overwhelming number of studies that prove that masks are effective, including one statewide study closer to home: Kansas counties with mask mandates had half the infection rates of counties without mandates.

But again, Ms. Covington, your prayers were answered, and we can all applaud that.

Gerard Attoun

Joplin

Missouri needs to pass photo ID law

It is time we pass a photo ID law in Missouri once and for all. Missouri has passed photo ID laws numerous times, most recently in 2016 when Missouri voters approved implementation with 63% of the vote. Unfortunately, the state Supreme Court struck down the most recent iteration in January. Our Missouri Legislature was moving a bill to reinstate photo ID requirements at the voting booth this spring when the session was interrupted by COVID-19. In the 2021 legislation session, the Legislature should finish the job we started and join the 18 other states that have photo ID laws in place.

We must also take our fight to the courts. While photo ID laws are critical to election integrity, this is just one battle in the war. Another is “ballot harvesting.” In many states, third parties can collect absentee ballots directly from voters. Systems like this are clearly susceptible to fraud. Arizona passed legislation in 2016 restricting who can handle a person’s absentee ballots to only family members and household members. However, the Democratic National Committee filed suit against Arizona. While the state won at the district level, the far-left Ninth Circuit overturned the lower courts and found for the DNC.

I have personally filed an amicus brief in the U.S. Supreme Court, in Brnovich vs. DNC, arguing why states such as Arizona and Missouri should be able to pass commonsense protections over their absentee ballots to prohibit voter fraud.

Even for those who are not lawyers or legislators, there is work for the willing and able citizen concerned about the direction of our country and our elections. Consider teaming up with your local county clerk as a volunteer in the next local election to join in and be part of this important process.

These are just three concrete steps we can take to protect the sanctity of our ballot boxes. But we must take them soon. The next election is 728 days away. For the sake and the strength of our democracy, it is incumbent upon us to ensure safe and secure elections moving forward.

Elijah Haahr

Springfield

Speaker of the Missouri House of Representatives

Press does not have license to manipulate the news

A local attorney wrote concerning the manner in which the press presents the news, in response to my letter and that of Derek Snyder (Globe, Nov. 10).

Having worked for a law firm, I am well aware that it is the nature of attorneys to try to influence the opinion of judges, other attorneys and witnesses. That’s their job. But it doesn’t mean the person or matter they represent is necessarily honest or innocent. Their job is to see that their client gets fair treatment under the law, but they do not have license to inject their own interpretation of that law.

The First Amendment absolutely does guarantee freedom of the press, but today’s so-called reporters have corrupted the meaning and intent of the Founding Fathers — to guarantee that the public has access to the truth. I do not believe the founders ever intended for the press to have license to color or manipulate the news to suit themselves and their own agenda.

Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkrite are no doubt spinning the in their graves. And yes, Fox is as guilty as ABC, NBC and CBS. The largest part of the writer’s letter was devoted to criticism of President Donald Trump, and I actually agree with some of what he said, but the American people should be given the opportunity to make up their own minds based on factual reporting and not the snide and nasty comments blatantly made by supposed news reporters.

Dianne Slater

Joplin

Trump has long history of discrediting elections

President Donald Trump, who never accepted that he lost the popular vote in 2016, has a long history of trying to discredit elections when he doesn’t like the results. On the night of President Barack Obama’s reelection in 2012, Trump tweeted, “This election is a total sham and a travesty. We are not a democracy!”

Moreover, as a presidential candidate in 2016, Trump asserted: “Ted Cruz didn’t win Iowa; he illegally stole it … Based on the fraud committed by Sen. Ted Cruz during the Iowa Caucus, either a new election should take place or Cruz results nullified.”

More recently, at a rally in Wisconsin in August, the president stated: “Because the only way we’re going to lose this election is if the election is rigged. Remember that.”

And again, at a campaign stop in Pennsylvania the week before the election, he declared: “The only way we can lose in my opinion is massive fraud.”

So it’s not surprising that Trump has become the first defeated president in American history to refuse to accept the results of an election.

Our democracy is built on a foundation of truth and trust. How do you trust someone who claimed that any election loss for him would be fraudulent?

Terry Hansen

Hales Corners, Wisc.

Trump behaving as ‘toddler in chief’

At a time when we should finally be enjoying the peace and civility that the majority have voted in during the November election, we are still dealing with the toddler in chief, who insists on muddying the waters and putting forth ridiculous lawsuits, most of which have already been dismissed, for the sole purpose of not conceding defeat in an election that had a clear winner.

The petulant child cannot be gone soon enough, and history will not be favorable to him or his administration. The silence is deafening from people who should be thinking country, not politics.

Judy Tesch

Joplin

Susan Estrich focuses on wrong lawyers

There was a man and several other interested parties who wanted President Donald Trump impeached. The man is Adam Schiff. He, along with Jerry Nadler, led the committee investigations and made several statements regarding proof of Trump’s guilt. They spent a lot of time and a lot of the people’s money trying to kick the president out of office.

Schiff never produced his “witnesses.” He provided zero proof of Trump’s guilt in happenings in Ukraine, and he provided zero proof of any country’s interference in the 2016 election.

But Schiff and his cohorts continued.

I share this information with the reader because Susan Estrich made quite a deal (Globe, Nov. 23) of the president’s legal team and the cost of their efforts and what one lawyer wanted in payment for his efforts. Most importantly, I thought it important for the readers to know Schiff used taxpayer money for his unsuccessful efforts while I find no evidence of taxpayer money being used by Trump’s lawyers.

I am sure there are those who are concerned about the worth of other people — financial and ethical. There are those who are concerned with what someone wore to the beach or the brand of shoes they wear. In my opinion, most of these people have no life of their own and dwell on the activities of others. Is it anyone’s business what a person charges for their services? It is when it is the people’s money they are spending, but we are not likely to hear or read that number from Estrich. I read only negative items from her pen.

David Turner

Lamar

Limbaugh column misses the point

David Limbaugh’s “Left obliterating free speech” column (Globe, Nov. 23) completely misses the point. He accuses liberals of “selective repression” of speech, a “war against this sacred liberty” and of being “brazenly hostile toward publication of opinions with which they disagree.”

What he fails to discern is that liberals do not want to get rid of opposing opinions. Indeed, we appreciate, and often learn from, opposing opinions. Our nation needs healthy, rational debates about a wide variety of issues affecting our future.

What we oppose is irresponsible speech, disinformation, dangerous propaganda and the assumption that my conspiracy theory is just as good as your facts.

There is a major difference between the freedom to speak our opinions and the fantasy that we should be able to proclaim hogwash to be truth. It is easy to see the difference between, “I should have won the election,” and, “I lost the election because of fraud.” The first is an opinion, probably harmless enough, but the second is a potentially dangerous lie.

Ironically, all of our freedoms are endangered by this insistence that free speech is protected even when it is garbage. Our democracy depends on consensus about what is “real,” upon commonly trusted data and substantiated information. Our free speech rights must include responsibility and an allegiance to truth and facts. And we must have the wisdom to discern opinions from fact and to know whether our opinions are based on reality or hogwash.

Sherry Buchanan

Joplin

Mask mandate good for general welfare

Local media have had stories about a petition to recall the Joplin City Council members who voted in favor of a mask mandate. The petitioner claimed that the council members failed to defend the rights of residents as laid out in the Constitution of the United States.

So I took a quick look and have to disagree. In the preamble, there is a requirement to “promote the general welfare.”

Considering that the effects of this pandemic are a threat to life, livelihood and an increased burden upon our health care system, I believe it would be rational to conclude that the general welfare of the community has deteriorated. A mandate to wear safety equipment during this high-risk period is not only a good decision, but failure of our leadership to evaluate the local environment and be proactive to minimize the threat would be to disregard the responsibility they have sworn to uphold.

James Graham

Pittsburg, Kan.

Poll workers, election officials earn thanks

We write to express our gratitude for the Democratic and Republican poll workers, county clerks and election officials who worked so hard this year. Through early voting, on Election Day and in the counting process, you have all done exemplary work. This was a year with higher-than-normal voter turnout and with much higher-than-normal absentee ballot numbers to process. We are grateful to you for the work you do for our democracy.

Thank you for your hard work and for your commitment in assuring the democratic process to enfranchise our Southwest Missouri voters.

Your efforts are greatly appreciated.

Krista Stark

Executive director

Southwest Missouri Democrats

Your view: Letters discuss masks, voter ID, press

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