Among Democrats and their media allies, it is an article of faith that Donald Trump is plotting to steal the 2020 election. In August, Mark Joseph Stern wrote at Slate that Trump was planning to subvert the U.S. Postal Service to prevent ballots from reaching their destinations in time. Amanda Marcotte has a lengthy essay in Salon, detailing all the nefarious means Trump and his supporters will employ to this end.
Vanity Fair recently detailed the planning Democrats are undertaking to thwart Trump’s plots. The Washington Post even ran a news article entitled “Here’s One Way Trump Could Try to Steal the Election, Voting Experts Say.” As with anything the left says about conservatives and Republicans, it’s always useful to bear in mind one important thing: Almost every allegation the left makes against the right is projection.
“Accuse your enemies of what you are doing.” Some variation of this quote has been attributed to leftists from Karl Marx to Vladimir Lenin to Joseph Goebbels to Saul Alinsky. The quote’s origin may be unknowable, but the substance is perfectly accurate.
While the media indulges the left’s paranoid fantasies about right-wing electoral subversion, the actual history of 2020 reveals a vast array of attempts by Democrats and left-wing activists to undermine the electoral process. Democrats got the ball rolling in March when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D. Calif., attempted to force her 1,400-page coronavirus bill on the country. Buried beneath all the pork spending were provisions that would have mandated a national system of vote-by-mail — with all the fraud, corruption, and sheer incompetence that would entail.
Pelosi sought to combine this with legalized “ballot harvesting,” allowing third parties to collect ballots, fill them out, and deliver them to polling places — essentially, an invitation to corruption. House Majority Whip James Clyburn, D-S.C., called the crisis “a tremendous opportunity to restructure things to fit our vision.” While, thankfully, the bill went nowhere, it was a foretaste of what unfolded in the months to come.
Three months before the November election, and without any input from the state’s chief election official, Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak (D) and the Democrat-controlled legislature enacted a law mandating ballots to be mailed to every voter. The legislation also legalizes ballot harvesting in the state. Democrats and Republicans on the North Carolina Board of Elections reached an agreement to loosen mail-in ballot restrictions, only to have both board Republicans resign in protest, claiming they had been deceived about the agreement by North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein (D).
In Alabama, the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a federal lawsuit seeking to loosen provisions of Alabama law designed to prevent election fraud in absentee ballots, such as the requirements that absentee ballots are notarized or signed in the presence of two witnesses and that absentee voters include a copy of their photo ID.
Florida law stipulates that convicted felons can regain voting rights, but they must pay various fees, fines, and restitution first as part of discharging their obligations to society. The American Civil Liberties Union, Florida NAACP, and the League of Women Voters of Florida challenged this law. To date, both the Florida Supreme Court and the federal 11th Circuit Court of Appeals have upheld it.
In response, failed Democratic presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg raised millions to pay these fees for tens of thousands of felons, a move that has prompted the Florida attorney general to request an investigation of whether Bloomberg violated Florida election law.
Ultimately, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court sided with the Democratic Party on loosening the deadline restrictions. Also, while they failed in a similar attempt to legalize ballot harvesting, Democratic operatives are now focused on another state Supreme Court ruling: ballots received without the proper privacy envelope (so-called “naked ballots”) must be thrown out. Similarly, in Wisconsin, the state Democratic Party is suing to relax state election laws.
Finally, my home state of Michigan has not been immune to Democratic election shenanigans. In 2018, Michiganders elected Wayne State University Law School Dean Jocelyn Benson as our secretary of state. Benson literally wrote the book on the importance of state-level chief elections officials.
Citing coronavirus concerns, Benson ordered the mailing of absentee ballot applications to every registered voter in Michigan. Although the move was upheld in court, it remains dubious, as the “Michigan Election Officials’ Manual” stipulates that absentee ballot applications should only be mailed upon the oral or written request of the voter. A similar move by county-level election officials a few years earlier was rejected by a Michigan court.
In a Sept. 6 interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Benson warned, “We should be prepared for this to be closer to an election week as opposed to an election day.” Twelve days later, the other shoe dropped. Michigan Court of Claims Judge Cynthia Stephens undertook a massive, unilateral rewriting of Michigan election law.
Stephens struck down the law requiring mailed ballots to be received by election day. Instead, she announced any ballots postmarked by Nov. 2 and received up to 14 days after the election would be counted. Stephens’s ruling also legalizes ballot harvesting, previously banned under Michigan law.
Neither Benson, a named defendant in the suit, nor Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel (D), plan to appeal the decision. One day earlier, in response to a lawsuit from leftist super-PAC Priorities USA, a federal district judge overturned Michigan’s 125-year-old ban on hiring drivers to transport voters to the polls.
Forget about the fevered dreams of “blue-check” journalists and Democratic party operatives. While they conjure and propagate conspiracy theories, they and their friends are guilty of a vast array of efforts to subvert the will of the people and their elected representatives, create chaos and confusion on election day, and facilitate massive election irregularities in critical swing states all over the country. Never forget: nearly everything the left says about the right is projection.