Elites Are Undermining Election Integrity To Help Biden

As far as the Democrats are concerned, anyone who doubted that the 2020 presidential election was “the most secure election in American history” is an insurrectionist “election denier.” And such “deniers” are, in this formulation, a threat to democracy whose efforts must be thwarted again in 2024. But the assumptions behind this mindset are the reason why it is President Joe Biden’s political party, not the Republicans, that may well be the real threat to election integrity and democracy this year.

Having spent the last three and a half years trashing their political foes as authoritarians, Democrats have come to believe their success at the ballot box is indistinguishable from the survival of American democracy. But, while most Americans don’t buy Donald Trump’s continued claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him, that isn’t going to be enough to give Biden another four years in the White House.

The Democrat’s performance on a host of issues like immigration, inflation, and foreign policy reinforce the perception that his age has diminished his capacity to govern. That has left his approval ratings deep under water. Trump leads in the polls for both head-to-head matchups with Biden and those involving third-party candidates, as well as in most of the battleground states which will decide the election.

Though all that could change in the next six months, it still raises the question of how Democrats would react to defeat. Starting in early 2022, many in the corporate liberal media have been predicting that Republicans would try to cheat or steal the 2024 vote. At the heart of this panic about their opponents was a conviction that Trump and the GOP could only win by foul play.

But Democrats’ adoption of deeply undemocratic tactics, such as seeking to censor dissenters against favored policies and opposing state laws intended to avoid repeating the pandemic-induced chaos that undermined faith in the integrity of the vote, has reinforced Trump’s narrative.

Most importantly, the banana republic-style lawfare campaign against Trump is causing many on the Right to wonder whether Democrats will let themselves lose an election under any circumstances. Their all-out effort to bankrupt, imprison, or throw their opponent off the ballot is the chief threat to the integrity of the 2024 vote and, consequently, democracy.

The Democrats have been campaigning for more than a decade against what previous generations would have thought were normal election practices. Their opposition to voter ID laws that have the support of overwhelming majorities of voters, including minorities, was based on the assertion that cheating was unheard of in American politics. But one could only believe that by forgetting everything about American political history and human nature. Given the stakes involved in elections, it’s safe to assume that both major parties will do just about anything to win.

That doesn’t mean either party will cheat this year or that it is inevitable that Democrats won’t accept a loss to Trump. But their narrative about saving democracy and the raw hatred for Trump is producing the sort of rhetoric that may justify playing dirty in order to serve what they consider to be a higher purpose than the laws on the books.

The Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot gave Democrats the moral high ground on elections. But their attempt to inflate that disgraceful event into a full-blown insurrection akin to the Civil War and to label anyone who raised doubts about what happened in 2020 as enemies of democracy discarded that advantage.

The circumstances of the pandemic created an unprecedented election in which vast numbers of voters did not cast their ballots in person on election day with the normal safeguards. Democratic legislatures discarded many of those safeguards because of what journalist Molly Ball described as a vast “conspiracy” by left-wing activists, liberal big business executives, and partisan unions to turn out large numbers of mail-in voters.

Throw in the way Silicon Valley oligarchs and mainstream media outlets conspired to silence reporting about a major Biden family corruption scandal in the weeks before the vote, and you had an election that may not have been stolen, but wasn’t entirely fair either. The way the security establishment cooperated with corporate media to sabotage Trump evoked the sort of behavior that Washington labels as undemocratic when it happens elsewhere in the world.

Will they do it again?

There are some ominous signs that Democrats will bend or break rules if they think it will help them. Liberal think tanks may talk about threats to the vote. Yet their attempt to label election laws about cleaning up the voter rolls and ensuring a fair count as well as the right to appeal questionable results as “election subversion” seems more a matter of projection than a sensible guide to protecting the process. Democrat-led legislatures might take that to heart later this year and begin undermining efforts toward a fair count.

Having invested so much effort in predicting another Trump “coup,” liberal outlets have already begun speculating about how Democrats might try their own insurrection by using Congress to invalidate an Electoral College vote that went against Biden—exactly the same thing they accuse Republicans of attempting to do in 2021.

And that’s not even counting the certainty that a Trump victory would set off more “mostly peaceful” riots in American cities. There is nothing worse for democracy than a clear threat of violence if one side doesn’t get its way.

At this point, it’s not clear that either major political party is willing to trust a result that goes against them. But Democrats have already proved in courtrooms—like the one in Manhattan where Trump is currently forced to stay—that they are prepared to do just about anything to win. It remains to be seen if even a clear Trump victory in both the popular vote and the Electoral College would be enough to prevent the 2024 election from descending into chaos in November.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS.org and a senior contributor to The Federalist. Follow him @jonathans_tobin.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.