The good news: Kentucky Senator Rand Paul told Fox News host Martha MacCallum on Monday that in his opinion, the vast majority of voting must be done in-person to limit the potential for election fraud — which should be a no-brainer. But Democrats.

The bad news: While every honest voter in America should agree that limiting election fraud is paramount, Paul used a  debunked study to make his case — a case in which even the statistician who conducted the analysis apologized for his mistakes, and said his findings wouldn’t have impacted the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Paul told MacCallum the election was “unprecedented,” as reported by The Blaze, due to the high volume of mail-in votes cast because of the coronavirus pandemic. “These mail-in votes, Paul said, are difficult to “validate.”

MacCallum began the segment by talking about the General Services Administration beginning the transition process and President Trump’s subsequent statements about continuing to pursue open cases of voter fraud, and observed that “the mail-in process, in some aspects, is very perplexing.”

Paul agreed, citing the aforementioned statistical analysis on absentee ballots in Pennsylvania.

“This was an unprecedented election. Normally, 99% show up in person and we can kind of police that the right people showed up because you don’t have the same people showing up again and again. They sign in, they show an ID, and it’s pretty easy to validate the vote.

“But now we have an election where maybe a third to a half mailed in their ballots. This has never ever happened in our history, so we have to validate, were they the right people?

“And the Left keeps saying there’s no evidence or there’s insufficient evidence, but what Professor [Miller] has done here, is he’s taken a random sample of Republican voters and found that there’s an extraordinairy of Republican voters who said they voted but weren’t counted.

“And then there’s an extraordinairy number of Republicans who said ‘I didn’t cast a ballot, I didn’t vote,’ but then they’re recorded as having voted.”

“We must have in-person voting to limit the potential for fraud,” he said.

Sen. Paul: We must have in-person voting to limit potential for fraud | https://t.co/aRx6pNFWWi

— Hold My Beer (@RealLibSmacker) November 24, 2020

As The Blaze reported, the study to which Paul referred was a statistical analysis from a Williams College professor who claimed that more than 89,000 absentee ballots requested by Republicans were incorrectly counted — or not counted at all.

Paul cited a statistical analysis from a Williams College professor that purportedly shows more than 89,000 absentee ballots requested by Republican voters in Pennsylvania were not counted or were requested by someone other than a registered Republican.

The analysis is part of a sworn affidavit from professor Steven Miller, a Yale- and Princeton-trained math expert, who used data provided by former Trump campaign data chief Matt Braynard.

Braynard leads the “Voter Integrity Fund,” a group led by former Trump campaign staffers and government employees that is analyzing voter data in key battleground states looking for evidence of fraud and investigating irregularities.

Pennsylvania on Tuesday certified its election results, which showed Joe Biden beating Donald Trump by more than 80,000 votes. But Paul told MacCallum on Monday he thought the Trump campaign should present Miller’s statistical analysis to a Pennsylvania judge who might then be persuaded to review absentee ballots in the state.

“I would think that if we took this to a court, the court would then mandate that you have to look at all of the absentee votes one at a time, not count them, but verify whether or not the person who you say voted, you actually call them and ask them, ‘did you vote’ and ‘who did you vote for’ to verify the vote.”

But as The Blaze reported, Miller’s analysis has drawn criticism from statisticians for “failing to meet basic standards of statistical analysis” and been called “irresponsible” and “naive” by peers reviewing the study, who said it was “wrong to separate basic mathematical analysis from questions about the validity of the data.” You can view the details here.

Miller responded to his critics, as The Blaze reported, apologizing for a “lack of clarity and due diligence” in his analysis.

“Especially as the consequences are so important, I should have made a greater effort to go deeply into and share how the data was collected and not treat this solely as an independent calculation. I am not concluding fraud happened, or that state outcomes should be changed.

“What I said was, assuming the accuracy of these numbers, then we have a large number of people who had a ballot requested in their name but say they did not request it, and we have a large number of people who said they mailed their ballot back but it was not counted.”

I’m not a statistician, but common sense dictates that the more people vote in person, the fewer chances for fraud, lost ballots, “accidental” miscounting, and any number of other charges levied by the Trump campaign and others. Moreover, it should always be a red flag to Republicans that any change in election laws sought by Democrats is not based on the integrity of elections; it is based on their belief that Democrats will benefit more than Republicans in elections with rules changed by them.

As for future elections, Paul told MacCallum pretty what we already knew heading into the election, based in part on the above paragraph: voting in person is “the easiest way to validate an election is to vote in person.”

“I’m not against voting early or having early voting, but the majority of the vote, the vast majority, needs to be in person because there are so many checkpoints,” he said, but “in the future, we have to go back to in-person voting.”

“We can’t just say ‘oh, here’s a ballot we’re going to mail to everyone.’ I think it’s ripe for fraud.”

Amen, senator.