If you believe a recent CNN poll, 70% of Republicans say Joe Biden’s victory in 2020 was illegitimate. Despite the source, that seems about right to us.

As we’ve said before, though, there’s a difference between stolen and rigged. There’s a difference between claiming some conspiracy with voting machine tallies and pointing out that bulk-mail ballots are a huge problem because of the laughable “verification” process, or that the Leftmedia and Big Tech suppressed what likely would have been decisive information about the Biden Crime Family just before the election.

In any case, election integrity is paramount. Authenticating votes is critical if each citizen is not to be disenfranchised by fraud. Cheating should be nigh impossible. Every American wants to trust our elections.

So why is this so hard?

Because Democrats have the easier message, and the mainstream media is a subsidiary of the Democrat National Committee. By the way, Democrats spent years denying election results before suddenly deciding denial was the greatest conceivable crime against democracy. But they control the media, so they’re never held accountable for their hypocrisy.

“Vote early and often” — that’s the old joke about elections, and it rings a little too true.

Despite the warnings of a blue-ribbon election committee led by Jimmy Carter and James Baker in 2005 — warnings about how “absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud” — Democrats now want ballots mailed to everyone with no true verification process to speak of, early voting for months before Election Day, and no requirement for ID. They treat essentially any “restriction” on voting within months of an election as the equivalent of police dogs and firehoses.

If we had our druthers, voting would happen on Election Day with a valid photo ID, and mail ballots would be limited to military personnel or others with a short list of good reasons. If you just can’t be bothered to show up in person for the most important civic duty of a citizen, that’s not a good reason.

But as we’ve noted before, such personal responsibility is a hard case to make, especially given that Democrats have won practically every election expansion they fought for. In most cases and places, putting the toothpaste back in the tube just ain’t gonna happen.

“Large majorities of Americans favor three measures meant to make voting easier,” Gallup says. Those include “early voting (78% in favor), automatic voter registration (65%) and sending absentee ballots to all eligible voters (60%).” Meanwhile, voters oppose culling voter lists of “inactive” people (60%) and limiting drop boxes for absentee ballots (59%). Gallup adds, “One restrictive policy that most Americans (79%) are on board with, however, is requiring photo identification to vote.”

So, with all that backdrop, election integrity laws in Georgia and Texas suffered legal blows in recent days.

“U.S. District Judge Xavier Rodriguez struck down a provision of Texas’ law requiring that mail voters provide the same identification number they used when they registered to vote,” reports the Associated Press. “He ruled the requirement violated the U.S. Civil Rights Act because it led to people being unable to cast ballots due to a matter irrelevant to whether they are registered.”

That ruling guts a key measure to authenticate votes. Election workers and volunteers are simply not equipped to match signatures on ballots, if they even try to do so. Verification numbers are an important way to match a ballot to the person it should belong to. Every ballot that is not authenticated could effectively disenfranchise a citizen who took the time to show up at the polls.

Georgia’s law likewise suffered setbacks. Or, as the AP frames it with full Democrat bias, “voting rights advocates got a more mixed set of rulings Friday from U.S. District Judge J.P. Boulee.”

For the record, the real advocates of voting rights are the ones who want elections with integrity. Leftists routinely distort the English language to achieve their political purposes.

Boulee “temporarily prohibited officials from enforcing penalties against people who provide food and water to voters waiting in line as long as they are more than 150 feet from the building where voting is taking place,” the AP says. “He also blocked a part of the law that requires voters to provide their birthdate on absentee ballot envelopes. But Boulee rejected the groups’ claims that certain restrictions imposed by the law deny voters with disabilities meaningful access to absentee voting.”

The food and water thing isn’t some kind of humanitarian cruelty; it’s to deny partisan hacks free electioneering opportunities while voters wait in line. Providing a birthdate is, again, a more reliable way to verify a ballot than signature matching. Yet according to leftists, authenticating mail-in ballots is apparently some kind of violation of civil rights.

The laws in Georgia and Texas were the subject of untold leftist caterwauling, even in the Peach State leading MLB to remove its All-Star Game from Atlanta in 2021. (The Braves responded by winning the World Series, which, even for this Cardinals fan, was glorious.)

The two states were prominent, but hardly alone. FiveThiryEight’s headline reads: “16 States Made It Harder To Vote This Year. But 26 Made It Easier.”

By “harder,” leftists mean the aforementioned cases, but also things like reducing by a couple the number of days available for early voting or tightening the window for accepting properly postmarked absentee ballots.

Conducting elections with integrity is something every advanced nation should be able to do. Yet the U.S. is alone among Western nations with some of the slipshod ways we do things, and the result is that neither party trusts the results when they lose. Is that really the Republic our Founders bequeathed to us?