An election-fraud rebuttal, a victory for integrity, and hopeful signs that voting patterns are changing.
By Gerard Baker, Wall Street Journal, Opinion July 5, 2021 12:53 pm ET
Democrats and the media have a simple rule about disputed elections: When Democrats complain about the result, there must have been something profoundly wrong with the process that rendered the outcome unreliable: dodgy ballots ( Al Gore, Florida, 2000), corrupt machinery ( John Kerry, Ohio, 2004), voter suppression (just about every election Democrats have lost in the south in the last 30 years but especially Stacey Abrams, Georgia, 2018).
When Republicans complain ( Donald Trump, 2020), the challenge is an unconscionable threat to the foundations of our democracy, an assault on the sacred electoral process, a coup in plain sight.
So our consistent and principled defenders of election integrity face something of a conundrum in New York City after a Democratic mayoral primary election in a Democratic city has produced epic levels of electoral malarkey. All three leading Democratic candidates filed lawsuits last week raising the possibility of irregularities in counting and seeking legal relief in case the final result doesn’t go their way.
New York’s new ranked-choice voting system has combined with rank incompetence by the city’s Board of Elections to produce near total confusion about the result of the contest last month between Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president and former cop; Kathryn Garcia, the city’s former sanitation commissioner (who should know a thing or two about messy outcomes); and Maya Wiley, the far-left legal analyst for MSNBC.
One of them has to win, unfortunately, but we won’t know for a while the identity of the pol who will almost certainly be elected in November to succeed Bill de Blasio, a man for whom the term municipal disaster might have been invented.
Fortunately, while New York City was attempting to re-enact an old Marx Brothers script, elsewhere across the country last week we witnessed more-serious developments that augur better for the health of electoral democracy. Three pieces of news should cheer serious conservatives. We could call them glad tidings from the ghosts of elections past, present and future.
The news from the (recent) past was the report from the Republican-controlled Michigan Senate that comprehensively debunked claims by Donald Trump’s campaign about electoral fraud in the state’s presidential vote. Anyone with lingering doubts about the fraud claims should read the document, which runs 55 pages including appendices.
Among its findings: Claims about widespread voting by dead people were all false, except for one poor soul who submitted an absentee ballot, then died four days before the election.
Conservatives should adhere to a consistent approach when considering electoral malpractice, even if Democrats and the media don’t: Evidence and facts are the only criteria by which claims should be judged. The Michigan Republicans have done the party and the nation a considerable service by setting this example.
The second promising development, very much in the present, was the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision last week in Brnovich v. DNC, brightly illuminated by Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion for the court.
The decision reversed an appellate court’s ruling that measures by Arizona to block ballot harvesting and require voters to vote in their own precincts were racially discriminatory and violated the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Legal scholars on the right and left agree that the decision bodes ill for the Biden administration’s politically motivated lawsuit against Georgia’s new voting rules, as well as congressional Democrats’ attempt to federalize election law through the massive power grab known as H.R.1—in short, for transparent efforts by progressives to prevent states from making reasonable rules to ensure electoral integrity are going nowhere.
The third piece of encouraging news offered a possible glimpse of future voting trends.
A detailed analysis of the 2020 election published by the Pew Research Center confirmed that Mr. Trump made remarkable gains among ethnic minority voters, especially Hispanics. The survey found that 38% of Hispanic voters chose the Republican, up some 10 points from 2016. Mr. Trump also seems to have advanced among Asian voters. In a further statistical rebuttal to the media’s portrayal of the Republicans as a bastion of “white supremacy,” Joe Biden narrowed the Democrats’ deficit a little with white voters.
The message from this, bolstered by opinion polling since the election, is promising: the woke, antipolice, American-cultural-identity-eviscerating progressives ascendant in the modern Democratic Party are turning off the most rapidly growing segment of the U.S. voting population. If the trend continues, their appeal will be confined increasingly only to the urban socialist dystopias of places like New York. If only they could run an election.