Two Faces of Election Fraud

You can't understand someone until you've walked a mile in their shoes.

 - Anonymous American proverb

In these days where the gulf between America's political tribes is as deep as the Grand Canyon, as wide as the Pacific, and growing by the minute, it's all too easy to simply dismiss the other side as the embodiment of evil, whether that be illustrated by Hitler, the Antichrist, Attila the Hun, George W. Bush, or whatever else defines evil for you.

And, let's face it - the rank bigotry on display at the level of elected Democrat officialdom comes pretty close to qualifying, when you consider that some of their proposed policies are literally what the Book of Revelation foretells as the hallmarks of the Beast and the End of Days.

Does that apply right down the line to your neighbor who voted for Sleepy Joe?  We'd like to think not, but it's become almost impossible to have a reasoned discussion of the issues with anyone.  As evidence, we offer this account of a LA Times editorial "What can you do about the Trumpites next door?"

The author was dismayed to find that her Trump-supporting neighbor had plowed her snowy driveway without being asked!  She had no idea how to respond to this act of neighborly kindness.  Her agonizing over whether to say "Thank you," and if so, how should she do it inspired a minor tweet-storm of ridicule, but getting along in spite of political disagreement is a real problem for many people.

Yet, one of the greatest attributes of the Internet is that it does allow anyone to put their views out for the world to see.  The Tech Lords may make it hard for anyone to find conservative views, but they do still exist - and the Left suffers from no such disability.

Thus it is that we found this truly striking, well-articulated, and intensely thought-provoking article from a far-lefty with whom we most likely share not one single political view other than a strongly-shared desire to not see Americans bludgeoning each other to death en masse with clubs and machetes as occurred in Rwanda after everyone ran out of bullets.

A Democrat voter?

First Find Your Premises, so You Can Check Them

You wouldn't suspect this from the title: "Election Integrity Is Why Trump Lost the Election, and Why the Dems Will Lose at Trial" - and we'll examine what the author is getting at in due time.  But he leads with a highly relevant point, which many conservatives have also been making from the opposite direction:

The House [impeachment] managers didn't address the Republican story of why Trump and the rioters are American heroes. In the eyes of Trump's followers, Trump and the rioters fought like hell against a stolen election.

Do tell!  That, as it happens, somewhat lines up with our own beliefs - except that we decry the violence and destruction that took place, and have absolutely no sympathy for the people who end up arrested, tried, and convicted for actual crimes of violence if such there be.  The original premise of a large, angry group of citizens expressing their fury at a stolen election, though, is both heroic and in the best American tradition, the handful of criminals and provocateurs aside.

We'd also take issue with the idea that Trump "fought like hell" - indeed, we find his post-election "strategy," if that's even the right word, to have been singularly incompetent.  He fought like hell only insofar as he did hellishly badly at it.

But the writer makes a good point: If, as they claim, Democrats truly believe that Joe Biden won the election fair and square, then why on earth wouldn't they be the ones demanding a full audit and recount of every last ballot in every single disputed county?  What better way to enshrine their dominance than by rubbing conservatives' noses in an actual, rock-solid repudiation by genuine bona-fide American voters?

If, as they claim, the House Democrats believe that then-President Trump started an insurrection to overturn an election based on lies that it was stolen, shouldn't they have made even a passing attempt at proving that accusations of election fraud were in fact lies?  The impeachment proceeding simply accepted a totally fraud-free election as Holy Writ, which - well, as the article puts it:

The House managers refused to do that. I doubt they convinced a single Trump voter that the election was not stolen.

This has the ring of absolute truth.  If there are any persuadable people left in this country, nothing was said during the trial that would persuade them in the direction of a squeaky-clean Biden administration.  If anything, they'd be more likely to be persuaded that Democrats are hypocrites, liars, and frauds, as Mr. Trump's attorneys proved live and in living color.

The lefty author, of course, does believe that Mr. Biden legitimately won, and is disappointed in Democrats' failure to argue that case.  But this brings us to perhaps the most interesting point: why, exactly does he believe the election to be both free and fair?  Let him answer in his own words:

The House managers refuse to explain how this was one of the cleanest elections in modern times. I think it was. One of the reasons was because of the expansion of vote-by-mail throughout the country due to covid restrictions. This meant that 90% of the voters were able to cast paper ballots, which created less room for possible problems with the voting machines.

Vote-by-mail also enabled people to vote much more easily. This was a big advantage for Biden and the Democratic down-ballot races.

In retaliation, Trump and his people slowed down post office operations as much as possible, to make sure that many votes never got counted in time. If anyone got cheated, I think it was Biden.

Trump convinced many of his followers that expanded vote-by-mail was the blueprint for stealing an election.

Read that again, slowly.

The reason this lefty writer believes the 2020 election was "one of the cleanest elections in modern times" - chock-full of integrity, as his chosen title signals - was precisely because it was conducted largely by mail, so just about everybody could vote without even having to get up off of the sofa, much less identify themselves as qualified to vote in any meaningful way.

That is also precisely the reason that the Right believes the election to have been stolen.

Right now, the Democrat Congress is preparing to pass HR1, a bill to Federally require all of the same election-process changes, legal and illegal, that so befouled 2020.  Among many, many other things, it forces states to implement early voting, automatic voter registration, same-day registration, online voter registration, and no-fault absentee balloting.

These "requirements" are inherently fraud-prone; many of them violate international standards on election transparency.  Our Mexican neighbors and many impoverished third-world countries require highly-secure voter IDs, for example.

The Democrats spin this bill as being designed to take aim at institutional barriers to voting, including cumbersome voter registration systems, disenfranchisement, and limited voting hours.  They are not wrong: it does, indeed, do away with all those things.  That's what makes the election dirty.

Requiring voter ID, for example, will without doubt disenfranchise a great many people who don't have valid government IDs.  There are, of course, a certain number of genuine American citizens who happen not to have bothered to obtain an ID.  There are a far vaster number of potential voters who don't have a valid ID for good reason: they are here illegally; they are here legally but are not citizens; they are dead; they moved out of state; you name it.

There is a reason we have traditionally had voter registration systems.  Yes, we want eligible voters to be able to vote, but we also want to prevent ineligible ones from voting.

Again, return to why our lefty friend so loved 2020's election and found it squeaky clean: it was super easy for literally anyone to vote!  I do not think "clean" means what he thinks it means.

When the Dems shout "Count every vote!" they aren't kidding, since they know they can gin up as many as they could ever want - US-citizen voters not required.

The Devastating Bottom Line

We know why our lefty friend is flinging screeds out onto the Internet rather than sitting in a Congressional seat: Elected Democrats are smarter than he is, and also, he is immeasurably more honest than they are.

Imagine if he were somehow one of the House impeachment managers, and he stood up to make his case with a pure heart.  Joe Biden won fair and square, he says, and the election was totally honest, precisely because literally all the votes were counted no matter where they came from (a neighboring state, China, Kinkos, mysterious truck deliveries in the dead of night) or who filled them out.  We counted all the votes, by gum, and we kept counting until Joe Biden won!

Consider, in contrast, his opinion on what we would consider to be a free and fair election: one where the Tech Lords and mainstream media did not have absolute control over what issues were freely discussed; where every vote was matched to a specific living, breathing, eligible U.S. Citizen; and when all votes, or nearly so, were cast by that selfsame voter in person on Election Day, having been verified as to identity and qualification by independent witnesses.

About the only election rule we'd both agree as constituting a Good Thing, is "being able to cast paper ballots, which created less room for possible problems with the voting machines."  Would that it were so!

Obviously, he'd immediately decry our ideal election as hopelessly bigoted and racist because of all the Democrat voters who can't be bothered to come up with the same photo ID that's required for everything from welfare benefits to Section 8 housing, or to haul their tuchuses a few blocks to the appointed polling place on the designated day.

His number one electoral value, it would seem, is openness to any ballot that happens to turn up.  That is a value not shared by, well, at least 75 million Americans.

How many actual Americans who truly did vote for Joe Biden share that value?  One is too many, but clearly it's the mantra of most Democrat elected officials and government employees.

If we cannot even agree in principle on what constitutes a free and fair election, there's no hope we'll ever again have one while both views are in the same electorate.  But at least we can be grateful to this one truth-telling lefty who portrayed his position so plainly, and highlights the deadly peril Our Democracy is in for any remaining doubters.