Originally published August 18, 2020
https://cnsnews.com/commentary/moshe-hill/mail-voting-comes-down-one-issue-trust
The latest Democrat conspiracy theory, cooked up in the bowels of Capitol Hill, served by the newsrooms in New York and Los Angeles, and eaten by the gullible masses of Democratic voters, is that the Trump administration is waging a war on the Postal Service. The brilliance of this conspiracy theory is the simple assumed premise that mail-in voting is not only necessary, but inevitable for the upcoming elections this November.
The evolution and dissemination of the conspiracy theory is well-documented and ultimately irrelevant. Mail-in voting cannot be allowed in the upcoming election because elections, to be considered “legitimate,” must have a basis of trust. In the most politically divided time in a half a century, is there any side of the political aisle that trusts the other not to do whatever it can to win?
Look at a small sampling of comments over the past few years.
This past February, a Baltimore area high school comparedPresident Donald Trump to Nazis and communists. Comparing Trump to Hitler has become commonplace since he announced his candidacy. Books have been written about it. A 2018 Washington Post article proclaimed that “it’s not wrong to compare Trump’s America to the Holocaust.” House majority whip Jim Clyburn (D-SC) recently said “I used to wonder: How did the people of Germany allow Hitler to exist? But with each passing day, I’m beginning to understand how.”
The Nazi comparisons don’t end with Trump. A 2018 article by Holocaust historian Christopher Browning in the New York Review Of Books said that Mitch McConnell was the “gravedigger of American democracy.” Former CNBC host and MSNBC contributor Donny Deutch said on “Morning Joe” in 2018 “if you vote for Trump then you, the voter, you, not Donald Trump, are standing at the border, like Nazis, going ‘you here, you here.’”
Trump voters have had to endure slings and arrows from the intellectual elite for their decision in 2016, regardless of reasons for casting their ballot.
“If you support Donald Trump, you are a racist,” wrote Michigan Democratic Party Chairwoman Lavora Barnes. “Here is where it gets tricky and uncomfortable. Donald Trump is a racist, and if being a racist is not a deal-breaker for you, you are the reason black people are being murdered for being black.”
The Los Angeles Times published an op-ed entitled “Why Do Trump’s Supporters Deny the Racism That Seems So Evident to Democrats?” in which the author, a law professor at UC Berkeley, argues that Trump’s racist dog whistles give his supporters enough plausible deniability to say that he’s not a racist. He also admits that 87 percent of Trump voters say he’s not racist, while 91 percent of Hillary voters say Trump is a racist.
So here we are, in 2020, with half the country thinking that the president is a racist, a Nazi, and destroying the “soul of the nation”, as Joe Biden puts it. Trump’s successes, according to vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris, are Obama’s, and his failures, especially the 2020 economy, are solely his own and have nothing to do with coronavirus. If they are true believers in what they are saying, and one has to assume that is the case, then why wouldn’tthey do anything and everything to win, regardless of the means.
Ballot harvesting is a legitimate problem for a free and fair election. In 2018, multiple traditionally Republican congressional House seats flipped Democrat on the back of harvested ballots, around 250,000 of which were dropped off on election day. Some states have bar codes on the outside of their ballots, where a clear “R” or “D” is marked, specifying if the recipient or sender of that ballot is a registered Republican or Democrat. Voter rolls in many states have incorrect information, so homes can receive ballots for former owners, alive, or deceased. CBS conducted an experiment in which 3 percent of ballots were never received.
Taking the facts that the left hates Trump with a passion and the system itself is wide open to a variety of fraudulent actions, the vote comes down to one thing: trust. Should Republicans trust Democrats not to cheat? Should Republicans trust that Democrats will accept the results of the 2020 election when they still haven’t accepted the results of 2016? There is not enough of a social fabric in this country to automatically throw a presidential election in such turmoil. But maybe turmoil is exactly what the Democrats are aiming for.
Moshe Hill is a fellow for Chovevei Zion, political analyst and columnist. His work can be found on his blog, www.aHillwithaView.com. You can follow on Twitter @TheMoHilland on Facebook @aHillwithaView.
