The Electoral Count Act and Lawfare

Our old friends in Maricopa County are back in the limelight again, having to deal with 90,000 last-minute voter registrations, 40,000 of which are too damaged to be processed. Wait until some of those 40,000 show up at the polls and find out they aren’t eligible to vote: can you say allegations of voter suppression?

I had outlined the Democrats’ obsession with “voter suppression” in a previous post; a term which seems to encompass any imposition of a requirement or restriction on voting. If you survey their various writings and pronouncements, you notice the topic has become part of their version of a Nicene Creed of belief regarding an unholy trinity also incorporating “fascism” and “Christian nationalism.”

I wrote in the same post about their hysterical response to the 2021 Election Integrity Act in Georgia which Joe Biden called “Jim Crow in the 21st Century.” The voter ID provisions that Biden and others pointed out as evidence of the return of Jim Crow? Overwhelming support among blacks in Georgia. The voting experience of blacks during the 2022 Georgia election? 72.6% said their experience was excellent with 0.0% citing a poor experience.

The two lessons from the Georgia experience are 1) blacks support common-sense voting requirements and 2) modern-day racial voting suppression for Democrats is a symbol with as much empirical evidence for its existence as the bogey-man. The best evidence that the Georgia laws didn’t suppress black turnout is that the Democrats no longer talk about it.

Put that aside for a moment. Let’s talk about the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022 (ECA) and what lawfare might look over the next few months.

The ECA was passed in response to the 2020 Election and creates a new process for any legal challenge to the presidential election in a given state, with offers of the possibility of expedited appeal to the Supreme Court. As John Yoo has stated, this new law not only invites but guarantees litigation (40:52).

The Supreme Court inserting itself into an election? The blowback from Bush v. Gore haunts the Court to do this day; witness the way it ran from any of the post-2020 election controversies by rejecting the various suits on the basis of standing. The Democrats have been beating the drum, stating not only that the Supreme Court is illegitimate as constituted, but in the last few years have dialed their rhetoric up to 11 by calling it partisan and corrupt.

Yet it very well may be that the Supreme Court will be asked to decide on matters that will affect who becomes president.

In that earlier post, I mentioned that the Department of Justice will be sending election monitors to 86 counties/cities and that 30% of those jurisdictions just happen to fall in the seven battleground states and include the largest political units within.

Keep in mind that the observers have little power to interfere with election day operations; their job is to observe and report their findings to Justice’s Office of Civil Rights. To call the OCR the Nazgul of the “voter suppression meme” is only slightly overstating things. I will guarantee you that, if they so wish, the OCR would be able to report (or most likely leak) “allegations” of problems with voting in any jurisdiction, from long lines due to poor staffing to people unable to vote because they couldn’t follow procedures.

So what’s this all about?

The job of the election observers is not to determine whether “improper partisan influence and voter suppression” occurred, but to record allegations of violations. The collection of any such data will cloud the validity of the election within particular jurisdictions and, because all of these jurisdictions are so large, within the states where those jurisdictions are located. The observers exist simply to move the desired plot along, the opening move for a lawfare operation.

During the 2020 election, these seven battleground states — AZ, GA, MI, NC, NV, PA, WI — had an average margin of victory of 55,105 votes, with a median margin of 27,139. Want to bet that some of those 40,000 damaged registrations in Maricopa are going to have an effect on Election Day with those observers around?

The validity of the claims will not matter so much as their existence, as they can provide a legal basis for filing litigation under the ECA. Keep in mind that for Democrats the existence of voter suppression exists outside of the realm of evidence and is instead a matter of faith. At the moment of filing litigation, the full impact of the Democrats’ prior efforts to delegitimize the Supreme Court will be felt, because the Court will be placed in a no-win situation.

If the Democrats file suit within a given state under ECA to invalidate the election results based on voter suppression, and then lose that litigation, and the Supreme Court denies their petition for writ of certiorari, the Democrats will claim the ruling to be illegitimate given their view that the Court is partisan and corrupt. They will claim the same if the Court accepts the Democrat’s writ and then rules against them, or if it accepts a Republican writ and rules for them.

Now fast forward to Jan. 6, 2025 when the electoral votes will be counted and certified.

The Democrats’ pit bull, Jamie Raskin, has already promised the Democrats will challenge any results that they believe were influenced by voter suppression.

Go back to the 2020 Transition Integrity Project and its Game 3, where John Podesta and the Democrats looked to overturn a Trump victory on the basis of allegations of voter suppression and of the fact that Trump failed to secure a victory in the popular vote. In short, they smelled weakness in Trump’s position and struck.

One stratagem the Democrats used in that scenario was to ask for recounts in Democrat-controlled states, with governors in several of those states sending separate slates of electors to counter those sent by the state legislatures.

Sure, TIP was a tabletop exercise, but it provided a road map then that is just as relevant now,

In addition to known knowns of the Democrats stating that Trump is disqualified from office due to his previous behavior in office and from his recent conviction, we also face the very strong possibility that the Democrats will try to delegitimize Trump’s win through allegations of voter suppression and other unfair tactics.

The job of those election observers is not interfere with Election Day so much as to perform the opening act for lawfare.