‘While McConnell has spent his career gutting voting rights, we are making it easier for working Californians to vote…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headline) One of the few staffers remaining after the Huffington Post‘s recent downsizing took it upon himself Tuesday to fact-check statements by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on the recent ballot fraud in North Carolina.
Instead, the ‘fact-check’ proved yet another example of leftist media fakery.
HuffPo reporter Sam Levine has covered North Carolina‘s 9th Congressional District scandal as part of his ‘voting rights’ beat throughout the months of breaking developments and investigative efforts by the State Board of Elections.
Yet, in his armchair journalism, Levine overlooked entirely the extensive history of voter fraud committed by Democrats in rural, tobacco- and textile-driven Bladen County, where the high school band turns up to play the opening of a new Hardee’s.
In his efforts to discredit McConnell, Levine used the exact phony tropes that McConnell had criticized, thereby illustrating the Left’s disingenuous posturing on matters of election integrity.
The ‘Fraud’ Sham
Levine’s article quoted McConnell on the Senate floor decrying Democrats’ hypocrisy over voter fraud. “For years and years, every Republican who dared to call for common-sense safeguards for American ballots was demonized by Democrats and their allies,” McConnell said. “We were hit with left-wing talking points insisting that voter fraud wasn’t real.”
But McConnell noted that Democrats were now relishing in the opportunity to pin such charges on an opponent, despite their having so frequently downplayed the issue.
“So now, as you might expect, now that an incident of very real voter fraud has become national news and the Republican candidate seems—seems—to have benefited, these long-standing Democratic talking points have been really quiet,” McConnell said.
To counter, Levine harped on the nuanced distinction between polling-place fraud and absentee-ballot fraud, while falsely claiming that the former does not impact elections.
The article bolstered the partisan talking point by referencing a 2006 study on the 2004 election to assert that no significant polling-place fraud exists in 2019.
Unfortunately for America, the political landscape has changed dramatically since the year when incumbent Republican George W. Bush, still riding high in popularity after the 9/11 attacks, defeated John Kerry.
It was only during the Obama years that the Alinsky-reading community organizer—with help from friends like George Soros—began encouraging election overseers to deploy the type of corrupt, partisan tactics long used in his adopted hometown of Chicago to systematically undermine election integrity.
The HuffPo’s treatment of the voter-fraud issue ignored considerable documented evidence nationwide that shows hundreds of thousands of non-citizen immigrants often are added automatically to the voting rolls and allowed to vote with very little scrutiny in the same “sanctuary cities” that openly flout federal immigration laws.
Additionally the bloated voter registries include deceased voters (some still on the rolls from the 19th century), duplicate voters and others who are ineligible to vote by law (e.g. certain convicted felons).
As McConnell said in his Senate remarks, reasonable efforts at reform—such as voter ID laws and tighter restrictions on the use of provisional or absentee ballots—have been met with considerable resistance from Democrats, who dubiously claim that forcing voters to physically appear at the polling place and provide rudimentary evidence of their identity would disfranchise many.
Democrats have claimed “that modest efforts to ensure that voters who are who they say they are and are voting in the proper place were really some sinister right-wing plot to prevent people from voting,” McConnell said.
The Bladen County Machine
Perhaps aware of the lack of evidentiary support for his false claims on polling-place fraud, Levine’s HuffPo piece quickly pivoted to discussing details of the North Carolina case, where recently indicted political operative McCrae Dowless was hired by GOP candidate Mark Harris to assist with a range of “get out the vote” initiatives.
Naturally, Levine attempted to paint Harris, a Baptist minister by trade, in the most nefarious of lights by selectively highlighting and omitting details of the investigation in his three-sentence summary.
He also used an embedded tweet from go-to Democratic attorney Marc Elias to attack Republican ballot fraud, ignoring countless cases in which Elias himself has personally been implicated in committing such fraud to overturn election results that favored Republicans.
Moreover, the HuffPo piece disregarded the fact that Democrats also have been implicated in North Carolina’s ballot-harvesting efforts—although when Republicans raised complaints against Democratic candidates, including current North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, they were summarily dismissed.
Dowless, the operative at the center of the current scandal, had a reputation as a political mercenary-for-hire in Bladen County, where he had previously counted Democratic candidates among his client list.
More significantly, the HuffPo made no mention of the Bladen County Improvement Society—nor has it in any of its coverage, according to a simple search. The Democratic political-action committee is accused of using the same tactics Dowless allegedly used to manipulate elections.
Both Dowless and the pro-Democrat BCIS were well known to state-level elections officials and investigators during the 2018 campaigns following past allegations of ballot fraud in 2016 and earlier.
In fact, Dowless himself had filed a complaint against the BCIS, charging that he had been the victim of ballot-harvesting in a municipal race for the sanitation department.
Among those who were aware of the past complaints was Joshua Malcolm, a partisan left-wing member of the state Board of Elections who had deep ties to the corrupt Bladen political machine.
It was Malcolm who, in late November, first raised the last-minute objections to certifying Harris, citing the longstanding fraud issues in his part of the state. However, he also had motioned to dismiss the similar claims that Dowless raised against Democrats about the 2016 race.
Although many Democrats likely benefited from Bladen County’s ballot-fraud operations before Harris did, Malcolm’s sudden selective outrage and his choice of timing to block the Republican winner seemed all too convenient.
California Corruption
Glossing over the Bladen County Democrats’ corruption, Levine jumped from his cursory explanation of the North Carolina fraud into another McConnell charge, that the issues in the “Tarheel State” paralleled those in California.
In 2017, lame-duck California Gov. Jerry Brown legalized precisely the sort of ballot harvesting that Dowless stands accused of in North Carolina. Miraculously, the following year, the West Coast liberal stronghold was able to reverse the election-night victories of multiple GOP candidates through late returns of absentee ballots, with some of the disputed precincts’ tallies lasting for weeks afterward.
This effectively halved the number of Republican congressmen in the state, where they already were drastically under-represented.
“We have no way to know if those ballots were sealed or even voted when they were harvested,” McConnell said. “The only evidence we have is the voter cast his or her ballot is the signature. Now, this past election cycle turned out favorably for California Democrats.”
But despite the clear double-standard Democrats applied, expressing indignation in North Carolina for the same ploy they had just legalized in California, partisan shills like Levine and Washington Post columnist Phillip Bump attempted to spin and redirect the issue.
The HuffPo article cited an estimate by President Donald Trump that in California there were up to a million illegal votes cast in the 2018 midterm—only to dismiss it by saying “There’s no evidence that’s true.”
Nor, of course, is there any evidence that there is no evidence. That’s because Democrats have no intention of investigating or providing evidence of their own corruption.
However, after California was forced by freedom-of-information lawsuits to disclose its voter rolls, a recent Judicial Watch examination revealed that 112 percent of the eligible adults in Los Angeles County were registered.
In January, the state pledged as part of a settlement agreement to remove some 1.5 million inactive voters from its registry. It remained unclear, however, what evidence California officials will provide to demonstrate their compliance.
As if to underscore the Left’s blatant and unapologetic duplicity, Levine’s HuffPo piece allowed California’s radical secretary of State, Alex Padilla, to have the last word.
Ironically, Padilla deflected from his own state’s issues by accusing McConnell of deflection, before offering a non-denial denial about California’s support for rampant ballot fraud.
“In a page straight out of Donald Trump’s playbook, Mitch McConnell is trying to deflect away from corruption perpetrated by North Carolina Republican campaign operatives by attacking California,” said Padilla.
Nowhere, however, did Padilla’s statement seem to discount the fact that California likely used illegal votes to overturn the Republican victories. Instead, he euphemistically touted “voting rights” that, presumably, included those who were legally ineligible or otherwise cast potentially fraudulent votes.
“While McConnell has spent his career gutting voting rights, we are making it easier for working Californians to vote,” Padilla said. “In California, we’re expanding voter registration opportunities, expanding early voting and vote-by-mail, and giving voters the choice to decide who they trust to return their vote-by-mail ballot.”