“We’re right to be on guard against voter fraud,” Barack Obama once said. “Voter fraud would impinge on our democracy. We don’t want folks voting that shouldn’t be voting. We all agree on that. Let’s stipulate to that, as the lawyers say.”
What do those Democrat lawyers say now?
They say a pandemic is a prime opportunity to strip away ballot security protections that Democrats claimed they used to believe in. Lawsuits brought by left-wing groups across the country would create the very chaos and fraud Democrats once warned against.
“They’re talking about people mailing in their ballots. Do you trust the security, the honesty of such an election process?”
“Well, I think we’d have to figure out whether this was fraud-proof.”
Those wise words were, once again, spoken by Obama. Back during the 2008 Democratic Primary when Florida was considering mail-in ballots, Obama specifically cited the need for signature verification, to ensure “they can check to make sure that the right people are voting.”
Now, lawsuits brought by the George Soros-backed election lawyer Marc Elias are seeking to gut those requirements. A Democrat lawsuit in Pennsylvania is seeking to prevent election officials from rejecting votes even if a signature on the ballot is completely different from the voter’s signature on file.
Want elections to be decided by the maneuverings of liberal election lawyers, where results are delayed for months, hundreds of ballots go missing, and duplicate votes are never scrutinized? That’s what happened in Minnesota, with Elias’s handiwork during the Senate recount in 2008. Seven months, “20,000 pages of legal briefs, and millions of dollars in election costs” later, Al Franken emerged the victor with results swinging by over 1,000 votes in his favor. It was once Elias’s proudest achievement, before he represented a group that registered dead voters, helped Hillary Clinton take over the DNC and smear her opponent with a dossier full of lies about President Donald Trump and Russia. When Democrats want to tilt elections in their favor outside the ballot box, they know who to call.
That type of chaos and confusion is exactly what Democrats are pursuing through the courts. Seeing an opportunity in the pandemic, they want to export California’s practice of ballot harvesting – where elections are placed in the hands of paid campaign operatives delivering thousands of ballots in bulk – disguised as “vote by mail.”
Democrats and the media used to see problems in such a plan.
“A mail-in ballot has wrong written all over it.” That’s what CNN reported in 2008, surmising former DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s position on proposals to vastly expand absentee voting.
Obama used to argue how difficult it was to commit voter fraud in person. The New York Times agreed that the real threat was mail-in ballots, with the more absentee voting, the greater “potential for fraud.”
Now Democrats say, for our safety, we cannot go to the ballot box, where elections are most secure. But campaign operatives can go from nursing home to nursing home, collecting ballots from our most vulnerable citizens to COVID-19. California Gov. Gavin Newsom has declared ballot harvesting an “essential activity.” Ballots must also be sent to all registered voters, Democrats say, regardless if they are active or not. That means sending ballots to millions of people who remain on states’ rolls despite having died or long since moved away.
An excess of ballots in circulation, to be picked up by ballot harvesters, signatures unchecked, and counted after Election Day? Sounds not exactly “fraud-proof,” and something we should be on guard against.
Democrats supported voter integrity measures not long ago. In 2002, Steny Hoyer, now the majority leader in the House, spearheaded a law to “ensure the integrity of our election system.”
“First-time voters who register by mail will be required to produce some form of identification,” Hoyer pronounced. “And states will be obligated to maintain accurate voting registration lists.” Bernie Sanders was a co-sponsor.
The legislation passed 92 - 2 in the Senate. Joe Biden voted yes.
Now Democrats say even raising the prospect of ensuring a mail-in vote was sent by the person they claim to be is tantamount to “voter suppression.”
“It would be a risky experiment for us with an election that has stakes as high as a presidential election,” Wasserman Schultz said of all mail-in voting in 2008. “There's a way to solve this without totally redoing this and causing chaos.”
We agree. That is why the RNC launched Protect the Vote, and why we just doubled our legal budget to fight back against Democrats’ assault on the ballot box. Don’t let Democrats use a pandemic to fundamentally transform this country, starting with our elections.