Believe what you like about the 2020 presidential election, but there’s no denying the widespread belief – even among Democrats – the election was stolen motivated a lot of people to work to tighten up future elections. The way I hear the story, donors poured $30 million dollars into election integrity efforts on the professional Right. You can add to that hundreds of citizen’s groups and thousands of individuals in the grassroots all working to secure elections like never before. So what do they have to show for all that treasure and effort?
A lot, actually. There were fewer reports of late night ballot drops and Republican poll watchers being blocked this time around.
A Republican lawsuit forced Nevada and Arizona to offer poll-worker data to ensure both parties are equally represented at voting sites. Another Republican challenge struck down a New York law that would have added 900,000 noncitizens to the voter rolls. There was yet another court ruling upholding voter ID, something most Americans support. High voter turnout in Georgia put the nail in the coffin of the Democrat’s phony narrative new election integrity laws passed by Republicans in several states are voter suppression. Jim Crow 2.0? Hardly. It was all Democrat hogwash. Oh, and what happened to all that Republican violence and all those disruptive Republican election workers we were supposed to see on Election Day? It didn’t happen. It was just hogwash. You can put it right next to all the other Democrat hogwash. Now, left-wing organizations have to explain to their base why it didn’t happen and they’re saying it was because elections officials were ready for trouble. Sure, and I’m the tooth fairy.
So there were some wins, but we still have miles to go before we can express confidence in our elections again.
A number of suspicious things happened in the midterms. Ballots arrived after the legal deadline with no adequate explanation at the Detroit bureau of elections, reminiscent of the 2020 election. A Democrat candidate got 1,100 votes in a town in New Hampshire that only has 700 people – how does that happen?
Turning to another subject, there is now something of a split among conservatives as to how to deal with the changes Democrats have brought to the election process in the last couple of years – what should we do going forward?
One school of thought holds the Democrats are winning elections because they have succeeded in gaming the system. People on this side of the debate point to Democrat victories in states that sent out over a million absentee ballots or states with permanent absentee ballot lists – ask for an absentee ballot once and you keep getting them in future elections. Having this many ballots floating around facilitates fraud and produced Democrat wins in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, and Arizona. Republicans did better in Ohio, North Carolina, Florida, and Georgia where absentee voting rules are stricter. Swing states with same-day registration like Michigan and Wisconsin went blue in this election. Florida, North Carolina, and Georgia don’t have same-day registration and went red. This school of thought believes all went according to Democrat plan and that Republicans should work to reverse things like mail-in voting and drop boxes.
But a new school of thought holds Republicans should accept all these things are here to stay and should learn to adapt to the new environment. Republicans should become aggressive in ballot curing, ballot harvesting where legal, and encouraging mail-in voting to avoid Election Day glitches. Adherents to this school of thought attribute the Republicans flipping the U.S. House to aggressive Republican ballot curing and harvesting in California. Republican candidates in Arizona urged voters to make sure their ballots were counted and to cure them if they were not.
Call me old school, but I’m not convinced. I get suspicious whenever anyone tells me I should do what the Democrats want me to do. Look at Michigan – voters just approved a ballot initiative from the Democrat side that will loosen voter ID, institutionalize early voting, mandate the use of drop boxes, create a permanent absentee ballot list, narrow the ability of citizens to challenge elections, and allow private money to be used for election administration. As for the latter, it’s pretty clear the true purpose of private money is to allow Democrat election officials to engage in voter registration drives to sign up more Democrats to vote. The consequence of all these changes the Democrats wanted will be less secure elections in Michigan in the future.
That’s the Democrat plan and I, for one, am not going to go along with it. I will continue my work with other activists in my state to fight all the changes the Democrats have made to our elections process. The Democrats will not quit. They will continue to try to subvert our elections. We must continue to oppose them and keep working to right the ship.
