I & I Editorial BoardOn Sunday, five days after “Election Day,” Americans still didn’t know which party will have a majority in the House while two states were waiting to find out who their next governors will be. Even the BBC has been wondering “when will we know who won.” Have the delays been caused by incompetence or malign forces? Surely both, but it’s the latter that has had the biggest impact.
Forty-two years ago, on the evening of Nov. 4, 1980, the day of the election, President Jimmy Carter conceded to his Republican challenger Ronald Reagan at 9:50 pm Eastern Standard Time. Eight years later – on Election Day – Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis called George H.W. Bush, the GOP’s candidate, and congratulated him on his win.
Hard to believe that many of us grew up going to bed on election night knowing not only who won the presidential election, but who came out on top of many other races, as well. But that’s changed. We no longer have an Election Day. We have Election Week, Election Month – and worse.
Blame Al Gore. The vice president for the man who ran a “permanent campaign” during eight years in the White House kicked off the “permanent election” in 2000 by retracting his concession to George W. Bush on the evening of Election Day. He then put the country through more than a month of turmoil, dragging out a challenge that went well beyond his right for a recount in Florida. His effort to count the votes until he had enough to win had to be ended by the U.S. Supreme Court.
We don’t know how many races, if any, the Democrats have stolen or are stealing in this year’s midterm elections. But they have a reputation for fixing elections. Think of 1960 and Mayor Richard Daley’s Chicago machine and John Kennedy’s tight win over Richard Nixon. Historian and Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson biographer Robert Dallek, believed that Daley “probably stole Illinois from Nixon.”
Start with that history, then add to it the fact that Democrats are thoroughly convinced of the righteousness of their policy positions, blend in their taste for exercising raw political power, and the dish that’s produced is poisonous to fair elections.
What we do know for sure is that Democrats were part of the rancid cabal (not our word) that rigged the 2020 election for Democrat Joe Biden. Time magazine reported about this “conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes,” “an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans,” a confederation of schemers “working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.”
The tools, no, the weapons were changes to voting systems that benefited Democrats; using the pandemic to increase voting by mail, which is an open invitation to fraud; and private funding (Zuck Bucks) put to use primarily “by “Democratic elections officials – in key states across the country,” says the Capital Research Center.
Naturally the Democrats are committed to mail-in ballots, which delay vote counting though in some states they can be cast more than a month before Election Day. They also help pile up votes for Democrats, who have “embraced” them “with gusto,” says the Washington Examiner’s Salena Zito, while Republicans have “shied away” from them since their presence was increased in 2020, a dynamic that the cabal was surely counting on.
Columnist Deroy Murdock spoke for the decent among us when he wrote that “as of early Friday afternoon,” the country’s voting system had “devolved from a global beacon of democracy to an international punchline.” He suggests that what “America needs is a major cleanup of our self-humiliating voting system,” a scrubbing that “should start by excising the cancer of early voting,” a sham allowed in nearly every state.
Murdock quotes the passage in U.S. election law that says: “The Tuesday next after the 1st Monday in November, in every even numbered year, is established as the day for the election, in each of the States and Territories of the United States, of Representatives and Delegates to the Congress,” then asks “what part of that federal statute is unclear?”
Americans are casting ballots before candidates have debated; while they know nothing about the health of the candidates they’re voting for; before they realize candidates are going to hide in their basements rather than campaign; before candidates drop out; before events that would change their votes occur (Google searches for “can i change my vote” peaked at 5 a.m. last Tuesday); before the public learns about the debauched and possible criminal behavior of a candidate’s son – and then the ballots are counted for days and weeks after the election, providing more time and access for those determined to change the outcome.
No election will ever be perfect. Fallible humans make errors. But ours would be much cleaner it we abandoned early voting and restricted mail-in voting to only “the sick, infirm, and those who will be – Imagine! – absent on Election Day,” as Murdock suggests. Don’t fall for the lie that this is suppression, or that it’s a “threat to our democracy,” or any of the objections that Democrats and their media lackeys will manufacture so that they won’t lose their party advantage. End the corruption before the corruption ends our republic.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
Using these vague “policy violations,” Google is now threatening to demonetize us. It’s part of Big Tech’s effort to silence conservative voices.
I wish Republicans/Conservatives would get off this “early voting is bad” kick. I’ve been voting early literally for decades. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I voted on election day. I now vote absentee because I meet the requirements in my state – over age 70 and disabled. The problem in 2020 and probably in 2022 is not early voting, it’s absentee voting by everybody. As for as early voting goes, who cares about the debates? Who actually pays attention to them anyway? All debating does is show who is the best arguer. Good debaters may make good lawyers, but they aren’t necessarily good at government. I did vote early one time and have my candidate drop out before the primary was held. It’s a myth that Democrats are more likely to vote early than Republicans, a myth perpetrated by media. No one knows who votes early in the states that don’t have party registration (and it depends on how voters are recorded in those that do.) Early votes aren’t held back, they’re recorded on election day along with votes from that day. Absentee ballots aren’t held back – they may not come in for a few days. Who knows what the problems are in the counties, mostly in California, that are having trouble counting their votes? Do away with early voting and create election day chaos with long lines and voting going on all night.
Not every state has good mail in voting rules, and fraud IS happening all over the country because OF it. Barack Obama himself claimed (IN 2008) that it is the counters who decide elections, and THAT is what is happening. https://twitter.com/i/status/1591667282178371584
Clearly, repetitively and without any doubt early early voting helps cheaters. Long term possession of votes that can be manipulated are advantageous to cheaters.
Fun Fact: JImmy Carter and his commission determined that Mail in balloting was the method most susceptible to fraud.
Another often overlooked aspect of mail-in voting is its susceptibility to coercion. Secrecy is a shield against coercion, and any system not guaranteeing secrecy during the casting of the ballot will introduce coercion. I’d be surprised if right now, there were no married couples where one partner was using the threat of divorce to coerce the other to vote in a particular way, and the threat can only be effective because of the lack of secrecy, the ability of the spouse making the threat to observe the actions of the threatened spouse. The same coercion could occur in any romantic relationship; marriage isn’t a requirement.
A hundred years ago nearly everyone would have been much more sensitive to the potential for coercion in voting outside of the secrecy of the voting booth, but people seem to have become much more obtuse about the issues surrounding voting. You can thank public education for the general decline in critical thinking that has facilitated the corruption of our elections.
The author makes some great points. I am old enough to recall the 2000 election and all the associated problems. The 2016 election was much worse and far more caustic. Hilary Clinton complained throughout the Trump Administration that she actually won the election and that Trump had “stolen” the election with “Russian Collusion.” Trump returned the caustic favor from 2020 to the present. None of this is good. I am not hopeful for the 2024 election cycle. We may have already passed the point of no return.
California used to limit ballot by mail to those who specifically requested a ballot by sending in a signed form. That limited fraud. Since the state began mailing ballots to everyone, I had one ballot stolen by the post office before it reached me. In one election, I got email confirmation my vote was received and made the mistake of answering an email poll on how I voted. This next year I put the ballot in the mailbox and the postal service apparently never delivered it –perhaps someone knew I was not voting for the right person or ballot measures and collected money for ditching it.
Nevada excels in ballot harvesting, thanks to the old Harry Reid machine that harvests ballots from the 125,000+ culinary union workers in Las Vegas. From what I hear, you hand over your blank ballot to be filled out and voted for you under job loss or some other threat or pressure. Puts the Wisconsin nursing home and comatose patient ballot harvesting to shame. If you believe Jim Marchant, Matt Braynard and the investigators in Nevada, in 2020 thousands of out-of-state people had ballots cast in their names without their knowledge. An obvious inside job.
In Arizona just prior to the 2022 election, a man reported that his vacant house up for sale, which he visited once every few weeks, had 6 ballots for people in Pennsylvania delivered to his vacant house as their Arizona voting residence. Other real estate people around the country noticed a similar phenomena, and some vacant houses in Pennsylvania and elsewhere have several dozen people using the same vacant residence as a voting address. Apparently, registering people for vacant houses and harvesting the mail is commonplace. May even extend into snowbird residential parks in Arizona and the Southwest. The more the DNC’s media shills shrilly call it election denial to recognize election fraud, the more I believe they are lying and that it is true. Robert Caro, who spent decades on his LBJ biographies, tells the story of the ballot box stuffed by Lyndon Johnson and his cronies to win the 1948 Senate race in Texas. LBJ kept photos of himself with the rigged election box in his bedroom dresser in the White House, and showed the photo to over 250 reporters, none of whom ever reported on it. Caro was meticulous, and confirmed the story by contacting all the reporters as well as LBJ’s election fraud helpers. Next to 2020, the biggest and best organized presidential election fraud to alter the vote counts after the election was Tilden versus Hayes, where both Dems and GOP colluded in a bit of horse trading.