Making electoral fraud legal - and permanent

 

The Wall Street Journal points out that's exactly what the Democratic Party appears to want.  Bold, underlined text is my emphasis.

[Last year] Mrs. Pelosi unveiled a 600-plus page bill devoted to “election reform.” Some of the legislation was aimed at weaponizing campaign-finance law, giving Democrats more power to control political speech and to intimidate opponents. But the bill was equally focused on empowering the federal government to dictate how states conduct elections—with new rules designed to water down ballot integrity and to corral huge new tranches of Democratic voters.

The bill would require states to offer early voting. They also would have to allow Election Day and online voter registration, diluting the accuracy of voting rolls. H.R. 1 would make states register voters automatically from government databases, including federal welfare recipients. Colleges and universities were designated as voter-registration hubs, and 16-year-olds would be registered to vote two years in advance. The bill would require “no fault” absentee ballots, allowing anyone to vote by mail, for any reason. It envisioned prepaid postage for federal absentee ballots. It would cripple most state voter-ID laws. It left in place the “ballot harvesting” rules that let paid activists canvass neighborhoods to hoover up absentee votes.

Democrats grandly named their bill the For The People Act, but conservatives had better titles. This page called it the “Majority Preservation Act,” while the editors at National Review described it as an “Unconstitutional, Authoritarian Power Grab.” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell decried the bill as a “naked attempt to change the rules of American politics to benefit one party,” and dubbed it the “Democrat Politician Protection Act.”

Mrs. Pelosi’s bill didn’t become law, despite her attempts this year to jam some of its provisions into coronavirus bills. But it turns out she didn’t really need it. Using the virus as an excuse, Democratic and liberal groups brought scores of lawsuits to force states to adopt its provisions. Many Democratic politicians and courts happily agreed. States mailed out ballots to everyone. Judges disregarded statutory deadlines for receipt of votes. They scrapped absentee-ballot witness requirements. States set up curbside voting and drop-off boxes. They signed off on ballot harvesting.

. . .

Pollsters aside, political operatives understood this election would be close—potentially closer in key states than it was in 2016. The Democratic strategy from the start, as evidenced by that legal onslaught, was to get rules in place that would allow them to flood the zone with additional mail-in ballots.

. . .

Yet the beauty of ballot harvesting is that it is nearly impossible to prove fraud. How many harvesters offered to deliver votes, only to throw away inconvenient ones? How many voters were pushed or cajoled, or even paid—or had a ballot filled and returned for them without their knowledge? And this is before questions of what other mischief went on amid millions of mailed ballots (which went to wrong addresses or deceased people) and reduced voter verification rules. As the Heritage Foundation’s election expert Hans von Spakovsky has explained, mail-in voting is the “single worst form of election possible” because “it moves the entire election beyond the oversight of election officials.”

. . .

This election was a mere glimpse of the system Mrs. Pelosi wants nationwide, and she has already suggested “election reform” might again be her first priority in 2021.

There's more at the link.

As an example of such chicanery, we saw electoral "reform" in action in Nevada this month.  Curiously, the critical "safeguard" built into the system was not only conspicuous by its failure - its use was actively resisted by Democrats.  Again, bold, underlined text is my emphasis.

Registering to vote in Nevada ... requires no step that actually seeks to establish the applicant’s right to lawfully cast a ballot in Nevada.

The registration application requires the individual to provide a state driver’s license or state identification number.  BUT, having neither is not a basis to deny the application.  For persons who lack those items, the application simply requires the last four digits of a Social Security Number.

The application must be signed, and that signature is then scanned into a database of voter signatures.  Mailed-in ballots and absentee ballots are signed by the voter on the return envelope, and the “verification” process is that the signature on the envelope will be “matched” to the scanned signature on file to establish that the person who signed the ballot envelope is the same person who registered.

. . .

The first problem with this system is that you could take names from a 20-year-old phone book in Nevada, complete and sign the registration applications, then sign the same names on a ballot envelope and that vote would be counted.  The person could be dead or have moved to another state, but there is no process in Nevada to “verify” in any meaningful way the entitlement of the person listed on the application to cast a vote.  Because the signatures matched, the ballot would be accepted and counted.

. . .

... after the use of mail-in balloting was vastly expanded, Democrats and Democrat interest groups started filing lawsuits around the country in the weeks before the election to throw-out signature matching requirements ... Democrat groups won some of these suits in district court, but I believe those decisions were all overturned by appeals courts. But it simply demonstrates the duplicity of the Democrats in pushing for vote-by-mail, assuring all that signature matching would minimize fraud, and then suing to eliminate signature matching on the eve of the election.

. . .

[One test revealed] an 89% failure rate of the “signature matching” safeguard that state and county election officials in Nevada — and elsewhere — have assured everyone is a basis upon which to rely on their claims that no “systemic” fraud impacted the outcome of the November 3, 2020 election.

There are affidavits and anecdotal reports from persons in Clark County that ballots were being filled out on election day by campaign workers and then submitted in ballot return envelopes.

There are confirmed cases of votes being cast in Nevada by people who have been dead for many years.  There are confirmed cases of votes being cast in Nevada by individuals who moved out of the state prior to the election, and who are no longer eligible to vote in Nevada.

Yet the Secretary of State and Clark County Election officials assure everyone that the “signature matching” requirement is a safeguard against fraud.

Again, more at the link.

Just because something is legal does not make it morally or ethically right or justifiable.  The opposite is often true, as appears to have been the case in the 2020 Presidential election.  I most sincerely hope the results of that election - which I firmly believe, on the basis of statistical and other evidence as well as the issues discussed above, to have been fraudulent in many so-called "battleground" states - will be overturned by the courts, so that our constitutional republic can be saved from such rapacity.  If they're not, then I honestly don't know that we can save it at all.  Our democracy will have become a sham, a fake and a public lie for all to see.

Many Americans, including yours truly, cannot and will not accept that.  If such chicanery is allowed to prevail, then the time for more direct action - at the very minimum, indefinite and deliberate civil disobedience - will have come.  May God forbid that should be needed . . . but if it is, so be it.  That's happened before, in this country and elsewhere.  It may be necessary once more.

The third president of the United States warned us, two centuries ago:

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.

We should not be surprised if that remains as necessary in our time as it was in his.

Peter