In the wake of last week’s laughably long overdue admission by The New York Times that Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop was indeed authentic, we thought it worth updating another story of the Times’s malfeasance — namely, its immediate and reflexive dismissal of any and all 2020 election fraud claims as false and as lies.

The “lies” dismissal was itself a lie, coming as it did just a week after the election and before all the votes had even been counted. And yet there was the Times’s front-page headline: “Election Officials Nationwide Find No Fraud.”

Really? Not a single instance of fraud among 155 million votes cast? Aside from that obvious lie, how could the Times have conducted such an exhaustive study so quickly and conclusively? Answer: It couldn’t have. But that didn’t keep Times Deputy Managing Editor Cliff Levy from triumphantly tweeting out that headline the night before it hit the newsstands. In fact, the Times’s introductory paragraph was even more damning: “Election officials in dozens of states representing both political parties said that there was no evidence that fraud or other irregularities played a role in the outcome of the presidential race, amounting to a forceful rebuke of President Trump’s portrait of a fraudulent election.”

Got that? The Times based its conclusions on interviews with “election officials in dozens of states.” In other words, it interviewed the defendants in the case. Of course they said it was a clean election. Otherwise, they’d be admitting that they failed to do the one thing that election officials are responsible for above all else: ensuring the integrity of the election.

All of this brings us to Georgia, one of the three states across which a relative handful of votes — 43,000 cumulatively — decided the 2020 presidential election. Georgia, along with Wisconsin and Arizona, were all decided by razor-thin margins, and all in favor of Joe Biden. And in the case of Georgia, it appears that fraud could have played a decisive role.

We first reported on this story in early January, when Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger confirmed that the state is investigating allegations that widespread ballot harvesting occurred during the November 2020 general election and the two subsequent senatorial runoff elections.

At issue is a whistleblower’s allegations of widespread and systemic ballot harvesting as told to a nonprofit voting integrity organization called True the Vote. Ballot harvesting, which is strictly illegal in Georgia, is a practice by which fraudsters pick up and deliver ballots on behalf of voters. As veteran journalist John Solomon reported at the time:

True the Vote’s complaint offered Raffensperger’s office access to what are characterized as detailed phone records and surveillance video it said would show as many as 242 people repeatedly made trips to the drop boxes to deliver ballots in what it described as a mass “ballot trafficking operation.” The aspect of the complaint that the secretary’s office believed merited attention was the allegation the group had spoken to a man who admitted he and others engaged in ballot harvesting.

Using a tactic increasingly used by the FBI and the intelligence community to solve crimes or national security threats, the group said it bought commercially available geospatial mobile device data showing the locations of suspected ballot harvesters’ cell phones in the vicinity of the ballot drop boxes at the times people appeared on the surveillance footage stuffing multiple ballots into a drop box.

What’s so compelling here is the electronic evidence and the specific details it provides. According to True the Vote’s complaint, those 242 people made a total of 5,662 ballot drops, with more than 40% of them taking place between midnight and 5 a.m. — not exactly regular business hours. In many instances, people were captured on video “stuffing large numbers of ballots into the boxes, some with so many ballots in hand that some of the envelopes dropped to the ground.” Additionally, some of the harvesters were seen taking pictures of themselves at the drop boxes, which, according to the whistleblower, he was required to do in order to receive a payment of $10 per ballot.

This is bulk-mail ballot fraud, and it seems well worth investigating, no?

The news this week is that the Georgia Elections Board has granted Raffensperger subpoena power to secure evidence and testimony from the whistleblower. We’re not sure what took it so long, but we’ll take it.

“We need to get a subpoena for the fella who this John Doe is,” said Raffensperger. “Was he paid? How much was he paid? And then who paid him. And we’re going to follow the money, and we’re going get to the bottom of it. And we’re going to prosecute this, if we find that there’s substance to it.”

Election fraud in Georgia? We can practically hear all 50 of those disgraceful “former intelligence officials” now, desperately colluding to dismiss this fraud just as they tried to dismiss the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s laptop: It has “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

Yeah, right.

Electoral fraud has many faces, and what appears to have happened in Georgia is just one example. But if a Republican governor and secretary of state can’t get to the bottom of it in fewer than 17 months, it doesn’t bode well for our republic.