In Brief: Unrigging Our Elections
Republicans need a serious counter-offensive if they want to stand a chance.
When it comes to elections, there’s rigging and there’s rigging. Even on the Right, there’s a lot of sometimes heated disagreement over just how Joe Biden became president in 2020. Journalists Mark and Mollie Hemingway home in on a few important things to do going forward to fix the problems.
It might not matter whom Republicans run for president in 2024.
America’s propaganda press traffics in disinformation. Its Big Tech oligarchs censor news and information helpful to conservatives, while elevating biased news and information that helps the Left. And its election systems have been overrun by privately funded groups that run Democratic “get out the vote” campaigns to traffic ballots into ballot boxes. …
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.
Ultimately, they married pair argues:
In this world, concerns about candidate quality are irrelevant. If we don’t fix this complete capture of election infrastructure, it might be impossible for anyone with a sincere desire to prioritize the interests of voters over the ruling class to win a national election.
They point to the 2022 midterms, for which "runaway inflation, Biden’s disastrous exit from Afghanistan, and a long line of electoral precedents” should have brought about a massive Republican victory. They argue that “GOP candidate quality doesn’t explain everything.”
The more likely explanation for these results is that Democratic ballot harvesting operations have reached such heights of sophistication that they can parachute into decisive battlegrounds and scare up enough votes among ignorant and unmotivated citizens to overcome the natural enthusiasm of informed and self-motivated voters.
Republicans care a lot about voter fraud, the Hemingways note, which is “a bigger problem than anyone wants to admit.” Yet they assert, “It distracts people from the fact that they’re getting outspent and out organized.”
Whether Republicans like it or not, some ballot harvesting operations are technically legal or operate in gray areas. Not that long ago, everyone from MIT to Jimmy Carter to the New York Times would admit that voting by mail raised serious concerns about fraud and manipulation. However, mail-in balloting has gained so much purchase both as a legal method of voting and a matter of habit among voters themselves that there’s not much that can be done to stop it at this point. Even Trump, who quite vocally opposed mail-in ballots, has come around on the need for Republicans to start competing with Democrats by developing their own harvesting and vote-by-mail turnout strategies. It is still preferable to encourage more voting in person, but for now our only hope of getting electoral arms control is if both sides have nukes.
They explain at length the record of shenanigans on the Left, whether it be money, registration, or other things. They also point to the “propaganda-laden news environment” in which we find ourselves. Therefore, they insist, it’s time for the Right to organize much better.
So while it is only natural to have detailed thoughts about a Trump-DeSantis match up, when you consider the events that defined the 2020 election—nationwide riots, social media censorship, the partisan co-opting of local election offices, and the wholesale rewriting of America’s election laws on the fly—the fate of America rests on the ability to win over voters on issues far larger than a personality contest. The problems are pressing and dire, and the best time to start working on these structural challenges was about 50 years ago. The second best time is now.
