A LOOMING THREAT TO OUR DEMOCRACY

A LOOMING THREAT TO OUR DEMOCRACY

BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN ELECTION LAW, VOTER FRAUD

Liberals love to talk about threats to “our democracy,” which just means threats to Democrats winning elections. Voting is a threat to “our democracy” when it doesn’t go their way.

But there is a very real threat to our democracy making its way through state legislatures. It is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. I wrote about it as far back as 2019. The “compact” is legislation, adopted state by state, that outsources voting in presidential elections.

States that subscribe to the compact agree that their presidential electoral votes will be cast, not for the candidate who won their state, but rather for the candidate who got the most votes nationwide. So if you live in a small or medium-sized state, you are essentially outsourcing your presidential votes to California, Texas, New York, Florida and Illinois.

Why would any state choose to do this? The idea is to, in effect, abolish the Electoral College without having to pass a constitutional amendment. The effects on presidential campaigns would be profound. Two such effects stand out.

First, presidential candidates would no longer pretend to care about smaller states. The Electoral College was intended in part to make sure that all states, not just the most populous ones, would impact national elections. Under the compact, campaigns will be devoted to driving maximum partisan turnout in the states where each party dominates–California, Texas, and so on. Who cares about South Dakota when there are millions of votes to be had in Florida? The interstate compact would turn our republic into a country that essentially is governed by plebiscite.

Second, the compact would put a premium on voter fraud. Already, there is no shortage of cheating, but each state’s boundary is a firewall. Philadelphia has been notorious for voter fraud for a century or more, and it may be able to elect a statewide candidate like John Fetterman. But the worst that fraud can do is swing a single state, so its impact is limited.

Under a popular vote regime, there is no limit to the impact that voter fraud can have. The premium will be on ballot harvesting, both legal and illegal. If you can come up with millions of illegal votes by stuffing ballot boxes in California, Illinois, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and so on, they all will count. Presidential elections will become a race to the bottom.

Apparently, Minnesota is about to be the latest state to adopt the compact. Our legislature is narrowly controlled by the Democrats–one vote in the Senate–but the DFL’s party discipline has been remarkable, and they have adopted one radical measure after another. The compact has now passed both the House and (by one vote) the Senate, as part of a larger elections package that is intended to institutionalize, for the foreseeable future, Democratic control over the state of Minnesota–control that the Democrats won on November by a few hundred votes.

It was Turkey’s Recep Erdogan who said that democracy is like a streetcar: when you get to your stop, you get off. That is the philosophy that the Democratic Party is trying to implement.

The popular vote compact is dangerously close to taking effect. By its terms, it becomes law when states representing more than one-half of electoral votes have approved it. Currently, states representing 195 of the necessary 270 electoral votes have signed the compact. Minnesota would bring that total to 205. One of these days, Americans may wake up to find that the manner in which we elect our president has radically changed, perhaps forever.

We can’t let that happen.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2023/04/a-looming-threat-to-our-democracy.php