Former Pa. Governor Tom Corbett says education and talking to one another are keys
Scott LaMar, WITF The Spark – Aired February 15, 2024
At the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, Benjamin Franklin was asked by a passersby about what kind of political system we would have and he reportedly replied: “A Republic, if you can keep it.”
Echoing Franklin’s words is Keep Our Republic, a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization that says its purpose is to “focus on the unconventional threats facing our election system, and on ways to help strengthen trust in our electoral system. We are most tightly focused on election integrity to assure that every eligible voter has the opportunity to vote, their votes are counted, and properly certified.”
More than three years after the November, 2020 election, polls show a majority of Republican voters still think President Biden’s victory was illegitimate and there was cheating and fraud. That’s even though there is no credible evidence of widespread fraud.
Former President Donald Trump continues to claim the election was stolen from him and he actually won. Again, Trump and his allies have lost dozens of court cases claiming election fraud. What Trump has done is sow doubt and mistrust in elections.
Keep Our Republic is concentrating its efforts on three swing states – Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan.
The chair of Keep Our Republic’s Pennsylvania Council is Former Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett, was on The Spark Thursday and said that mistrust in the electoral process and the possibility of interference from foreign powers like Russia, China or Iran are threats to elections, but he added social media presents another challenge,”Social media as compared to, broadcasting and as compared to the print media really has no control over what people put on (post). And I don’t mean illegal control. I mean, people can say just about anything they want to say. In the newspapers, they have editors. They have to make sure that they’re saying something, that they’re not going to get sued about. The same thing with broadcast media — that doesn’t happen when it comes to the social media and what we’ve seen in this country. Is a divide that keeps getting wider because people are looking at social media or media as a whole. Picking a camp, whether it be a red camp or blue camp, conservative, liberal, and only looking at that which they believe in and trust and not looking to see if they can find anything, maybe in the middle, maybe independent. So I think those are the fears that I have, going into November of this year.”
Corbett was asked how the polarization in the U.S. can be overcome and trust can be restored in elections,”I think education is part of that process, and it’s going to go back to educating all the way back into the grade schools, the high schools, into the colleges. But I will circle back to what I think is the everyday process that we have of people going into camps and relying upon what they see or hear, whether it be CNN or MSNBC or Fox or whatever, and not sitting and discussing the issues with people they know. Government doesn’t work by being one or the other. It’s not easy. And it’s kind of ugly to get there. It works by compromise.”