'Existential Threat': Mollie Hemingway Lays Bare the Problems With America's Elections
As America barrels toward another presidential election with many of the issues arising from 2020's vote still unresolved, no one knows exactly what will happen on Election Day, nor can we be certain whose names will be on the ballot by then. In addition to the uncertainty caused by multiple legal cases, flurries of appeals, and first-of-their-kind prosecutions of the former president-turned-2024 frontrunner, how America will elect its next president is another point of swirling disquiet.
As only she can, Federalist Editor-in-Chief and bestselling author Mollie Hemingway succinctly described the issues with America's elections in under four minutes flat while testifying before the Committee on House Administration on Wednesday, outlining this "existential threat to our system of self-government."
Contrasting what should — and used to — be "an Election Day where everyone votes at the same time and with the same full set of information, votes are counted quickly, and everyone promptly knows and trusts the outcome," Hemingway pointed to the "absurd" current situation where "lengthy election seasons that can last months prior to and even after Election Day" mean "we have presidential and gubernatorial debates weeks after some people have already voted."
As part of these "election seasons," and "instead of having total security and a verifiable chain of custody for ballots being issued, cast, and counted, we flood addresses across the country with tens of millions of unsupervised mail-in ballots months ahead of elections frequently to locations from which voters — if they're even alive — have long since moved," explained Hemingway.
What's more, the people overseeing our votes in government offices "have allowed the private takeover of government election offices by partisan oligarchs and their armies of activists who use those offices and their authorities to tilt the election toward favored candidates," she testified.
"In the last presidential election, nonprofit groups — with very strong ties to the Democrat party and funded by one of the world's wealthiest and most powerful men, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg — took over government election offices, most notably in the Democrat areas of swing states," Hemingway said of another situation that deserves immediate attention. "Since then, the efforts by partisans to further infiltrate government election offices to ensure favorable outcomes have only increased," she warned.
Addressing efforts to remove Trump from the ballot in a handful of states — situations set to be argued before the Supreme Court on Thursday morning — Hemingway said such actions are "reminiscent of Soviet Russia" as are Democrat Party efforts to "throw its opponent in prison and bankrupt his family. Instead of a system of rule of law that gives Americans the same rights and due process, the Department of Justice and other partisan actors are prosecuting their opposition, whether powerful or lowly, and doing so in places where partisan juries will ensure a quick conviction," Hemingway noted.
While all that chaos has been developing, Hemingway emphasized that voters have been left without "a free and independent press that shares news and information to help inform voters" and instead "have a press that is almost exclusively the arm of one political party and is so corrupt that it is willing to perpetrate hoax after hoax against opposition party members."
And on another level, Hemingway lamented the lack of a "vibrant public square where Americans can debate issues and express their strongly held views" caused by an "elaborate censorship-industrial complex where the government works hand in hand with tech oligarchs to suppress and blacklist debate on all the important issues that contribute to election outcomes. This is something I know first-hand because our government worked with tech companies to censor me for my election reporting," she reminded.
"Just one of these attacks to infect our electoral system would be a crisis," Hemingway remarked. "Allowing all of them at the same time is an existential threat to our system of self-government."
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