By I & I Editorial Board | Issue & Insights
On Sunday, five days after “Election Day,” Americans still didn’t know which party will have a majority in the House while two states were waiting to find out who their next governors will be. Even the BBC has been wondering “when will we know who won.” Have the delays been caused by incompetence or malign forces? Surely both, but it’s the latter that has had the biggest impact.
Forty-two years ago, on the evening of Nov. 4, 1980, the day of the election, President Jimmy Carter conceded to his Republican challenger Ronald Reagan at 9:50 pm Eastern Standard Time. Eight years later – on Election Day – Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis called George H.W. Bush, the GOP’s candidate, and congratulated him on his win.
Hard to believe that many of us grew up going to bed on election night knowing not only who won the presidential election, but who came out on top of many other races, as well. But that’s changed. We no longer have an Election Day. We have Election Week, Election Month – and worse.
Blame Al Gore. The vice president for the man who ran a “permanent campaign” during eight years in the White House kicked off the “permanent election” in 2000 by retracting his concession to George W. Bush on the evening of Election Day. He then put the country through more than a month of turmoil, dragging out a challenge that went well beyond his right for a recount in Florida. His effort to count the votes until he had enough to win had to be ended by the U.S. Supreme Court.
We don’t know how many races, if any, the Democrats have stolen or are stealing in this year’s midterm elections. But they have a reputation for fixing elections. Think of 1960 and Mayor Richard Daley’s Chicago machine and John Kennedy’s tight win over Richard Nixon. Historian and Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson biographer Robert Dallek, believed that Daley “probably stole Illinois from Nixon.”
Start with that history, then add to it the fact that Democrats are thoroughly convinced of the righteousness of their policy positions, blend in their taste for exercising raw political power, and the dish that’s produced is poisonous to fair elections.
What we do know for sure is that Democrats were part of the rancid cabal (not our word) that rigged the 2020 election for Democrat Joe Biden. Time magazine reported about this “conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes,” “an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans,” a confederation of schemers “working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.”
The tools, no, the weapons were changes to voting systems that benefited Democrats; using the pandemic to increase voting by mail, which is an open invitation to fraud; and private funding (Zuck Bucks) put to use primarily “by “Democratic elections officials – in key states across the country,” says the Capital Research Center.
Naturally the Democrats are committed to mail-in ballots, which delay vote counting though in some states they can be cast more than a month before Election Day. They also help pile up votes for Democrats, who have “embraced” them “with gusto,” says the Washington Examiner’s Salena Zito, while Republicans have “shied away” from them since their presence was increased in 2020, a dynamic that the cabal was surely counting on.
Columnist Deroy Murdock spoke for the decent among us when he wrote that “as of early Friday afternoon,” the country’s voting system had “devolved from a global beacon of democracy to an international punchline.” He suggests that what “America needs is a major cleanup of our self-humiliating voting system,” a scrubbing that “should start by excising the cancer of early voting,” a sham allowed in nearly every state.
Murdock quotes the passage in U.S. election law that says: “The Tuesday next after the 1st Monday in November, in every even numbered year, is established as the day for the election, in each of the States and Territories of the United States, of Representatives and Delegates to the Congress,” then asks “what part of that federal statute is unclear?”
Americans are casting ballots before candidates have debated; while they know nothing about the health of the candidates they’re voting for; before they realize candidates are going to hide in their basements rather than campaign; before candidates drop out; before events that would change their votes occur (Google searches for “can i change my vote” peaked at 5 a.m. last Tuesday); before the public learns about the debauched and possible criminal behavior of a candidate’s son – and then the ballots are counted for days and weeks after the election, providing more time and access for those determined to change the outcome.
No election will ever be perfect. Fallible humans make errors. But ours would be much cleaner it we abandoned early voting and restricted mail-in voting to only “the sick, infirm, and those who will be – Imagine! – absent on Election Day,” as Murdock suggests. Don’t fall for the lie that this is suppression, or that it’s a “threat to our democracy,” or any of the objections that Democrats and their media lackeys will manufacture so that they won’t lose their party advantage. End the corruption before the corruption ends our republic.
