Former President Trump is all but certain to win the 2024 Republican presidential nomination and he will defeat President Biden in November — if the voters are allowed to decide the outcome. Though a number of polls show Trump leading in most if not all of the seven states that will be truly competitive this year, only Georgia and North Carolina have enacted meaningful election integrity legislation since the last presidential contest.
The remaining five have doggedly refused to adopt serious reforms that will ensure fair and honest elections. Not coincidentally, they include states that Biden won in 2020 by tiny margins after protracted post-election vote counting.
[B]eing ahead in the polls on Election Day means virtually nothing in an all mail-in state.
Arizona provides an illustrative example. According to the RealClearPolitics polling average, Trump leads Biden in the Grand Canyon State by 4.5 points. This obviously suggests that his chances of capturing its 11 electoral votes, particularly considering that he won them in 2016 and only lost to Biden by a miniscule 0.4 percent in 2020. The fly in the ointment is Arizona’s Democratic governor, Katie Hobbs. Despite the chaos and controversy that has characterized her state’s last two elections she has vetoed 21 election integrity bills passed by the Republican legislature. This won’t surprise anyone who read the guest editorial she wrote for the far left Democracy Docket about attacks on “our democracy” by the wicked GOP:
Across the country, Republican legislatures are hard at work passing laws to restrict and deny the fundamental and sacred freedom to vote. Even worse, conspiracy theorists are running for public office … There is no mistaking what these Republicans are doing. They are explicitly and unapologetically making the ballot box inaccessible for voters, especially for people of color and seniors. The freedom to vote is fundamental to our democracy.
Hobbs is by no means the only Democratic governor of a battleground state to wield the veto pen in the war against election integrity. In Wisconsin, where the RCP polling average shows Trump leading Biden by less than 1 point, Gov. Tony Evers has vetoed every election reform bill passed by the state’s Republican legislature. In 2022, he killed nine such bills, including legislation that would ban election officials from accepting grants from private entities (e.g. Zuckbucks). Evers also vetoed a measure that would have banned automatic mailing of absentee ballot applications to all registered voters. In 2023, he vetoed legislation that would have required the state Elections Commission to verify voter citizenship.
In nearby Michigan, where the RealClearPolitics polling average shows Trump leading Biden by 5.1 points, Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has made common cause with her Arizona and Wisconsin counterparts in their war on election integrity legislation. She has vetoed bills meant to make absentee ballot fraud a felony. Whitmer has killed measures that would have strengthened voter ID requirements. She has vetoed legislation requiring Michigan to clean up its voter rolls, ignoring a report from the state’s Auditor General that found multiple failures by the state’s Bureau of Elections to remove deceased voters and those who have failed to vote since the last century. Readers will find her rationalizations all too familiar:
I vetoed legislation that would have perpetuated the “Big Lie” or made it harder for Michiganders to vote. Right now, Michigan Republicans are participating in a coordinated, national attack on voting rights that is designed to undermine confidence in our election system and systematically disenfranchise Black voters, communities of color, older voters, and college students. I will have no part in any effort that grants an ounce of credence to this deception.
In Pennsylvania Trump’s poll numbers are underwhelming and election integrity legislation was throttled in the cradle by the current governor’s predecessor. Before his term ended in early 2023, Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf vetoed legislation that would have strengthened voter ID requirements, decreased the abuse of mail-in ballots, and tightened the rules governing ballot drop boxes. The current incumbent, Democrat Josh Shapiro, has been spared the necessity of using his veto pen on election reform because Pennsylvania’s General Assembly is divided. Republicans control its Senate and Democrats control its House of Representatives. Even if an election reform bill reached his desk, it would be vetoed by Shapiro. (READ MORE from David Catron: Is This What Biden Meant By ‘Unity’?)
The fifth state in which election integrity will be a serious problem in 2024 is Nevada. This should be a good state for Trump. The RCP average shows him leading Biden by 7 points, but the Silver State has now become the latest to conduct elections entirely by mail and ballot harvesting is legal. As former Senate candidate Adam Laxalt discovered in November of 2022, being ahead in the polls on Election Day means virtually nothing in an all mail-in state. It is no coincidence that every state that conducts its elections entirely by mail (California, Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, and Washington) have become single-party fiefdoms — all but one of which is controlled by Democrats. Nevada is unlikely to be an exception.
Where does this leave Trump’s bid to become the second President in American history to be elected to nonconsecutive terms? Assuming Trump wins every state he won in 2020, plus Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada he will still need a “blue wall” state to hit 270. Unless the bottom falls out due to a conviction for one of the “crimes” he has been charged with, he may well win Michigan. If a significant percentage of Muslim voters refuse to vote for Biden because of his (tepid) support for Israel or Trump picks up a lot of the union vote, it’s plausible. If he wins those 15 electoral votes, he could afford to give up Arizona or Nevada. This will overcome Trump’s swing state challenge and restore the public’s faith in our elections.
via magatribute
