The Patriot Post® · Punishing Voter Fraud Is Racist?

Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: Republicans are racists.

That’s the not-so-stunning conclusion offered by The Washington Post in a new “exclusive” and “first-of-its-kind analysis” about how minorities (and Democrats) are the most frequent “targets” of the GOP’s “voter-fraud crackdown” in various states.

If it feels like we’re picking on The Washington Post a lot lately (Thomas Gallatin also does so today for its hit piece on homeschooling), it’s because the “Democracy Dies in Darkness” crowd running one of the nation’s leading newspapers has a big impact on how news is reported nationally. And it seems that the over-the-top left-wing propaganda at the Post has accelerated.

According to the Post, “Black and Hispanic people made up more than 75 percent of defendants and Democrats nearly 60 percent in a controversial push by Republicans to prosecute election cheating.”

This reminded us of Barack Obama’s obsession with the “disparate impact” of school discipline, which likewise hit minorities more frequently. There’s also the fact that more minorities are arrested and incarcerated for crimes in American cities.

It’s all just systemic racism, right? Right?

The Post’s reporting certainly both depends upon and reinforces that narrative.

The trouble is that laws only have to be enforced against people who break them. As we recently noted in a blockbuster story about one in five voters admitting to illegal mail-in ballot practices, a far higher number of Democrats cast ballots by mail, and younger voters and minorities — who skew heavily Democrat — were “significantly more likely to admit to engaging in fraudulent election activity” than were older or white voters.

It only stands to reason then that if state officials are “targeting” minorities and Democrats, it’s because they’re more likely to break the law. Are state officials supposed to charge more Republican white people just for the sake of “equity”? Or let minorities and Democrats commit crimes just because they’re minorities and Democrats?

And as our Mark Alexander wrote just three months ago:

Of the votes cast in 2020, 43% (66 million ballots) were cast by mail — and a majority of those were in states where authentication of the person receiving and casting the ballot is not required. Of all those who voted in person, 66% voted for Trump versus 42% for Biden — which is to say that 58% of Biden ballots, almost 47 million votes, were cast by mail.

Rather than screaming about “racism,” perhaps the Post’s crack team of journalists could answer why Democrats and minorities are so much more likely to vote by mail and cheat while doing so.

Instead, the story also goes to great lengths to minimize the problem of voter fraud. “The election integrity units established or expanded in six states after [Donald] Trump’s loss obtained only 47 convictions during a period in which tens of millions of votes were cast,” the Post notes with an unmistakable sneer. Furthermore, “The vast majority of the convictions represent small-bore cheating — or, as some defendants argue, mistakes — by individual voters, such as casting two ballots, falsifying a registration or voting even if barred by a conviction.”

Up next is a quote from a left-wing activist group that “tracked the work of the units” and says that “the units have been a waste of money and have undermined democracy.”

This is from the paper and the political party that spent years trumpeting the Big Lie that Trump colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election, culminating in his first impeachment and, frankly, seeding the ground for the trouble in the 2020 election and the second impeachment.

For a crowd constantly fretting about the precarious state of our “democracy,” they sure are trying to have it both ways. Voter fraud is a minuscule problem and a waste of time chased down by racist Republicans. Also, Trump threatens democracy itself by his mere presence on a ballot. (To be fair, though, even the Post’s editorial board isn’t sold on the Colorado Supreme Court’s reasoning.)

Speaking of Trump, he’s a big reason the Post even thinks this story is a story. Trump did well with minorities in 2020, and many poll respondents are gravitating toward him and the GOP more generally again. Therefore, it’s time to bang the “racist” drum even louder. All the better to do it about voting, like the whole Georgia fiasco with Major League Baseball.

A final point about voting. With all the rancor and distrust of our election system coming from both sides, a lot of it with very good reason, it seems to us there’s a simple solution: voting in person with a photo ID on Election Day. It’s awfully hard to cheat that way, and no one comes away thinking an election was stolen when the same rules apply to everyone.

Democrats don’t want this, of course, because they benefit from every expansion of voting to include early voting and mail ballots, sometimes in bulk. Even if no fraud is committed, Democrats know that low-information and low-effort voters break heavily for Democrats. Why give up that advantage when, instead, they and their Leftmedia propagandists can accuse Republicans of racism for trying to establish election integrity?