After all that’s transpired involving the 2020 presidential balloting, much can be said - and desired - concerning election integrity.

The Heritage Foundation, which stands as a bastion of the American conservative movement and a broadly supported national think tank, recently stated that contrary to claims from the left, voter fraud is a very real problem. When that occurs, the process is no longer fair, everyone’s vote gets diluted, and sometimes election results are changed.

Hans von Spakovsky, manager of the foundation’s Election Law Reform Initiative, states that in the freest nation in the world, our system of government and our very liberty depend on free and fair elections. Whether we’re selecting a mayor or the president of the United States, every American must be able to trust the process, or the democratic system itself breaks down.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell concurs, recently stating that if any major irregularities occurred that would affect the election outcome, then every single American should want them to be brought to light and should not fear any extra scrutiny.

Despite objections from Democrats who say court challenges by the Trump legal team are hurting the country, the legal rights of every citizen, including the president, are guaranteed under the Constitution.

Saturday marked the 20th anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling that effectively paved the way for George Bush’s win over Al Gore by just 537 votes, a decision that is still debated and loathed by Democrats.

The biggest difference from that election and the one now being contested by Trump is the scope. The 2000 election dispute centered on the butterfly paper ballot used in Palm Beach County, Florida. Trump’s legal challenge, meanwhile, targets key counties in the crucial battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona.

Despite claims from Democrats and the liberal media that there is no evidence of fraud, affidavits from hundreds of witnesses in those key areas describe voting irregularities while data experts have reported on statistical anomalies.

The president was well ahead when most people went to bed on election night - leading by hundreds of thousands of votes in key swing states - which makes it hard to convince Trump voters that votes were not somehow manipulated.

The overall vote total itself is an anomaly. In the prior five elections, four had vote totals ranging from 122 million to 130 million. This one was 155 million! While the Biden surge during the early morning hours was suspicious enough, reports then surfaced of ballot boxes being removed, dumped or suddenly surfacing in the key voting areas.

Other anomalies that raise obvious questions include:

• How could President Trump receive almost 11 million more votes in 2020 than he got in 2016 - improving his national performance by almost 20 percent - and still lose by 6 million votes to a candidate who essentially held no rallies, not leaving his basement to campaign, and when he did, had trouble articulating, even while reading a teleprompter?

• How could Donald Trump lose despite winning 87 percent of all counties across the nation, including all the bellwether counties he needed and also capture the key battleground states of Florida and Ohio?

• How were Republicans able to do so well and flip so many House seats in the “down ballot” results but lose the presidency?

In an interview with Mark Levin, pollster Patrick Basham stated that Biden defied key “non-polling metrics” to defeat Trump in a way that is “not statistically impossible, but it’s statistically implausible.”

Data expert Justin Hart charted how a large number of Biden votes were tabulated late at night and early into the next morning. In Wisconsin, for example, Trump led throughout election night until a dump of votes at 3:42 a.m. Hart admits there could be a good reason for this, but it certainly raises suspicions when a large batch of votes comes in at 96 percent for Biden, even though it’s unclear where one could find enough precincts that would produce that many votes.

Despite their repeated claims that there were no problems with machines, the Dominion Voting Systems presents another red flag for Hart. The company’s own training videos, he said, show how easy it is to cheat.

While Hart has doubts that the legal challenges can succeed across multiple battleground states, he hopes the investigation continues in order to find the truth and also prevent any future elections from being riddled with questions about ballot integrity.

Abraham Lincoln told us that America will never be destroyed from the outside.

“If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves,” he warned.

Unfortunately, character traits like truth and integrity are in short supply these days, especially in the nation’s Capitol, where left-leaning liberals like the media mobs and political insiders pollute the Washington swamp.

By Jim Zbick | tneditor@tnonline.com