ELECTION FRAUD IS COMING FROM INSIDE THE GOP
Last week, as North Carolina’s Board of Elections was coming to grips with what increasingly resembles a case of genuine election fraud in the state’s 9th congressional district, House Speaker Paul Ryan was talking at an event in Washington.
Speaking of election results in California, where Republican candidates were wiped off the map of traditionally Republican Orange County, Ryan called the results “bizarre” and in deiance of “logic.” He said:
“We were only down 26 seats the night of the election and three weeks later, we lost basically every California race. This election system they have — I can’t begin to understand what ‘ballot harvesting’ is.”
Ryan has run a longstanding, uncannily successful con in Washington, where he has voted for trillions in debt under Republican presidents while making an obstreperous, high-dudgeon ruse of iscal hawkishness. But Ryan has side-stepped the seediest elements of his party’s moral collapse. Unlike his even more cynical Senate counterpart, Mitch Mcconnell, Ryan occasionally voices objection to some grotesque display of racism or moral turpitude by his party’s leader in the White House.
When I asked Ryan’s ofice why he was joining in the efforts of his party’s least credible members, including President Donald Trump, to undermine conidence in the integrity of the vote — without a shred of evidence that something’s awry — a spokesman pointed me to a previous statement delivered to the Hill newspaper, saying Ryan “did not and does not dispute the results of the election.”
Good to know that when the speaker of the House pours kerosene on conspiracy theories, he’s not rooting for the republic to burn down.
Ryan’s spokesman didn’t respond to an emailed question about North Carolina, where the state is investigating whether a local Republican operative, Leslie Mccrae Dowless, helped Republican congressional candidate Mark Harris win a narrow victory by collecting, and possibly disposing of, Democratic mail ballots.
The daily crisis that is Trump’s presidency often obscures the extended crisis that is the Republican Party. In Michigan and Wisconsin Republican legislators are seeking to steal not votes but their meaning. Having lost statewide elections in November, the Republicans, many representing intricately gerrymandered districts, intend to rob incoming Democrats of the powers of their ofices, voters be damned. They are smashing the peaceful transition of power without which democracy instantly fails.
The Trump era combines the criminality of Watergate with the demagogy of Mccarthyism. But Mueller, a Republican of the old school, can’t save democracy from the demagogy of the new school. The sick irony of the emerging scandal in North Carolina is that if GOP election fraud is indeed proved to have taken place, Republicans will soon have the evidence they lacked for so long. Future voter suppression will be justiied on the grounds that Republicans must protect the sanctity of the vote from themselves.