‘I’m asking you, is it right or wrong?’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Among the many hypocrisies present during the closely watched election-fraud investigation in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District, Democrats who long have dismissed GOP concerns suddenly have found religion when the result adversely affects them.
While liberal influencers such as Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Bernie Sanders previously scoffed at well-documented accusations that illegal immigrants, convicted felons and other ineligible voters could be padding the final tallies in large numbers, Fox News said “Democrats have seemingly taken a more sober tack” in the recent ballot scandal.
The issue centers around charges that unsealed absentee ballots in North Carolina’s Bladen County were “harvested,” meaning collected by a third party who then may have tampered in a variety of ways. Evidence points to the likelihood that GOP-paid operative McCrae Dowless conducted such an operation, which even the state’s GOP leaders and the winning candidate, Mark Harris, acknowledge will likely result in a district-wide re-vote at the investigation’s conclusion.
Notwithstanding that the exact concerns over absentee ballots were derided by partisan investigators when former Republican Gov. Pat McCrory raised them in the 2016 election—after he was defeated by current Democrat Gov. Roy Cooper—still, some on the Left continued to split hairs at the difference between the “polling-place” fraud that Republicans have long objected to and the “mail-in” ballot fraud that transpired in NC-09.
Ezra Rosenberg, co-director of the leftist Voting Rights Project, told Fox News: “There is no evidence that [in-person] voter fraud exists to any discernible degree.”
However, he added, there was no comparison between that issue, which has prompted GOP legislatures like that in North Carolina to push for tough voter ID laws, and the falsification of absentee ballots.
“The sort of organized, wide-scale fraud, allegedly engineered by organizations such as those reported to have been involved in North Carolina is a different animal altogether,” Rosenberg said. “It actually is ‘fraud on voters,’ on a group basis, because others are allegedly fooling huge batches of voters by casting their votes for candidates the voters themselves did not intend.”
In asserting the high ground on MSNBC’s “Hardball,” host Chris Matthews seemed to make a similar distinction while framing it as a moral and ethical issue to Dallas Woodhouse, executive director of the North Carolina Republican Party.
“I’m asking you, is it right or wrong” to pay someone to deliver the most absentee ballots, Wallace said, directing his attack not on Dowless but on the candidate, Harris—a Baptist minister who has denied knowing at the time of Dowless’s alleged illegal activity.
“I think that’s at the heart of this corruption, the belief that you can deliver victory among the absentee ballots if you—in that county especially, in Bladen County—if you control the way that they were harvested,” Matthews said.
Never known for his self-awareness, Matthews’ line of questioning ironically finds him and his Democratic allies fixating on the splinter in the GOP’s eye while ignoring the log in their own.
In California, Gov. Jerry Brown signed a law two years ago that legalizes precisely the sort of ballot-harvesting activity that is at issue in North Carolina. Not coincidentally, Democrats were able to flip seven of the GOP’s 14 Congressional seats, including many where the GOP’s election-night victories were reversed by late returns.
Some Democrats, including Califoria’s secretary of state, mocked retiring House Speaker Paul Ryan after a recent forum for pointing out how “bizarre” the new law was.
“When you win the absentee ballots and you win the in-person vote, where I come from, you win the election,” Ryan said.
Although Ryan stopped short of accusing California Democrats of “nefarious” activity, it was reported in November that at least nine people in the Los Angeles area were arrested for soliciting votes from homeless people, paying them in cash or cigarettes for signatures on ballot petitions.
Somehow, nobody on the Left clamored for the result to be reversed, and L.A. County elections chief Dean Logan seemed to downplay the concerns at the time. “It’s not really voter fraud, in terms of illegal voting and manipulation,” Logan told the Los Angeles Times. “But I am certainly concerned about any activity that causes voters to lose faith in the process.”
By attempting to selectively assert their partisan upper-hand in the 9th District and ignore or rationalize other instances of fraud, Democrats may win the battle in North Carolina, but in the process they will sacrifice any vestiges of moral authority.