Yesterday, our Mark Alexander asked an important question, indeed an existential one: Does your vote still matter?

The answer is painful, and it’s complicated, but it’s important to all Liberty-loving Americans — which is why we here in our humble shop keep harping on it. The COVID-19 pandemic and its attendant panic gave the Democrats a green light to normalize the very abnormal and very fraud-friendly practice of bulk-mail voting. Along with it came early voting and ballot harvesting. And, as Elizabeth Stauffer points out at Power Line, “As dangerous and unpalatable as these activities may be, they are here to stay.”

Put another way: Voter fraud is here to stay.

Stauffer continues, “I’ve certainly been wrong before, but I am firmly convinced that, if not for the introduction of nearly universal mail-in voting in 2020, early voting, and the widespread use of ballot harvesting, former President Donald Trump would have won reelection.”

We agree. But as we wrote in June, “Now that the American Left has wrecked Election Day by turning it into Election Season, we on the Right have a decision to make: We can either continue to complain about it, or we can resolve to beat the Democrats at their own ballot-harvesting game.”

Because let’s face it: If Basement Joe Biden can get more population-adjusted votes in 2020 than electrifying Barack Obama did in 2008, it means we’ve entered a whole new world of electioneering.

The good news is that we’re still 419 days from Tuesday, November 6, 2024 — which means we still have time to either adopt or minimize the impact of the bulk-mail ballot strategy that the Democrats used with such devastating effect in 2020.

Remember: Joe Biden didn’t get 81 million votes on the up-and-up, and he didn’t beat Donald Trump by seven million votes. Instead, Biden beat Trump by a razor-thin 43,000 votes across three key swing states — Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin — and he did it because his Democrat machine was committed to ballot-harvesting. It was committed to wringing out every last Democrat vote in every last Democrat-controlled urban stronghold in every swing state — in Atlanta, in Detroit, in Milwaukee, in Philly, in Phoenix. They were committed, for example, to ensuring nearly 100% voter turnout in the nursing homes all around Democrat-controlled Milwaukee.

Let the implausibility of that sad fact sink in, and you’ll come to realize what we’re up against in the Brazen New World of American elections.

Ignore the fact that more than 155 million votes were cast nationwide. Flip those three states — Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin — and Trump wins reelection.

You’ve got to hand it to the Democrats, and to the half-billion dollars that Meta zillionaire Mark Zuckerberg pumped into their get-out-the-vote apparatus. In 2020, the Democrats proved that campaigning doesn’t matter, at least not in a nation that’s as evenly divided politically as ours. Nor does charisma or energy or competence. Nor does an incumbent’s demonstrable record of success. What matters is which party best harvests the vote. Anyone who doesn’t believe that is delusional. And in 2020, the Democrats were a lot better at harvesting the vote than Republicans.

As conservative columnists Mark and Mollie Hemingway recently put it:

Instead of election day, we now have an “election season” — during which, over a period of months, we flood homes across the country with tens of millions of mail-in ballots, regardless of whether secretaries of state or local registrars have any idea if those ballots are being sent to the correct addresses. This in a country where 11% of residents move every year. We then wait for sophisticated partisan turnout operations funded by activist billionaires and run by ideological statisticians to round up those ballots in entirely selective ways.

What’s more, as our Mark Alexander notes: “Democrats protest any measure to require voter ID, as is required in every other civilized nation on the planet. The result is that millions of votes nationwide were not authenticated, which, in combination with massive Demo ballot-harvesting operations, significantly eroded the integrity of authentic votes — meaning your vote.”

In his 2021 book Beyond Biden: Rebuilding the America We Love, Newt Gingrich devotes a whole chapter to election integrity. It’s not enough. Not nearly enough. Newt has some very good ideas, including a guiding principle for more honest and trustworthy elections. He writes: “To get to the election system that is best for Americans and our system of government (in that order), we need to establish a simple, accepted goal: every American citizen who is eligible to vote should be able to do so securely and easily and have his or her vote counted — exactly once. Every election rule we make must be in pursuit of this goal and no other.”

He’s right, of course, but the devil is in the details. As noble as Newt’s vision is, what’s the likelihood that Republicans can bring enough Democrats along to it? What’s the Democrats’ incentive to cooperate? After all, our election system is working out pretty well for them just like it is.

Indeed, why should the Democrats seek electoral reform when their best and clearest path to power is to cheat? Wisconsin Republican Bryan Steil, who chairs the Committee on House Administration, recently introduced an election reform bill, the American Confidence in Elections Act, which he and his Republican colleagues tout as the “most conservative election integrity bill to be seriously considered in the House in over 20 years.”

But, again, why should the Democrats care about the ACE Act?

Regardless of who the Democrats ultimately put forth as their presidential candidate, if Republicans want to avoid a replay of 2020 in 2024, they need to realize that the Democrats aren’t going to help them reform our elections. Instead, they need to figure out how to beat the Democrats at their own ballot-harvesting game.

If Republicans want to regain the White House, they need to commit themselves to harvesting the vote — especially in the swing states. It’s complicated, and yet it’s really that simple.

POSTSCRIPT: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis won reelection by a whopping 19 points last year in a state not known for electoral blowouts. The landslide was likely due at least in part to Senate Bill 524, which he signed in April 2022, and which tightened voter rolls, strengthened ID requirements, and cracked down on lawbreakers. Florida thus provides the GOP with an election-integrity roadmap, but only in states that already have Republican governors and legislatures. Of the five swing states mentioned earlier — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — only one of them, Georgia, fits those criteria.