Democrats Aim to Delegitimize the Election
Democrats who once opposed mail-in balloting now favor expanding the practice.
“I just, as a very experienced practical politician from New York, feel constrained to observe that in my experience in New York, paper ballots are extremely susceptible to fraud.” —House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler … in 2004
For eight years of the Obama administration, the Democrat Party labored mightily to force-feed Americans a “fundamental transformation” of a nation it condemned as “systemically” flawed. The 2016 election was supposed to produce another eight years of a Hillary Clinton regime, during which that agenda would have been firmly entrenched and, in conjunction with the Democrats’ open-borders and amnesty policies, likely unassailable for the foreseeable future. When instead Donald Trump prevailed, the Left exploded in an orgy of hate and violence. And in the leftists’ ongoing attempt to delegitimize him, the utter corruption infesting the permanent bureaucracy and the Ruling Class — all of whom despise his America First agenda — was revealed.
In short, globalist-beholden leftists made it clear they believe they are entitled to rule this nation, irrespective of elections. Unfortunately for them, America still has them. What to do?
Delegitimize the election process itself with the same mail-in ballot scheme that is not only susceptible to fraud but has already proven itself to be a disaster. In New York, it took six weeks to determine the winners in two congressional primary votes held on June 23. More importantly, more than one in five ballots were rejected.
So why would Democrats like Jerry Nadler suddenly decide mail-in voting is the way to go? Hillary Clinton provides a hint, saying, “Joe Biden should not concede under any circumstances, because I think this is going to drag out, and eventually I do believe he will win if we don’t give an inch, and if we are as focused and relentless as the other side is.”
An editorial in The Washington Post written by Rosa Brooks, a Georgetown University law professor and cofounder of the Transition Integrity Project, doubles down. Brooks reveals that she has “war-gamed” the election, and the conclusion she reaches amounts to extortion. “A landslide for Joe Biden resulted in a relatively orderly transfer of power,” she states. “Every other scenario we looked at involved street-level violence and political crisis.”
Joe Biden has the same take. “Does anyone believe there will be less violence in America if Donald Trump is reelected?” he asked.
The scenario here is simple: Leftists believe the larger the crisis, the more it accrues to their interests. Thus, the longer it takes to determine the winner of the election, the more time Democrats will have to sow the seeds of complete chaos, secure in the knowledge that their allies in the deep state, the media, academia, Hollywood, Big Tech, and Big Business will be with them every step of the way.
What most Americans don’t know? In the current scenario, where it is exceedingly likely that record numbers of Americans will, in fact, vote by mail, the ability to delay calling the election on Election Day itself is built into the system. In the District of Columbia and 16 states — Alaska, California, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nevada, New Jersey, North Carolina, Texas, Virginia, Washington, and West Virginia — mail-in votes are acceptable if they are postmarked by November 3. Thus it will be literally impossible to include them in any tally conducted on Election Day. In the most egregious case, California will consider a mail-in vote valid if it is received by November 20.
This reality, in and of itself, makes a complete mockery of a process already bastardized by early voting, which allows voters to cast their ballots in periods ranging in length from four days to 45 days before the election, with an average length of 19 days. Yet while early voting still presumes a deadline, mail-in ballots received after Election Day elicit a critical question: If a postmark deems automatic legitimacy, and voting remains a states’ rights issue, how far past Election Day can votes received still be considered valid? This year California will validate votes received 17 days after the fact. What if another state or several other states decide that votes will still be valid 27 or 37 days after Election Day?
Moreover, who benefits most from such a scenario? California provides some possible insight. During the 2018 election, a 14-point lead held by Republican Young Kim evaporated a week later in a state where absentee ballots are mailed to every voter, where ballots are “harvested” by third parties with no relationship to the voter, and where Los Angles County and 11 others had more registered voters than eligible adults.
California is essentially a one-party state run by Democrats.
And like Jerry Nadler, Democrats who once saw the dangers of mail-in voting now heartily endorse it. Despite co-chairing the bipartisan 2005 report of the Commission on Federal Election Reform, which concluded absentee ballots “remain the largest source of potential voter fraud,” former President Jimmy Carter now backs the process, insisting his change of heart is due to the fact that “many states have gained substantial experience in vote-by-mail and have shown how key concerns can be effectively addressed through appropriate planning, resources, training, and messaging.”
Really? According to the Election Assistance Commission, during the elections taking place from 2012 through 2018, a whopping 28.3 million mail-in ballots remained unaccounted for, a total that does not include ballots that were spoiled, undeliverable, or came back for any reason. Moreover, that figure might be an underestimation, because some areas of the country, including Chicago, did not respond to the survey.
Democrat Senators Amy Klobuchar and Ron Wyden have also proposed the Natural Disaster and Emergency Ballot Act of 2020. The bill would allow every eligible voter the opportunity to vote by mail regardless of state laws governing mail-in ballots.
Regardless of state laws? Trump should enter the fray on the other side of the equation. His administration should ask the Supreme Court to convene a hearing to determine whether state laws that currently do not require a mail-in vote to be received in time to count it on Election Day are valid. And while he’s at it, he should inform the Court that both the National Association of Letter Carriers and the American Postal Workers Union (APWU) have endorsed Joe Biden for president, with APWU President Mark Dimondstein framing that endorsement as a matter of job survival.
In other words, the people tasked with maintaining the integrity of mail-in voting have chosen sides. And the fact that they have framed that choice as a job saver makes the scenario envisioned by a self-confessed vote rigger quite plausible: “You have a postman who is a rabid anti-Trump guy and he’s working in Bedminster or some Republican stronghold. … He can take those [filled-out] ballots, and knowing 95% are going to a Republican, he can just throw those in the garbage.”
Democrats are willing to throw our republic in the garbage if it imbues them with power. In one Democrat-controlled, riot-afflicted city after another, they have made it clear that wholesale chaos serves their agenda.
And nothing will create more chaos than delegitimizing the election process itself.