For the Left, ‘Election Denial’ Is Like Hindsight—Always 2020

The term “denier” is an allusion to Holocaust denial. In the 1990s, activists and pundits exercised about global warming, or what is now called climate change, began calling their adversaries “deniers.” Those “deniers” included many people who accepted the reality of global temperature change but rejected the proposed remedies. Nonetheless, in an effort to delegitimize their views, their “denialism” was tacitly associated with a form of demented bigotry.

Now we have election “deniers.” They don’t deny the existence of elections. In fact, as the Times laments, many of them have just won elections, and even more have run in them. Most of them, according to the Times’s own criteria, don’t deny the legitimacy of the 2020 election at all.

The Times defines election “deniers” as those who “said inaccurately that the 2020 election was stolen or rigged.” Its page also lists election “skeptics,” people who “stopped short of that falsehood but nonetheless criticized the election.” I’m not sure the distinction matters to the Times’s intended readers. The deniers and skeptics are all listed together, the only difference being a pink versus a red background to the head shot.

But is it reasonable or fair to associate people who merely “criticized” an election with people who denied the legitimacy of the winner? Recall that we are talking about the historically anomalous election of the pandemic year, in which election rules were changed in the middle of the race, in many cases without legislative approval. You could find yourself on the list of 210 miscreants, the Times explains, if you “embraced a narrow procedural argument that it was unconstitutional for states”—meaning state judges or officials other than lawmakers—“to bypass state legislatures when they changed voting procedures during the pandemic.” The Supreme Court will consider precisely that question in Moore v. Harper next month.

Among the list’s election “skeptics” is Gov.

Brian Kemp

of Georgia. Mr. Kemp rejected Donald Trump’s demand not to certify his state’s electors for

Joe Biden,

who carried the state by 11,779 votes. Two years earlier, Mr. Kemp defeated

Stacey Abrams

by 54,723 votes, only to see Ms. Abrams lionized by the Times and other media outlets for refusing to concede the race. Ms. Abrams, who ran for governor again in 2022 and lost to Mr. Kemp by almost a million votes, doesn’t make the Times list of election deniers for two reasons: She didn’t win, and she denied the wrong election.

This last point exposes the panic over election denialism as the rankly partisan exercise it is. It is true that Mr. Trump and his most sycophantic allies spread falsehoods about that election. But the list of 210 deniers might have been expanded to include current lawmakers who, “without evidence,” as the Times would say, denied the 2004 election of

George W. Bush.

That election hinged on Ohio. On Jan. 6, 2005, Sen.

Barbara Boxer

and Rep.

Stephanie Tubbs Jones

objected to the certification of the state’s electors because some voting machines allegedly didn’t work and long lines prevented some voters from casting their ballots.

Of the 31 representatives, all Democrats, who voted not to certify Ohio’s electors, 10 will be members of the new Congress that convenes Jan. 3:

Jim Clyburn

of South Carolina (now the third-ranking House Democrat),

Danny Davis

of Illinois,

Raul Grijalva

of Arizona,

Sheila Jackson-Lee

of Texas,

Barbara Lee

of California,

Ed Markey

of Massachusetts (now a senator),

Frank Pallone

of New Jersey,

Jan Shakowsky

of Illinois,

Bennie Thompson

of Mississippi and

Maxine Waters

of California.

Four years earlier several Democratic representatives, including Ms. Jackson-Lee, Ms. Lee and Ms. Waters, attempted to object to the certification of Florida’s electoral votes for Mr. Bush and were gaveled down by Vice President

Al Gore

for lack of a Senate supporter. Many elected officials would later assert that Mr. Bush wasn’t the rightful winner. Mr. Grijalva, Ms. Jackson-Lee, Ms. Lee and Ms. Waters also attempted to object to the certification of Trump electors in 2017, as did Reps.

Pramila Jayapal

of Washington,

Jim McGovern

of Massachusetts and

Jamie Raskin

of Maryland.

The Times also excludes members of Congress who characterized the 2016 election as illegitimate—the result of Russian meddling or “collusion” between the Trump campaign and

Vladimir Putin.

That was as powerful a denial of an election as could be imagined, but including the purveyors of that act of denialism would land two thirds of the Democratic Party on the list—not to mention, if we included non-officeholders, some of the Times’s own journalists.

None of this is to say that the repudiation of the 2020 election was insignificant or didn’t happen. Some election-winners on the Times’s list of deniers, among them Rep.

Marjorie Taylor Greene,

deserve to be there. Others such as

Don Bolduc

of New Hampshire and Kari Lake of Arizona, would be rightly on the list if they won.

But it is not amiss to recall that 2020, the year to which the Times unaccountably limits its attention, was a year of rife unreason. Many Americans, including prominent people in academia and media and the entertainment industry, said and did unbelievably stupid things while confined to their homes and hiding their faces from each other. Some fashioned elaborate theories about how an election was stolen. Others circulated idiotic theories about the virus and demanded the closing of businesses and schools. Still others legitimized mass violence because an arrest went bad in Minneapolis.

By all means let us consider every American election fair and legitimate, absent overwhelming evidence to the contrary. But if the exponents of elite opinion wish to stop election denialism, they might consider abstaining from it themselves.

Mr. Swaim is a Journal editorial page writer.