The Wall Street Journal
Opinion
Review & Outlook
The
left may get an unexpected lesson in electoral federalism.
Remember
when Democrats and the left scored Donald Trump for worrying that the election
might be “rigged”? Well, now that he’s won, the same crowd is demanding
recounts in three battleground states on grounds that the Russians rigged the
results.
On
Saturday what’s left of the Clinton campaign said it will join the recount
effort demanded by Green Party candidate Jill Stein in Wisconsin, Michigan and
Pennsylvania. The conspiracy theory for which they have no evidence is that
Russian hackers rigged voting machines to manipulate the results. The Obama
Administration has said it detected no such hacking and that the elections were
“free and fair from a cybersecurity perspective.”
But
reality doesn’t matter in the fake-news world of the far left any more than it
does on the far right. The recount may be a progressive gambit to raise money
from the gullible, or perhaps to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election.
The ultimate Hail Mary would be to raise enough smoke about irregularities that
individual electors would deny Mr. Trump the 270 votes he needs in the
Electoral College.
Mr.
Trump leads in 30 states with 306 electoral votes, and he would have to lose
all three contested states to lose the election. He leads by some 71,000 votes
in Pennsylvania, a little more than 20,000 in Wisconsin, and by nearly 11,000
in Michigan. If you think U.S. politics is polarized now, try handing the White
House to Hillary Clinton now.
The
silver lining may be to teach a lesson in electoral federalism. It’s all but
impossible for hackers to rig U.S. elections because they are run locally and
voting machines aren’t connected to a national internet network, as Hans von
Spakovsky and John Fund explained on these pages in September. Progressives,
not conservatives, want to nationalize election laws. So go ahead and do the
recounts and then accept that Mr. Trump won fair and square.
