December 20, 2022

Republicans are still recovering from the midterms hangover after suffering a stiff dose of how probabilistic mathematics, statistics, blood-red election maps, armchair predictions, and century-long historical trends are collectively no match for the underhanded ground game of one’s opponent.  Giddy Democrats have again put one over on the American people, somehow dodging retribution for a miserable economy and two years of demonizing half the electorate.

Even with majorities in both houses, the Dems faced stiff political and public resistance in their failure to pass H.R. 1, For the Peoples Act, a misnamed Democrat effort to federalize state elections.  Undeterred, state Democrat parties have teamed up with Democrat national campaigns to achieve a permanent, quasi-legal destruction of the election process and institutionalized fraud through the pursuit of early mail-in voting and extended ballot deadlines in states that prohibit or curtail these practices.  This campaign is virtue-signaled through baseless and easily refuted claims of voter suppression, racism, and vintage pandemic concerns.  Nonetheless, aggressive Democrat state court challenges have been effective, bringing us to witness the last vestiges of Election Day, a 250-year old lesson in democracy that has surrendered to a prolonged bout of ballot collection and counting that predominantly gifts high office and power to Democrats.

The Cook Political Report, priding itself on a nonpartisan analysis of elections, pointed out that the 2022 Republican midterm turnout outnumbered Democrats and put five percentage points more votes on the scoreboard.  They reasoned that such a numerical advantage had the probability of creating a twenty to thirty seat majority in the House.  Instead, the GOP lost seats in congressional races while down-ballot Republican candidates were victorious.  Cook analysts reasoned that “clearly something or someone intervened, affecting the outcome of the election in the places that mattered.” At a loss for an explanation, the report took the popular default of blaming Donald J. Trump and his supporters as a greater perceived threat to voters than the policies and actions of an administration destroying America in plain view.

In 2020, the onset of COVID upended state voting procedures.  Blue state governors tested the limits of constitutionally corrosive regulatory powers and the shift in election protocols and practices was tectonic.  In-person voting was discouraged, as polling centers were seen as super-spreaders.  Online voting registration was sold as the only healthy alternative to a fearful electorate.  Vintage, inaccurate voter registration rolls were resurrected to send unrequested ballots to every voter.  Polling locations were opened to in-person voting weeks before Election Day.  Rogue Democrat secretaries of state changed state law without legislative approval, blessing late counts for ballots arriving days or weeks after Election Day.  Mailed-in ballots went from thousands to millions, with little scalability on the part of county and state election officials to handle that capacity or to guarantee proper chain of custody.  Extended ballot deadlines made Election Day results irrelevant and consistently put more and more votes on the Democrat scoreboard.  As the dust settled on the 2020 presidential election, Democrat power brokers realized that a litigious assault on state voting practices had given them a playbook to win future elections, even when running unpopular candidates in predominantly red states.

Without disease or disaster, and despite the declared end of the pandemic, these altered voting practices have all continued by judicial fiat.  Resting their legal arguments on straw groups of victims — racial minorities, the elderly, disabled, or indigent — Democrat coalitions funded by liberal individuals and philanthropies, to include George Soros, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Democracy Fund, Open Society, Tides Foundation, and the Arnold and Hewlett foundations, sought relief from traditional voting practices in red and purple states.  In all, 160 voting rights cases were on the dockets before the 2020 election, with the ACLU filing twenty lawsuits in sixteen states expanding mail-in voting.

Court decisions sanctioned the very practices known to breed fraud, preventing voter identification, witness requirements on absentee ballots and signature matching, and allowing weeks of early, mail-in voting, curbside and drive-up voting, the use of inaccurate voter registration lists, ballot harvesting, and the acceptance and counting of ballots beyond Election Day.

Republican candidates and campaigns found themselves consistently on defense as the Democrat machine invested tens of millions to push progressive state ballot initiatives, such as ranked-choice voting, that overhauled the election laws in majority Republican states.  Republicans filed eighty-two challenges to the 2020 presidential election, to no effect on the outcome.  In 2022, Democrat midterm efforts to quell resistance to election outcomes became more malicious, with ethical complaints against Republican lawyers threatening their disbarment and partisan judges censuring attempts at election audits.

To paraphrase Mark Twain, if the 2020 general election didn’t exactly repeat itself in the 2022 midterms, it certainly rhymed.  Two general election cycles have since proven the effectiveness of Democrat legal efforts to revolutionize or replace state voting practices in order to expand the collection, dumping, and counting of ballots.  Meanwhile, Republican party strategy is still stuck on pushing Election Day turnouts while shoo-in Republican candidates with double-digit leads watched their in-person voters fall prey to power outages, water main breaks, voting machine crashes, and printers with no ink.

Because of their nascent influence in state elections, Democrats are now convinced that they can impose an unpopular economic and social justice agenda upon an unwilling citizenry without suffering consequences at the polls.  Despite the loss of the lower chamber, Biden has treated the midterms as a public endorsement of his party and policies.  At the recent COP27 United Nations summit in Egypt, he promised more “transformational changes” to America.  Republican bigwigs seem eager to help.  Rather than put the road to fiscal recovery in the hands of an incoming Republican House, Mitch McConnell is standing with Democrats to pass a lame duck trillion-plus Omnibus Bill with more pork than a slaughterhouse that will gut the power of the 118th Congress to rein in federal spending.  

For well over two centuries, voting has required a certain desire and effort on the part of the citizen to participate, whether in person or through application for an absentee ballot.  Voting was carried out on Election Day as a right, not a mandate wherein, lacking the justification of natural disaster or disease, every registered voter had to be sent an unsolicited ballot.  In assigning governance, the Constitution did not guarantee the right to early voting by ballot, nor were state governors given the power of deciding when and how voting occurs.