It’s time for Republicans to get creative in the election integrity fight

Daily Caller News Foundation

It goes without saying that voter fraud is nothing new. Think Tammany Hall and Chicago’s “city bosses,” including Cook County in the 1960 presidential election. Or read “Means of Ascent,” Robert Caro’s masterful account of “landslide” Lyndon’s shenanigans at the ballot box during his 1948 Senate run-off in Texas.

And who can forget (except the media) the more recent FBI investigation into the corrupt “community organization” ACORN that resulted in the arrests of eight workers in St. Louis for a host of election law violations? Pretending voter fraud doesn’t exist is political strategy, not reality.

That’s why partisans screaming the loudest at so-called “election deniers” have to rely on gaslighting and online censorship. The Democrat/Media complex looks at ballot integrity precisely the same way it looks at climate change or vaccine mandates — there is no debate.

Of course, it’s political crossdressing on an epic scale. Democrats who’ve made a career of questioning elections suddenly irate over the sloppiest one in modern memory? Al Gore, just as unhinged two decades ago as he is today, repeatedly claimed that the 2000 election was stolen. Stacey Abrams, Raphael Warnock and Hakeem Jeffries are all serial “election deniers.”

Yet it was Hillary Clinton who actually tried to undo the will of the people.

Along with the DNC, her campaign farmed out the creation of a fake Russian “dossier” in what made the CIA’s Watergate burglars look like amateurs. Even Bob Woodward is covering his tracks.

The Obama team, including then Vice-President Joe Biden, was briefed on the “alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on July 26, 2016 of a proposal … to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services.”

A corrupt Justice Department was enlisted to spy on, investigate and delegitimize the 2016 election. Rep. Adam Schiff repeatedly lied about it all, as the Twitter Files confirm.

He’s been removed from the Intel Committee — he should now be removed from Congress. These are the people throwing stones (and jailing J6ers) at anyone who questioned an election conducted under pandemic rules and decided by just 44,000 votes in three states.

I was Minnesota’s GOP Senate nominee in 2020 and along with my friend, Dr. John Lott, we tried to warn folks on what was coming in May of that year.

Quoting a 2005 report from the Commission on Federal Election Reform, chaired by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker III, we reiterated “absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.”

That fall, 60% of Minnesota votes were absentees.

Even in small Crow Wing County, 22,000 absentee votes failed to match up to various data sets (e.g., SVRS voting histories) by the December deadline, making it nearly impossible to contest the election. Secretary of State Steve Simon rejected the county’s request for an audit so recounts did little to eradicate bad ballots. But in Minnesota’s one-party media state, no one in the press was going to raise an eyebrow.

As I chronicle in “Party Animal, The Truth About President Trump, Power Politics & the Partisan Press,” the Star Tribune’s Stephen Montemayor, wrote a “tendentious hit piece on the ‘false fraud’ claims of county citizens” and one of the most partisan, from the Pioneer Press, David Orrick, informed the GOP Party Chair that “My editors and I made a decision yesterday to not cover a press release on the ‘abnormalities and statistical variations from Minnesota’s historic voter trends.’”

“Variations,” indeed.

Candidate Biden, who touted his 2008 “southern strategy” by reminding folks Delaware was a “slave state,” was so popular in Rep. Ilhan Omar’s urban district that he fared far better than Barack Obama. Nationwide, as the Democracy Institute’s Patrick Basham and others have pointed out, Biden set two records that are possible, but unlikely — he won the most votes of any candidate in history while prevailing in a record low 17% of counties.

And boy did he prevail. With about 70% of the vote by absentee, Democrats enjoyed a record turnout of 85% in populous Hennepin County, higher than the statewide average.

Trump and I dominated in Greater Minnesota but the historic metro-surge reversed two cycles of downward trends for Democrats who were campaigning from their basement. President Trump, who came within 1.5% in 2016, lost as an incumbent in 2020 by 7%. I outperformed the top of the ticket but still came up short in a race that was deadlocked in late October, according to a SurveyUSA poll.

Critics contend that charges of irregularities in the 2020 election are circumstantial. And I suppose they have a point. But it is difficult to prove intent to defraud if election officials won’t investigate. Kari Lake’s two-day lawsuit was dismissed even after witnesses stipulated myriad Maricopa machinations because, as the judge said “it wasn’t intentional.”

Right, and neither was the spiking of Hunter’s laptop days before the 2020 election.

But this isn’t about election do-overs (though a U.S. district court ordered just that in a contested North Carolina redistricting case), it’s about stopping the rewriting of election law by people who have no authority to do so. The legal bar is high and to have “standing” for injunctive relief, assertions can’t be “conjecture or hypothetical” or “merely speculative.” That made litigation for all but the very wealthiest campaigns cost prohibitive.

Too many conservative talking heads are capitulating, suggesting these unconstitutional voting changes are a fait accompli, and we must “learn to live by the new rules…” Hogwash! The GOP already has two strikes against it due to geographical barriers, i.e., it’s much easier to play the ballot-harvesting game in big centralized counties where the left thrives.

As I’ve said before, the GOP can still prevail in a few, heavily Red districts. But the combination of months-long early voting (before seeing John Fetterman debate) and COVID-inspired universal mail-in ballots makes it hard to see how Republicans win another close statewide race.

It’s time to get creative.

This article has been adapted from the author’s Substack page, which can be viewed here.

Former Congressman Jason Lewis is the author of Party Animal, The Truth About President Trump, Power Politics and the Partisan Press. He also writes at jasonlewis.substack.com.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

 

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