Universal mail-in balloting and looser ballot integrity laws are poison to fair, honest elections.  Go ask Donald Trump.  Trump lost by whiskers in five battleground states last November.  A switch of approximately 139, 350 votes (out of 23.8 million cast) across those states would have reelected Trump.  Democrats fixed the systems just enough.  And, in many instances, with Republican assistance, in the name of easier voting access thanks to COVID restrictions.  Thus turned the nation’s course.     

Trump losing last year had little to do with Democrats running better ground games, per some explanations.  Porous voting laws and highly insecure mail-in balloting, with multiple opportunities to commit fraud or mishandle ballots, were culprits.  They proved to be licenses to steal.  There were other “irregularities,” too, but those two factors were primary. 

Peter Navarro’s report about the presidential contests, issued last December: “The Immaculate Deception: Six Key Dimensions of Voting Irregularities,” makes a compelling case for greatly abused elections systems in six pivotal states.       

There’s good news, though.  Outcries from the grassroots for change are being heard by conservative GOP legislators in, at least, three critical states: Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona.  Moves are underway to tighten laws and either repeal or restrict mail-in balloting.  The superior play is outright repeal.  Republicans have a penchant for trying to improve bad laws or policies, rather than ending them.  ObamaCare should have been killed off when the GOP ran Congress in 2017-19. 

On the national level, Democrats and conservative Republicans are squaring off, too.  Democrats have introduced the radical “Vote at Home Act.” 

From The Epoch Times, January 29, 2021:

Democrat lawmakers on Thursday introduced a bill dubbed the “Vote at Home Act,” which seeks to “massively expand vote-at-home ballot access,” enacting automatic voter registration and providing voters with pre-paid ballot envelopes.

The measure sounds innocuous, but would effectively force the Democrats’ California elections model in 49 other states.  If successful, and if the legislation withstood court tests, Democrats would enjoy huge advantages. 

Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), the measure’s principal sponsor, remarked in a written statement (see the link above) that it was “ridiculous” to expect Americans to take a little time away from school or work to show up at polling places to vote, typically once every two years. 

 U.S. House Republicans had previously introduced their own elections reform legislation.  Per the Republican Study Committee, in an undated release: 

To achieve these ends, the Save Democracy Act would prohibit or reform current practices that weaken the security, oversight, and administration of elections for federal office. The Save Democracy Act stands in contrast to Democrats’ “For the People Act,” which embodies the Left’s crusade to implement policies favoring their candidates rather than a fair and legal process.

The short-term peril lies in down-ballot contests.  Election overhauls must happen prior to the midterms.  That’s for statewide, congressional, and state legislative battles in 2022.          

This from a very biased “CNN Source” news report, January 29, 2021:

The [GOP state legislatures’ reform] measures, if passed, could have a significant impact on upcoming 2022 midterm elections, as Republicans have failed to hold a majority in the Senate but have noticeably gained members in the House.   

The GOP winning control of the U.S. House would put a critical break on the Democrats run at imposing even more ruinous legislation on the country.  Republicans may need to swing only five seats.  The Senate is more problematic in that 20 Republican seats are up versus 14 for Democrats, but the GOP is all the more hampered if playing fields are skewed.

GOP-controlled state legislatures hang in the balance, too.  There are 36 governorships up in 2022.  Those include battleground states Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.  Republicans need to hold Arizona and Georgia, while making serious runs at the other three states.  What happens in legislative and gubernatorial contests in those states will have a direct bearing on GOP fortunes in the 2024 presidential sweepstakes.                  

The mainstream media grasps the peril to Democrats.  Stopping or seriously crimping mail-in balloting -- along with other needed reforms – revokes Democrats’ license to manufacture votes.  Vote manufacturing also includes counting flawed ballots that in previous election years would have been rejected.  Tightening definitions of ballot integrity are a must. 

As Stalin famously said, it’s less about who votes than who counts the votes. Transparency in tallying ballots is also required.  GOP poll watchers were impeded from doing their jobs in Detroit and Philadelphia last November; that was a dead giveaway of Democrats’ intentions.    

The question arises: If Democrats gamed the system in battleground states, tilting contests to Biden and away from Trump, why, then, didn’t they repeat the trick in down-ballot races?  The simple answer is that Trump’s presidency was remaking the nation’s political landscape.  Doing so would disadvantage Democrats for a generation.  Trump was the fulcrum.  Democrats’ priority was to beat him and recapture the presidency.  That’s where their energies went.    

Democrats fully appreciate the stakes in 2022.  They’ll do their level best to not only protect permissive elections laws but make them looser. 

In the coming fights to win back elections integrity, conservatives need to understand what and who they’re up against.   

A group, the National Vote at Home Institute, is indictive of how Democrats and the left organize in very interlocking and sophisticated ways to not only advance universal mail-in balloting but provide detailed execution.  Note that the group bears the same name as Wyden’s aforementioned legislation.  There are no coincidences on the left.    

The Institute is a coalition of progressive groups and a “bipartisan” outfit, the Bipartisan Policy Center, which includes some usual RINO suspects.  The ACLU, Common Cause, League of Women Voters, Rock the Vote, and the National Association of Letter Carriers, which would benefit from increased U.S. Postal Service budgets to deliver mail-in ballots, are among the generally left-leaning groups.  Phil Keisling, a Democrat, who served as Oregon secretary of state in the 1990s -- hence, the group’s tie-in to Wyden -- is best known for having “championed the state's vote-by-mail system.”  It was a first of its kind in the nation.   

The Institute isn’t doing anything unethical or illegal.  However, though it positions as nonpartisan, in fact, it’s no such thing.  It’s leadership and partners attest to the underlying partisan makeup of the organization.  It’s nonprofit status bars it from political advocacy, yet it clearly facilitates programs and means of overhauling elections systems that give Democrats the edge.  

Conservatives have groups, too, like Got Freedom?, which provides a limited scope of support in countering elections fraud.  The Amistad Project of the Thomas More Society has been aggressive legally in elections fraud in the states, and its efforts continue.  What conservatives need is a grassroots-oriented organization similar to the National Vote at Home Institute, which is dedicated to educating voters and elected officials in the whys and hows of elections integrity, as well as allied groups in the states.   

A conservative counter to the National Vote at Home Institute needs to occur sooner, not later.  The clock is already ticking toward the 2022 midterms.  Meanwhile, conservative lawmakers must press ahead with repeals and reforms of egregiously bad elections laws, which they may have helped pass with the best intentions last year but resulted in elections irregularities that will forever taint the 2020 presidential contests.  The damage done to the Republic is grave enough.  More harm to our elections systems may prove fatal.       

J. Robert Smith can be found on Parler @JRobertSmith, when Parler returns, and is new to Gab, again @JRobertSmith.  He also blogs at Flyover.      

Image: Thomas Nast