by Hayden Ludwig, The American Conservative:
The left wants all future elections to look just like they did in 2020, and we have the blueprints to prove it. Covid-19 was the excuse Democrats used to radically transform our nation’s election systems in ways that make them less secure, less fair, and more vulnerable to mischief. Virtually all of the “temporary” changes introduced—ever-earlier voting, mass mail-in balloting, and lax penalties for fraudsters—have become codified everywhere Democrats rule unopposed.
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It was never about protecting Americans from the coronavirus; it was always about seizing power. If conservatives are to win in 2024, they must be all-in. In many states that will mean using the left’s tools against them, until principled patriots once again have the power to restore trust and confidence in our elections. That starts by understanding the left’s playbook for meddling with 2024.
The 2020 election might fairly be called the country’s first all-mail election, given how Democrats changed our laws and procedures to encourage voting by mail simply to defeat Donald Trump. Credit the National Vote at Home Institute for that grift—whose ex-leader, Amber McReynolds, now leads the campaign to seize control of the U.S. Postal Service in order to continue the campaign for all-mail elections.
Every “progressive” group supports that objective, but the left-wing NewDEAL Forum explains why in its “Democracy Playbook” for warping 2024, which the Washington Post endorsed in February.
It is worth first noting the document’s authors: Michigan’s Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, who wants Michigan to adopt all-mail elections after trying the scheme in 2020, and Arizona’s Democratic Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, who calls Republicans “fascists” and “election deniers”; Sandra Jauregui, a Las Vegas assemblywoman who introduced legislation in March to curb right-wing “domestic terrorism”; and Ken Lawrence, election board chairman for Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, which voted narrowly to certify the 2020 election results despite receiving numerous ballots after Election Day.
NewDEAL wants every state to expand early voting and adopt no-excuse absentee voting—note that eleven of the fifteen states that require a reason to vote absentee are Republican-run—as well as automatically mail every voter a ballot without their solicitation. That is effectively adopting all-mail elections, something eight states currently do (only one of which, Utah, is Republican-run).
Democrats knew they needed private drop boxes purchased with “Zuck bucks” to hoover up all of those mail-in ballots in 2020, so NewDEAL recommends making them a permanent feature of all future elections. (The true goal is to turn USPS into a mail-in ballot collection machine, with drop boxes as a stopgap measure.)
NewDEAL also wants to weaken signature-matching requirements on absentee ballots because they “discriminate against voters who already face other obstacles to voting.” Any errors, the group says, can then be corrected with liberal ballot-curing laws.
But that’s not all—states, they say, should also extend the deadline for postmarking absentee ballots to Election Day, guaranteeing that ballot-counting will drag on for days or weeks after the first Tuesday in November. Eighteen states plus D.C. currently accept and tabulate ballots received after Election Day, in some cases up to 14 days later. They aren’t all blue states, either—North Dakota is engaged in a lawsuit with the right-leaning Public Interest Legal Foundation for its late-acceptance law.
Yet this policy is “the most voter-friendly,” the group assures us, with my emphasis
allowing voters to fill out and mail their ballot on Election Day. While this method could result in a longer waiting period to determine the winner of an election, it allows the most voters to participate.
The parties have known for decades that voting by mail is the least-secure way of conducting elections. That was a central finding of the 2005 bipartisan Carter-Baker report. Both Team Obama and Clinton protested a recount in Florida’s 2008 presidential primary because officials wanted to hold it via mail, with Obama campaign manager David Plouffe voicing his “real deep concerns” about the “reliability and security of a mail-in vote.”
One of the ugliest features of the 2020 and 2022 elections was the way counting dragged on long past Election Day, creating ample opportunities for mischief and secrecy. No one seriously thinks codifying these malpractices will encourage trust in election security—that was never the point.
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