Blue State Blues: A Bad Week for Democrats’ Efforts to Rig Elections

Democrat politicians want to rig elections. This is evident from their refusal to respect the result when the Republicans happen to win.

Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 served as the basis for years of wild conspiracy theories about “Russia collusion” by the leading intellectual lights of the left and the self-appointed arbiters of reliable news.

The lesson the Democratic Party took away from 2016 was that the people responsible for rigging elections — that is, rigging them for Democrats — did not do a good enough job. The remedy was to change the rules, and to create new systems for voting: ranked-choice, automatic vote-by-mail, “ballot harvesting,” and others.

The conventional model used by the rest of the world — voting in person, with photo ID, on one day, with a paper ballot — was deemed to be “racist.”

The “Big Lie” of the 2020 presidential election, we are told, is that there was “widespread” voter fraud. And, indeed, many Republicans, unable to accept that a candidate like Joe Biden could win from his basement while Trump drew thousands of people to his rallies, looked to conspiracy theories for answers.

But Democrats are not stupid enough to steal elections outright. First of all, they would be caught; second, they can win far more votes through legal rigging.

As that infamous apostle of Democratic Party corruption, George Washington Plunkitt, once declared, there is more money to be made in “honest graft” than in “dishonest graft.” The “dishonest” kind — “blackmailin’ gamblers, saloon-keepers, disorderly people, etc.” — is hardly profitable.

The “honest” kind — making legal investments on the basis of inside information, or simply knowing best how the system works — is where the real money is to be made in politics.

Many of the new voting systems are “honest graft.” Take “ballot harvesting,” for example, a system that allows party operatives to pick up and return as many mail-in ballots as they want.

The only restriction is that they cannot fill out ballots for voters themselves, but that rule is difficult to enforce. In most of the world, “ballot harvesting” would be recognized as a vehicle for fraud, but Democrats legalized it in California and want to impose it nationwide as well.

The key is that the changes mirror existing Democratic Party turnout operations. The mass adoption of vote-by-mail in the 2020 election, for example, was funded in key counties by donations from Mark Zuckerberg. That’s “honest graft” and it is far more efficient than fraud. Democrats want to make the 2020 changes — largely imposed by courts — permanent. They also want to expand federal spending, which will find its way to Democrat-aligned interest groups.

They may yet succeed. But this week, Democrats suffered several setbacks.

One was the New York City primary for mayor, where election officials had to withdraw results after accidentally counting 135,000 “test” ballots, throwing the new “ranked choice” system into chaos.

Another was the Supreme Court decision in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, which upheld an Arizona ban on ballot harvesting and on casting ballots in precincts other than voter’s own.

That decision will weaken the Biden administration’s case against Georgia’s new voter integrity law, which preserves (and expands) early voting and drop boxes, but requires a valid ID to cast an absentee ballot.

Democrats, led by the president himself, continue to push for voting “reforms” in H.R. 1 and S.1, the so-called “For the People Act.”

In California, they passed new rules this week for recall elections to protect incumbent Governor Gavin Newsom, who faces one Sep. 14.

But this week’s chaos in New York, and the Supreme Court decision, have made their effort to rig elections just a little harder.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.