by Ned Ryun
Joe Biden has claimed “democracy is under attack” and that to save “democracy” we must annihilate Senate norms such as the legislative filibuster. If you don’t believe that this crisis exists and act immediately, his argument goes, the sun won’t rise ever again; the oceans will dry up, and you’re an evil racist like Jefferson Davis, Bull Connor, and George Wallace (Democrats every last one—and Biden actually sought Wallace’s support back when Biden wanted to be liked by the Wallaces and Byrds of the Democratic Party.) But why let facts get in the way of a good Grandpa Dementia bedtime story?
Of course the real reason for the shrieking hysteria from Biden and the Left is that they’re confronting what is likely to be an electoral tsunami in the fall. Most Americans with half a brain have realized after a year under the Biden presidency that the Left’s policies and politicians are absolute failures. That’s why Biden has a 33 percent approval rating. And it’s why moderate Democrats like Senators Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) want nothing to do with Biden, his policies, or his efforts at rewriting Senate rules.
Progressives of course had a premonition that their policies would wreak havoc upon the American people. To protect themselves from electoral accountability they immediately introduced a bill to federalize election law for the Left’s partisan advantage. This comes as no surprise from the Democratic Party of Tammany Hall, which has a long, sordid history of rigging election laws to hang onto power through the intimidation of voters.
Now the Democrats want to add to this notorious history by allowing 16 year-olds, illegal immigrants, and non-citizens to vote, with universal mail-in ballots, privatized takeovers of elections (by leftist billionaires, no less), no photo ID, election weeks in lieu of Election Day, and the list goes on and on.
Having seen the success of their extra-legal rigging of the 2020 election with “emergency measures,” the Democrats demand they be made permanent. But above all, to reverse their political fortunes, what the Democrats really want—no, what they need—is H.R. 4, which is a patent voter intimidation bill.
Just like everything else the Left tries to rebrand or rewrite, we should be clear about what H.R. 4 is. It’s not about vote integrity. It’s about their pursuit of one party power (theirs of course). And it’s absolutely about voter intimidation. The Democrats are hell-bent on it.
Why do you think the Democrats want to take voting further and further away from the poll booth? It’s to annihilate the idea of a secret ballot. In America, we have a secret ballot to protect voters from intimidation or remuneration for doing their civic duty. At polling locations, it is far easier to protect voters and their privacy from the prying eyes of those who would intimidate them and usurp their right to vote as they see fit.
But mail-in voting has few such safeguards. The ones it does have are difficult to enforce and Democrats are intent on removing even those. When a ballot harvester is amassing his bounty in a senior center, who will protect the elderly from being intimidated to vote a certain way? Who will protect the vulnerable voter from being steered to cast a ballot by someone paid to “assist” him?
This is not an abstract question. Remember the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL)? In 2020, with the help of hundreds of millions of Mark Zuckerberg’s “Zuck Bucks” channeled through CTCL, the Left hired commissars to go into senior centers to ballot harvest (read: fill out seniors’ ballots for them) with no protection for seniors’ privacy rights. The abuse was so rampant in elder care facilities in Wisconsin that criminal charges have been filed.
But screw the law and all that: the Left wants to do it again. Why? Because there were no consequences the last time they rigged the election. Now they just need to replicate those conditions again and again and again so Democrats continue to get their way.
We saw in 2020 some of the most vulnerable and defenseless groups of people coerced into voting together with no privacy protections and Democrats want to make that a permanent thing. If this bill passes, it will codify mass coercion and the intimidation of voters will not be stoppable.
Secret ballots can only really be enforced at the polls. That’s why we need to ban mail-in ballots except in extreme cases, ban electronic voting machines, return to paper ballots, and make Election Day a national holiday during which we celebrate our democratic process. Otherwise we will not have free and fair elections again and there will be no guaranteed peaceful transfer of power because people will no longer believe in the process.
Sane people know that every last measure inside the Democrats’ voting bill is an attempt to codify corruption. If you advocate against photo ID and in-person voting, you’re doing it for one reason: you want to cheat. Europe knows that, even if they made exceptions in the last election cycle. France outlawed the use of mail-in ballots in 1975 with many European countries requiring photo ID to vote, meaning most advanced countries still hold to some standards of free and fair elections. But not the American Left.
Those who care about protecting vulnerable voters from the Democrats’ intimidation should oppose H.R. 4 and every other iteration of the Democrats’ attempts to irrevocably corrupt the process.
If not, the Democrats want to make sure you never get another chance.
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Ned Ryun is a former presidential writer for George W. Bush and the founder and CEO of American Majority. You can find him on Twitter @nedryun.
Photo “Election Day” by Phil Roeder CC 2.0.
