By Monica Showalter
This news story from the U.K. Guardian stands out:
Britons will have to show photo ID to vote in future general elections, ministers are poised to confirm this week, as a means of tackling fraud which critics claim could deter poorer and ethnic minority voters from taking part in democracy.
The proposal is to be included in Tuesday’s Queen’s speech, which will set out the government’s post-pandemic priorities and the laws it intends to pass in the forthcoming parliamentary session.
Voter I.D.? Wow. Up until now we’ve been told in the press there’s no such thing as election fraud. We’ve been told that Georgia’s voter-I.D. law, is “Jim Crow on steroids,” by friend-of-Klansmen Joe Biden, no less. England, the nation that made the global slave trade abhorrent, has decided differently. Can pin “Jim Crow” on that country, despite Meghan Markle’s wokester prevarications.
The queen’s speech will also include a proposal to limit ballot-harvesting, another sleazy electoral fraud vehicle, which has seen its share of both GOP and Democrat violators, from North Carolina, to Texas, to Minnesota, as well as illegal aliens harvesting votes on behalf of Democrats on a wide scale over in California. The queen apparently wants none of that.
I didn’t know that the queen had that much authority, actually, I thought she was just a figurehead. But this step shows how electoral integrity is clearly an apolitical issue, not a partisan one, as Democrats would have you believe. Nothing in this measure will stop voters from voting leftist if that is what they want. What it will stop is leftists from stuffing the ballot boxes and cancelling out the votes of others who don’t want to elect leftists, which is what Republicans, with plenty of reason, suspect has been going on. And clearly, the queen noticed a danger.
After all, the U.S. and U.K. systems tend to move in tandem.
What’s vivid here is that the queen seems to have noticed that President Trump was right all along about the fraudy nature of the 2020 election, which saw the election of a doddering old foof with a Jeremy Corbyn-style agenda, put into office based on the questionable activities of a few blue city machines. She appears to want none of that in her kingdom.
That runs counter to the strong narrative that President Trump was the problem because he refused to concede the election to Joe Biden back in 2020. If you read the Politico anecdotal narratives from various countries’ elites about the U.S. 2020 election, you will see that their observers from nearly all nations blamed President Trump for crying fraud, as if there were no such thing as electoral fraud in the U.S. This took some doing, given that everyone noted that U.S, elections were a mess and said so, friend and foe. They also know that there is the possibility of fraud in their own countries, so they effectively claimed that the U.S. couldn’t possibly have fraud, even as they claimed that U.S. democracy was diminished. Either it really was diminished and Trump was telling the truth, or it wasn’t diminished, and Trump was blowing smoke. Because anything Trump might claim would fall to pieces if his claim were not true, and it’s clear they knew it wasn’t.
The Kenyan observer said that America’s 2020 election was just like a Kenyan election, but pinned the blame on Trump instead of the specter of fraud, as if fraud were unknown in a place like Kenya.
The Mexican observer, Arturo Sarukhan, a former ambassador to the U.S. and known Trump-hater, claimed that U.S. elections were a mess, and Trump was the one at fault, not the fraud. He wrote this twisted drivel, forgetting that Mexico’s own current sitting president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, knows that the same crap happened in Mexico as has now happened in the U.S.:
There’s no doubt that if what has happened here in the runup to the elections—with a sitting president stating that fraud is being perpetrated against him, refusing to commit to a peaceful transition of power and to acknowledge and recognize the winner, and stating that the only way he would lose the election was via an electoral fraud—were happening elsewhere in the Americas or the world, for that matter, it would be branded by U.S. media as an attempted coup. That U.S. institutions—mainly the courts and the electoral system, albeit with its imperfections and growing need for reform—and the media continue to check and balance the executive is of little solace to those of us who see this country painfully polarized and tribalized, with the real and troubling weaponization of disinformation and lies feeding the tectonic and sociodemographic fractures that are tearing its social contract asunder.
As an additional note, Sarukhan also knows that California’s influential one-party Democrats-only state takes Mexico’s political system with all its ballot-harvesting from the PRI one-party-state “perfect dictatorship” era as its model. Note his claim that the U.S. electoral system and courts need “reform.” He likes to cover all his bases.
That’s the globalist consensus, that the U.S. election was perfectly done and the U.S. remains a beacon of democracy with Trump’s cries of ‘fraud’ the only problem, as if Trump can’t possibly be just ignored if he’s wrong. Trump’s words, not the system, are the only problem, so they claim.
Yet this move from the queen of England says that she knows better. And this Harvard study that came out before the 2020 election, identifying scores of fraud opportunities in the U.S. electoral system, and how the U.S. election system compares very poorly to that of other democracies, says the same.
The U.K. just got through a significant local election where the public mood was clearly conservative, throwing out leftists across the kingdom. That may have sent a signal to her that the time was right for ensuring that lean-and-hungry frustrated leftists don’t attempt to rig elections now that they know they can’t sell their extremist ideas as they are now.
That’s saving democracy. And it’s important to do, because the 2020 U.S. election taught us that time to stop fraud is before it happens, not after. The wise old queen is doing what myriad state legislatures in the U.S. are doing, which is preventing fraud before it starts. That’s a blessing for the U.K., one of her lasting gifts before her reign is done. And you can bet we will see additional democracies elsewhere quietly following her lead.