Saunders: The So-Called Plot To Fix the 2024 Election

Most Americans don’t stay up nights worrying about “voting rights” reforms in the belief that they are needed to eliminate what progressives call “barriers to voting.”

A September Morning Consult poll found that 44% of U.S. adults believe voting rules are not strict enough, while “only” one-third believe it’s too difficult for eligible Americans to cast their ballots.

Yet big media are obsessed with stories about GOP attempts to make it difficult to vote, even if most voters don’t see a big problem.

In The Atlantic, Pulitzer Prize winner Barton Gellman writes of a “plot” to steal the 2024 election. “Thousands of votes will be thrown away, or millions, to produce the required effect,” he predicts. “The winner will be declared the loser. The loser will be certified president-elect.”

“Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun,” the headline reads.

The next presidential election is three years away, and already leftists are concocting dubious reasons they could lose. They’re already writing pre-conspiracy screeds.

Note that when the conservatives challenge how elections are conducted, the media lament that the right is undermining public faith in elections.

When progressives do likewise, it’s like a tree falling in the woods with no one there.

In her new book, “Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections,” Fox News regular Mollie Hemingway quotes Democratic pols who claim the 2016 election was “stolen.” (Hillary Clinton said that.)

In 2019, former President Jimmy Carter told NPR, “Trump didn’t actually win the election.” You don’t see a lot of fact checks or stories about election “misinformation” from these sore losers.

The real misinformation, Hemingway points out, was the false story about Russia colluding with the Trump campaign — which Special Counsel Robert Mueller did not find — and the impeachment efforts, based on the bogus Russian collusion fiction, that followed.

Hemingway catalogues the various ways Democrats gamed COVID-19 to increase voting by mail and extend when people could vote and where. At the same time, signature verification and other safeguards were relaxed. Ahead of the November general election, 39 states changed their election laws or rules.

When it was over, Biden won.

My view: They changed the rules in the light of day. It was the campaigns’ job to adjust accordingly. That’s the American way.

But when Republicans try to peel back the changes also in the light of day, Gellman sees “election theft.”

Not a coincidence: President Joe Biden’s poll numbers are underwater with 52% disapproval and 42.3% approval, according to the latest RealClearPolitics polling average. Americans disapprove of his handling of the economy, the coronavirus, immigration, foreign policy and the direction of the country.

At the end of a very long and tortured piece, Gellman concedes that former President Donald Trump or another Republican could win a fair election in 2024.

He uses the word “coup” anyway.

Trump likewise threw shade at the electoral process, even though he won in 2016.

In 2017, Trump named an election integrity panel. It disbanded after six months with no evidence of the fraud Trump had alleged.

Either election integrity meant little to Trump or he was incapable of luring the best people to fight bad actors. Or, most likely, Trump just wanted something other than himself to blame if he lost in 2020. Which he did.

The next presidential election is three years off, and already Democrats are constructing arguments that explain their loss: They were outplayed by a ruthless team. If only they hadn’t been so trusting.

But really, who would believe that?

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