Since Nov. 3rd, one particular line has been repeated almost to the point of becoming a meme: “There will never be another honest election in this country.”

I’ve seen it in a dozen articles I’ve worked on for AT, and at least twice that many times elsewhere. It wouldn’t be going too far to say that it has became a piece of received wisdom, along the lines of “Biden is the asterisk president”: there will never be another honest election in the U.S.

To some extent, this attitude is understandable, and you can’t blame people for holding it. I myself entertained similar thoughts in the wake of the electoral coup this past fall.

This reflects conservative defeatism. Unfortunately, the default position for most conservatives is to give up, retreat into the think tank and spend time tossing off remarks about how horrible our doom will be, mixed with attacks on anyone trying to stop it. It’s in times like this that this fatal, self-inflicted flaw becomes most evident.

But all the same, it’s wrong, and it’s wrong for a very apparent and simple human reason.

At first glance, the idea seems to have a lot going for it. As November 3rd clearly revealed (and Molly Ball and Time mag foolishly underlined), the electoral fraud machinery is immense and the Dems went to incredible effort and expense to put it together. So why would they use it only once? That would make no sense whatsoever. Surely, the Democrat’s theft machine is built for the long haul, like the Tammany machine of the 19th century or the Cook County machine of the 20th.

But there are number of reasons why it’s unlikely that it will ever be reused – at least not at the level it was last November. The first involves COVID-19. COVID was the key element in last fall’s electoral fraud. Probably the foulest example yet of the Dem’s “never let a crisis go to waste” philosophy.  There’s no question that Democrats have exploited the pandemic for their own benefit – the Empress of Ice Cream has boasted as much. It may be going too far to assert that Democrat policies have deliberately intensified the effects of the disease, though at times it’s hard to avoid that conclusion. Certainly, the irrationality of the anti-disease efforts (what, exactly, is a curfew supposed to do to control a disease?) is hard to explain any other way.

COVID enabled the Democrats to ram through a vastly expanded use of absentee ballots on the grounds that voting was now “dangerous.” As we all know, the COVID virus avoids attacking Antifa riots and BLM demos, hoarding its efforts to strike down voters alone. It has to be that way – otherwise, Dr. Anthony Fauci, third in humanitarian stature only behind Gandhi and MLK, Jr. (recall the story of how he descended from his white steed to divide his cloak in two in order to share it with a poor COVID victim) would have told us.

It was the absentee ballots that were the core of the fraud effort. If you look at the chain of events surrounding the fraud, you’ll note that almost all the irregularities involved the absentee ballots. It was regarding those ballots that all the questionable court decisions were handed down, those ballots that corrupt governors and secretaries of state intervened to permit. Vote counts were halted to allow time for those ballots to be manufactured, and GOP vote counters were sent home for the sole purpose of allowing those votes to arrive unobserved. It was those votes that GOP observers were denied the right to examine, and it was to hide those votes that windows were blocked. While other efforts might have been underfoot, it was the absentee ballots that bore the weight of the fraud.  It was those that comprised the bulk of President Asterisk’s 13 million votes out of hyperspace.

These circumstances are unlikely to be repeated. While the Dems are stretching the COVID “crisis” (in truth, it’s the botched response that actually triggered the “crisis”) as long as they can, it’s unlikely to be tolerated much longer, let alone the 21 months that would be required for them to drag it on into the 2022 election. And faking up a new plague would simply be too obvious (though not too idiotic – see Molly Ball) for the Dems to attempt. Once we’re out from under the COVID “countermeasures,” it’s likely that most people will look back on them as a gross overreaction that caused more chaos that they were worth.

COVID was a one-shot deal. But what about the fraudulent systems already put in place during the 2020 campaign? It happens that almost all the battleground states (along with nearly half the states in the country) excepting Nevada are GOP-controlled at the legislative level. It also happens that many of these politicians in these states are looking at re-election in 2022.

What this means that the Republicans are finally going to get off their fat duffs and do something. The GOP may not be willing to lift a finger to help Donald Trump or protect the Constitution. But save their own penny-ante political careers? That’s another story. That’s important. That has to be defended at all costs.

And so we’re beginning to see efforts to do just that. In Pennsylvania, the legislature is addressing the problem in the session that began this week. Several proposals have been made to abolish mail-in ballots completely. The Dems have protested, which simply shows how much these procedures mean to them.

The problem with PA is that Gov. Tom Wolf is up to his neck in last year’s election corruption (no single politician was more closely involved with the promotion of absentee ballots) and is unlikely to budge an inch. A veto-proof majority will be necessary to overcome inevitable opposition from Wolf.

The Arizona GOP is willing to go even farther. House Bill 2720 would enable the Arizona House to revoke certification of presidential electors. While passage of this bill may be unlikely, there are a number of proposals for either eliminating (House Bill 2701) or modifying absentee ballots ranging from requiring that they be dropped off in person (Senate Bill 1503) to including a copy of a driver’s license (House Bill 2369).

There are also rumblings from Georgia, but it’s difficult to imagine any meaningful reforms with Kemp and Raffensperger in charge. Both refuse to admit any responsibility for the multiple electoral disasters that struck their state, both seem blind to future dangers, and both are evidently happier battling members of their own party than the political opposition. But the January 5th runoff, run under the same rules as the November election and resulting in the “defeats” of Douglas Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, has no doubt put the fear of Jehovah into the hearts of state politicians. We will see reform in Georgia.

These are only the leading edge of efforts to attack the universal electoral corruption revealed last November, efforts that will be given further impetus by court decisions such as the late January decision finding Virginia’s late election law changes illegal. (We can also forget about the section of U.S. House bill H.R. 1 that attempts to seize control of national elections form the states. This is blatantly unconstitutional and will be found to be exactly that once Roberts and the Three Musketeers can be dragged awl out from their hiding place beneath the bench.)

This is all very appropriate. In our system, the states are the last line of defense. It’s the states that will undermine the Dem’s headlong rush to a totally corrupt single-party state. Apart from that, it’s often overlooked that the Founders, in their wisdom (that amount of brainpower out of only 2.5 million people. If you were to look for a dozen Americans to match them out of our 330-odd million, you would utterly fail), based our system on human frailty. As has been said in other cases, any system based on that is based on a strong foundation indeed. We’ll see plenty of evidence of that in the months to come.

Image: Thomas Nast