To Fix Elections, Hold Real Elections

The mess in Florida, Georgia, Maine, and anywhere else in these United States where, thanks to the Democrats and their locust legions of lawyers, the results of last week’s elections are still in doubt, can easily be fixed. Have voting on a fixed day and date: all eligible voters with proof of identity and residency within the applicable jurisdiction can vote only during the statutory hours at designated polling places. The end.

In other words, no:

• early voting
• provisional voting
• motor-voter registration
• mail-in ballots
• phone-in or faxed-in votes
• absentee ballots except for on-duty military stationed overseas (civilian living out of the country? Tough, your choice)
• all results to be reported within twelve hours of poll closings and certified within 24

Problem solved.

That’s largely the way elections used to be conducted in the modern age, when personal responsibility was still prized and the notion of civic duty was not derided as a relic of a vanishing “white,” patriarchal America that is rapidly being replaced by an ascendant (and coincidentally Democratic) coalition of women and minorities. In the guise of “fairness,” the secular Democrats have long since sacramentalized the right to vote — which, historically, is not all that sacred, and has been in various cultures, times, and places subject to all sorts of restrictions; and which right one is still free either to choose or not use — and now have incrementally extended the act of voting from one day to days and even weeks, whether before or after the actual election day itself.

But if voting is “sacred,” then treat it like church or shul: on a fixed day, at a fixed time, in a fixed place.

Since the polls closed on Nov. 6, the GOP has seen a steady number of House seats slip away from their apparent victors, as well as a Senate seat in Arizona and, still at issue, a Senate seat in Florida and two governorships, in Florida and Georgia. This makes nonsense of the whole idea of an election, which is a snapshot in time of citizens — all acting upon the same available information — making a binding decision in their role as the body politic.

But nothing is ever really “binding” for the Democrats, who view campaigns as effectively never-ending processes: they are always either litigating the most recent vote, planning ahead for the next one, or both. The Democrats have become the party for which elections are not a means to governing but governing itself, which they do via their secretaries of state, lawyers, extraordinary GOTV efforts, and various means of miraculous ballot-discovery. For them, no election is every truly over unless they win.

Since 1845, the law has been clear: national elections (which set the standard for all others) are to be held on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. And yet the Democrats have cannily whittled away the very concept of an election by cloaking their various amendments and objections in the guise of “civil rights,” relying on the media’s pat stereotype of post-Reconstruction America from more than a century ago as the still-operative template of today.

That this is both offensive and wrong bothers them not one whit: “by any means necessary” is their motto for a reason. So unless the GOP never wants to win another national election, those states still controlled by Republican governors and legislative majorities need to get their act together, fast.

The Democrats lost the presidential election of 2000 only because the Supreme Court, in a 7-2 vote, overruled the Florida Supreme Court’s order for a statewide recount as being in clear violation of Florida law and a violation of the Equal Protection Clause. That effectively ended the contest. But once burned, twice shy: Democrats have made sure to attack almost every subsequent close vote across the board, in Washington state for governor, in two straight Connecticut gubernatorial races, in Al Franken’s wondrous “victory” in Minnesota, and in Arizona this year, to name just a few recent examples. They never stop, they never sleep, they never quit.

Now they’re still at it in Florida, because if they can “win” there their media buddies can cement the notion that this was a “blue wave” election after all, thus sowing doubt and discouragement in the minds of Republican voters heading into 2020 and emboldening talk of dumping Trump in favor of… Mitt Romney?… so the wipeout can be complete.

One man, one vote, one day. Anything else is not democracy, it’s anarchy.