If you have to cheat to win elections, you want to avoid having new rules imposed that would effectively expose and limit your ability to cheat. That is essentially the sentiment undergirding the Democrat Party’s loud objections to voter integrity laws, which is why leftist cohorts repeatedly smear the laws as “Jim Crow 2.0” and “voter suppression.”

A recent example of a Leftmedia hit piece against Texas’s new voter integrity laws comes via the Associate Press in a report on the Lone Star State’s first-in-the-nation primary. Titled “Texas flagged 27,000 mail ballots for rejection in primary,” the story assumes that the number of rejected ballots equates to a suppression of legitimate votes.

The AP’s intrepid journalists don’t really dig into why so many of these mail-in ballots were rejected — other than relaying an anecdote from a 75-year-old woman who apparently struggled to cast her vote after she failed to follow the simple rule of including her voter ID number with her mail-in ballot. Nevertheless, the “unbiased reporters” strongly imply that the new regulations are simply too burdensome for voters.

The AP also engages in a classic false data point comparison. The report notes that in this primary some 17% of mail-in ballots across 120 counties were rejected, whereas in the 2020 election less than 1% of mail-in ballots were rejected. The AP then suggests that this is cause for concern, though not with the 2020 election results. Instead, the AP finds fault with the new regulations that were specifically designed to prevent fraud. It really makes one wonder just how much bulk-mail balloting fraud there was in 2020. If only there were investigative journalists available to dig into that question.

Indeed, the real question the AP should be asking at this point is just how many fraudulent votes were missed in the 2020 election if now upwards of 17% have been rejected. The real indictment of the election system in so many states is that fraudulent votes actually serve to suppress legitimate ones. Which likely explains why the vast majority of the nation including minorities favor ID laws.

Furthermore, the 17% rejection rate actually serves to justify Texas’s new voter integrity law by showing that it was needed to shore up an election system that was clearly open to abuse and fraud. And even if a voter in Texas learns via an online ballot tracking system that his ballot has been rejected for some reason — likely that he forgot to include his voter ID number — he still is given options for correcting the issue. That includes the novel idea of casting a provisional ballot at a polling station on Election Day.

The notion that Texas’s and Georgia’s election integrity laws are “Jim Crow 2.0,” as Joe Biden disingenuously labels them, or that they are designed to suppress the vote is simply a big lie. What they are designed to do is suppress voter fraud so that every American can have confidence in the outcome of an election, which is an issue that should matter equally across all parties.

(Updated)