Very little seems to be going right for the Democrats these days, but they have surpassing confidence in one particular American institution: our voting system.

Why? Because most Republican voters think it’s broken. And when people sense that something is broken, they tend to not use it. Here’s how the Appropriated Press spins it:

Few Republicans have high confidence that votes will be tallied accurately in next year’s presidential contest, suggesting years of sustained attacks against elections by former President Donald Trump and his allies have taken a toll, according to a new poll.

The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll finds that only 22% of Republicans have high confidence that votes in the upcoming presidential election will be counted accurately compared to 71% of Democrats, underscoring a partisan divide fueled by a relentless campaign of lies related to the 2020 presidential election. Even as he runs for the White House a third time, Trump continues to promote the false claim that the election was stolen.

Those are stunning numbers. And that’s a mind-boggling differential: One in five Republicans is confident in the current electoral system, while nearly three in four Democrats are.

Why are the Democrats so confident? It’s simple: The current system works for them, and it works smashingly well.

And did you catch the AP’s implication in all this? Republicans are simply being irrational. They’re being fed “a relentless campaign of lies” by Donald Trump, and that campaign has eroded confidence in today’s clean-as-a-whistle Election Day Week Month Season.

No, no, says the AP, there’s simply nothing to fear with our COVID-inspired bulk-mail balloting system, our Democrat-controlled voter rolls, our Zuckerbucks-funded ballot harvesting, our unmanned vote-collection boxes in deep-blue Democrat strongholds, and our laughably poor signature verification system.

Nope, nothing to fear here. Just because France banned mass mail-in voting in 1975 doesn’t mean it’s risky. Just because a bipartisan 2005 report from the Commission on Federal Election Reform — a commission chaired by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker — concluded that absentee ballots “remain the largest source of potential voter fraud” doesn’t mean anything’s out of whack with our current electoral system.

Clearly, something needs to be done. The question is: What?

Wisconsin Republican Bryan Steil, who chairs the Committee on House Administration, has an idea. On Monday, he and his fellow House Republicans introduced an election reform bill, the American Confidence in Elections Act, which they tout as the “most conservative election integrity bill to be seriously considered in the House in over 20 years.”

That may be so, but just because the House might pass an election integrity bill doesn’t mean it has a snowball’s chance in Chuck Schumer’s Senate. Still, we’re willing to hear out Steil and his colleagues because the alternative is the status quo. And the status quo is a disaster.

The bill “focuses on the importance of strong election integrity reforms that meet the moment by bolstering voter confidence in our elections while respecting the Constitution, federalism, and conservative principles,” as its summary statement puts it. “Further, the ACE Act continues to address disappointing challenges faced by military and overseas voters and makes the biggest legislative effort in a generation to protect political speech in a climate where Democrats are doing everything in their power to determine ‘truth’ and silence conservative voices.”

As the Washington Examiner reports: “The bill would put restrictions on election practices that have been the target of conservative scrutiny. It would require states to preserve election materials for 22 months, allow states to use federal funds on audits, and restrict ballot harvesting.”

Further, in an op-ed in the Examiner, Steil describes the bill:

The ACE Act has three main pillars: equipping states with election integrity tools, implementing election integrity reforms in Washington, D.C., and protecting political speech and donor privacy. … The primary section of the bill is focused on providing states with tools to improve voter confidence. We will remove outdated policies that stand in their way and provide access to information held only by federal agencies.“

This seems to us a good start because it’s an attempt to return the power of elections to its rightful home: the states. Which is exactly the opposite of what the Democrats want to do with their race-baiting abomination of an elections bill.

Among the many infuriating anomalies we’ve often noted about the 2020 election was that Basement Joe Biden lost 18 of 19 "bellwether” counties and won a smaller percentage of counties nationwide than any winning president ever — and yet he still got more population-adjusted votes than the “articulate and bright and clean” and wildly popular Barack Obama did in 2008.

In fact, Biden won just 16.7% of counties in 2020, which shattered the previous record low of 22% set by Obama in 2012, which broke the previous record low of 28% also set by Obama in 2008. So, in 2020, Donald Trump won 2,547 counties to Joe Biden’s 507, and he hauled in a whopping 13 million more votes than he did in 2016, and yet he lost the election by seven million or so votes.

But, no, as the AP insists, there’s nothing wrong with our electoral system. You’re just being fed “a relentless campaign of lies.”

We’re not sure what, legitimately, can be done about electoral reform without control of both houses of Congress and the presidency, but if we allow a replay of 2020 in 2024, we’ll get the government we deserve.

And we’ll get it good and hard.

As Steil concludes in his op-ed: “The Left is already attacking the ACE Act, just as they attacked Georgia’s election integrity law. But protecting our elections is too important to back down. Today’s introduction of the ACE Act is the first step in this fight.”