First things first: We take a backseat to no one in our desire to see President Donald Trump reelected. The prospect of a Biden-Harris presidency makes our skin crawl. So does the very thought of Never-Trumpers like Jonah Goldberg, George Will, Bill Kristol, Steve Schmidt, and Jennifer Rubin.

Second: Fraud did occur last Tuesday. Anyone who considers the history of the president’s opponents and still thinks otherwise is in deep denial. More than 147 million votes were cast — some of them by dead people, others by people ineligible to vote, and still others by people who didn’t vote at all.

Small potatoes, you say? Let’s look at the bigger picture. It appears that tens of thousands of voters in key states inexplicably filled out only the single circle for Joe Biden but no others. Bigger still? Donald Trump, the guy with the massive rallies, the guy who himself has netted more than 71 million votes, which is eight million more than the GOP record of 63 million he received in 2016, is nonetheless trailing the 77-year-old Biden by five million? And Biden, the guy who can’t draw flies to a rally, has so far racked up more population-adjusted votes than the then-record 69 million that young Barack Obama got in 2008?

No way. No way.

So the two critical questions are these: Was the fraud decisive? And, Will the president’s team be able to prove it? Because if we still honor Rule of Law, we must demand proof. And if the president’s team can’t make a solid case for fraud — a case that withstands legal scrutiny — his case goes nowhere. And at that point, short of shackling himself to the HMS Resolute desk, he’ll head off to Mar-a-Lago on January 20.

The status of President Trump’s claims of massive voter fraud in last Tuesday’s election can be best summed up — at least at this point — as a battle between the Trump Haters and the Trump Supporters.

In the Hater camp, we bring you former journalist Chris Wallace, who made a decision some time earlier this year to throw in with the Never Trump crowd. We could see it in the way he began conducting interviews on his “Fox News Sunday” show: contentious questioning for the pro-Trump guests, and cupcakes galore for the Trump Haters — especially those defending the four-year-long Russia-collusion hoax. Wallace must’ve found the pressure of being an honest journalist to be too much.

Among the Trump Supporters are men like Ted Cruz, who’s been looking into the various fraud charges and has encouraged the president to fight on. Said Wallace of Cruz, “It would seem to me that Republicans on Capitol Hill have a role to play in this, a very few of them have said, ‘Look, you pursue your legal options but damp down the rhetoric,’ like Mitt Romney, like Pat Toomey. There are a lot who are just silent and there are some, I mentioned Ted Cruz, who are like the Japanese soldiers who come out 30 years after the end of the war and out of the jungle and say, ‘Is the fight still going on?’”

To which Wallace’s Fox News colleague Mark Levin said, “This is way out of line. Keep your politics to yourself, Mr. Journalist. You’re not just showing ankle, you’ve undressed yourself.”

And to which Cruz responded, “Chris Wallace, who beclowned himself with a shamefully biased debate performance — universally panned — continues to demonstrate his rank partisanship. Urging that we follow the law & that election recounts be actually completed is not somehow undermining democracy.”

Cruz is right and Wallace is wrong — as if that needed to be said. As Heritage Foundation Senior Legal Fellow and election law expert Hans von Spakovsky writes, “Even if news organizations declare a winner … that’s not the official result. States have until Dec. 8 to settle any election disputes and certify their results before the meeting of state electors in every state Dec. 14, when they cast their Electoral College votes for president. … Think back to Bush v. Gore [which] wasn’t decided until December, when the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in to end any further vote recounts in Florida because of the mistakes made by state courts and election officials.”

As for those “disputes,” the Trump legal team has already begun collecting sworn affidavits of voter fraud and filing lawsuits in battleground states such as Michigan. One such affidavit from a Detroit elections worker named Jessy Jacob reads, “I was told to alter the information in the QVF [Qualified Voter File] to falsely show that the absentee ballots has been received in time to be valid. I estimate this was done to thousands of ballots. I was instructed not to look at any of the signatures on the absentee ballots, and I was instructed not to compare the signature on the absentee ballot with the signature on the file.”

If it’s okay with Chris Wallace, we think this and other such eyewitness accounts of fraud are worth looking into. As President Trump has repeatedly stressed regarding other lawless behavior by those rotten Democrats, “This should never happen to another president again.”