Monica Showalter uses North Carolina’s recent 9th Congressional District fiasco to make a larger point in the American Thinker about election practices nationwide.
Speaking as a Republican, why shouldn’t there be a new election? Fraud has been committed, and anyone who has principles about free and fair elections is going to want that result thrown out. Most Republicans do, so the whole North Carolina spectacle is as disgusting to Republicans as it is to Democrats. And yes, a redo is likely to lead to a Democratic pickup of North Carolina’s 9th District seat, given that Democrats are likely to be even more energized by the scandal than they had been earlier. If you know that your ballot wasn’t counted, you’d be darn sure to go to the polling place on the new election day and turn it in to the ballot box yourself to make sure it is counted. People’s votes should count, so whatever the outcome, fair elections deserve to be the standard and the lesson.
The sorry spectacle does have a silver lining for Republicans. The incident shows just how dangerous ballot-harvesting is. …
… The whole scandal shows just how bad the practice of ballot-harvesting is, just how subject to abuse it is in the aftermath of the “harvest,” and why the practice is ready for a congressional law to ban the practice nationally. Call it the Remember North Carolina Vote Integrity Act, and pass that ban.
Where such a ban would be felt is primarily in California, where ballot-harvesting is perfectly legal and a lot of us have lost confidence in the integrity of our elections as a result. Democrats took at least seven seats in the congressional midterms based on these exact same vote-harvesting practices, and you can bet that the Democratic operatives who did the harvesting for that result could just as easily have engaged in the same abuses that were seen in North Carolina.
