By Monica Showalter
It’s not enough that riots, chaos and economic mismanagement plague America’s one-party blue cities.
In cities such as Detroit, Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Minneapolis, the usual machine-politics deliveries for Democrats appear to be on overdrive. In this election, stealing elections is an act they’ve taken national, with President Trump the target.
There’ve been reports of voter intimidation, illegal electioneering, and observer suppression in Philadelphia; illegal ballot-harvesting and vote-buying in Minneapolis; big midnight vote dumps of ‘found’ ballots’ bearing votes for all a single party in Detroit, alongside boarded up windows by election officials to prevent observation of what goes on the the totalization rooms. In Atlanta, Rev. Alveda King, Martin Luther King’s niece, has declared she has seen voter fraud firsthand in her city, too.
Just by coincidence, they’re all in states now under dispute in the general election, states where the president appeared to be ahead until the ballot-counting suddenly stopped and then the numbers suddenly reversed. He’s suing Michigan and Wisconsin, and possibly some others.
But sorting out which ballots are legitimate and which are not in the wake of such widespread evidence of fraud is a tall order, and probably impossible on a state scale where officials have not acted in good faith.
North Carolina faced this situation, in 2018, where a campaign operative working for a Republican congressional candidate, engaged in illegal ballot harvesting, primarily of black votes presumed to be votes for Democrats and instead of turn them in to the registrar of voters, threw them in the trash.
When it was brought before a judge, the judge declared it so tainted he threw the entire election out, and ordered a new election. According to this well-written report describing what happened in the Raleigh News & Observer by Luke Decock:
The state board called it “a well-funded and highly organized criminal operation” to collect absentee ballots from voters and mail them to election officials. Witnesses testified some ballots were collected unmarked, and experts testified that an unusual amount of requested ballots were never submitted.
The ballot harvesting threw into question the 9th Congressional District election that Harris won by a scant 905 votes over Democrat Dan McCready. Harris was never certified as the winner as the fraud came to light. Another Republican, Dan Bishop, eventually claimed the seat almost a year later in a special election.
A consultant to Harris’ campaign hired Dowless after the operative helped secure 221 of 225 absentee votes cast for Harris’ primary opponent in 2016. Harris then won the 2018 primary thanks in part to a 437-17 absentee edge.
There is talk about recounts,but how do you re-count an election where the ballots have been opened from their envelopes? Where illegal immigrants have quite possibly padded the voter rolls? Where ballots have been harvested and the chain of custody utterly broken? Where who knows what went on behind closed doors as suitcases and boxes on rollers mysteriously arrived at midnight?
Recounts are a fool’s errand. Throwing out a bad election and ordering a new one, with hard observation on all sides, full transparency, and judicial supervision is frankly the far better solution, as it is the only way to restore confidence in the system.
And it’s not that farfetched.
The North Carolina teams who challenged the election used the Guaranteee Clause requiring states to not be run as dictatorships (note that all dictatorships have filthy elections) as its rationale, and it could just as easily be done with these blue-run cities and states.
Trump is facing the battle of his political life with this evidence of electoral rigging and strange outcome from the expected one. Recounts may be a first step but for utterly dirty elections, the best solution is a judicially ordered re-do. One hopes that by the time it hits the Supreme Court, the matter will get to that.