The Patriot Post® · Flip-Flop: Starbucks Now Decries Mail-In Voting

Honest elections for me, but not for thee.

That seems to be the mindset of the management at Starbucks, the ubiquitous coffee cafes that populate and caffeinate the nation and that have for years resisted Big Labor’s efforts to unionize. Indeed, the company has asked the National Labor Relations Board to suspend all of its mail-in ballot unionization elections nationwide in the wake of what it claims is misconduct in the voting process by the board’s personnel and the union organizing its employees.

Whoa, wait. Is Starbucks saying that Big Labor and its Democrat brethren are trying to cheat their way to an electoral win? Who knew? As NBC News reports:

The Seattle-based coffee giant wrote in a letter to the chairman and general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board on Monday that the labor board’s officials acted inappropriately during an election in the Kansas City area and has likely acted similarly in other elections. Starbucks cited a career NLRB professional who approached the company as a whistleblower.

More than 220 Starbucks cafes [out of some 6,000 total] in the U.S. have voted to unionize, according to an NLRB tally as of Friday. An additional 34 elections have been ordered or are in progress, and seven more stores are waiting to schedule elections.

And get this: “In addition to asking for a pause on all scheduled mail-in elections at its U.S. stores, Starbucks is requesting that all future elections be held in person while the allegations can be investigated.”

In-person elections? That can’t be, can it? After all, if bulk-mail balloting is reliable enough to use in a nationwide presidential election, why isn’t it good enough to use in a Starbucks unionization election?

We seem to remember massive bulk-mail balloting paving Joe Biden’s path to the presidency. Surely he got all 81 million of those votes on the up-and-up, right? Surely all those tens of millions of mail-in votes he received were properly filled out and deposited and identified and signature-verified, right?

Come to think of it, wasn’t it just last year that Starbucks sanctimoniously joined all those other weak-kneed corporate lemmings and signed onto a statement opposing the efforts of Republican legislators and governors to bring commonsense election integrity laws to Georgia and Texas and other states? Indeed, it was. As columnist Spencer Brown writes, “What’s good for Starbucks is apparently not what Starbucks thinks is good for the rest of America’s voters.”

“WE STAND FOR DEMOCRACY,” blared that stirring corporate statement (it’s a republic, but whatever), which then extolled the virtues of “government of the people, by the people” and how “the very foundation of our electoral process rests upon the ability of each of us to cast our ballots for the candidates of our choice.” As if the added electoral security introduced by the Republican legislation would deny even one legitimate voter from casting a ballot.

To their credit, Starbucks and its corporate fellow-travelers stopped short of declaring that future elections would be “illegitimate,” but that didn’t stop Joe Biden from uttering such shameless sentiment.

Could it be that Starbucks management is now having second thoughts about the reliability of mail-in balloting and about its utter imperviousness to fraud or other electoral misconduct?

Probably so. But next time Republicans try to clean up our nation’s sorry electoral process and get rid of mass mail-in balloting, we can be sure that Starbucks brass will be out there with the rest of ‘em, denouncing such efforts as “discriminatory legislation” and chirping away about the need to protect “this most basic and fundamental right of all Americans.”

Some folks never learn.