“The 2020 election. It was stolen. This is the mother of all bombshell polls released yesterday by Rasmussen along with the Heartland Institute. And the thing that needs to be said right off the bat is when it comes to Rasmussen reports, they are the most or one of the most credible, most respected, legitimate, accurate polling firms in the entire country. So if it comes from Rasmussen, it’s rock solid. They teamed up with the Heartland Institute, another group that is also very respectable, extremely credible,” said Boston-area MAGA radio host Jeff Kuhner earlier this month in reaction to a “rock solid” finding from a Rasmussen survey where circa 20 percent of all respondents who voted by mail in 2020 supposedly said they “claim they took advantage of election laws that loosened up because of the coronavirus crisis to commit fraud, including filling out ballots for others.”
Kuhner’s reaction is just one of dozens of hot takes from right wing influencers and media personalties listed on the Heartland Institute’s website in the days after the Washington Examiner first printed an article about the poll, which also found “Nineteen percent of those who cast mail-in votes say a friend or family member filled out their ballot, in part or in full” and “Seventeen percent of mail-in voters said they cast a ballot in a state where they were no longer permanent residents.”
The @HeartlandInst & Rasmussen Reports have released two new polls in which voters who cast mail-in ballots admitted to widespread voter fraud and that President Trump and others who questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 election should face harsh punishment.
1/2 pic.twitter.com/lcBOvq7SEG— Rasmussen Reports (@Rasmussen_Poll) December 24, 2023
You’d have to expect Trump himself would be still posting about “THE MOST IMPORTANT POLL RELEASED IN THE LAST 20 YEARS” 12 days later if it were really that important, rather than Rasmussen themselves still continuing to try to hype it, but the right wing media ecosystem’s bandwidth has been pretty taxed this month. Hell even Hunter Biden’s relatively on the back-burner as the propagandists have been stuck playing a lot of defense for the Orange God Emperor between his Hitler comedy routine on the campaign trail, getting disqualified from the 2024 ballot in Colorado, and getting caught on tape pressuring those Michigan canvassers in November 2020. Much of the rest of their airtime has mostly filled up with the always reliable “border crisis” circlejerk.
We bring up that silly Rasmussen poll from a few weeks ago now not just because we were unable to give it the full attention it required when the fat orange bastard first posted about it, but more so that it’s a useful contrast with this fucking EPIC piece from the American Conservative published on Tuesday titled “How Mass Mail-In Voting Changes Everything.” This jeremiad by some “think tank” dickweed named William Doyle is actually perfect in certain respects as it’s by far the most intellectually honest-ish estimate of the situation facing the right: They’re fucked if they can’t stop people from voting by mail and are nowhere close to figuring out a way to make that happen.
Since 2020, elections have been under assault by a complex of leftist lawyers, nonprofits, and election activists as they attempt to implement schemes and introduce administrative changes that fundamentally transform the way elections are conducted.
Most of these changes have been undertaken in the interest of promoting mass mail-in voting. The objective of mail-in voting activists is an electoral world in which polls, historical trends, economic issues, messaging, voter enthusiasm, candidate quality, traditional get-out-the-vote efforts, candidate debates, and voter persuasion no longer matter in elections.
All that ultimately matters in mass mail-in voting states is the number of absentee ballots that can be distributed, harvested, and ultimately counted in local election offices by partisan election activists over the weeks and months preceding election day. Through the strategic expansion of mass mail-in voting, Democrats are creating a new urban based, activist driven electoral playing field where they alone can win.
Really the only part of Doyle’s screed that overlaps with the more conventional MAGA Cinematic Universe conspiracy theories about the 2020 election is the “Zuckerbucks” storyline. In the real world Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife doled out millions in grants to local election officials to facilitate an increased demand in early voting options during the COVID-19 pandemic, something that of course got twisted into “rigging it for Biden” by the fanboys.
Ad for a 42 minute-long “documentary” produced by some Trump minion in 2022.
“The Democrats’ use of mail-in ballots and ballot harvesting techniques to win elections burst into full view in 2020 with the Center for Tech and Civic Life’s $332 million COVID-19 Response Grant Program (‘ZuckBucks’), which was aimed at gaining control of election offices in areas that were critical to Democrats in 2020 though large, ‘strings attached’ CTCL grants,” Doyle writes.
As plainly butthurt he is over Zuckerberg’s “plot,” Doyle doesn’t so much as hint at any actual unlawful subterfuge. In a way it’s a mirror image of some lefty writer fuming over that Christopher Rufo piece of shit making Critical Race Theory into a potent election issue in 2021: A lot of frustration, no real answer for it. Funny too is how Doyle doesn’t even dignify Ronna Not-Romney’s stupid “Bank Your Vote” program to try to counter the deep hostility to mail-in voting, instead laying out why trying to build out canvassing “infrastructure” to counter Dems’ would be pointless.
It is important to understand that heavily funded mass mail-in “ballot harvesting,” and ballot canvassing, at a scale that is likely to have a significant impact on election results, will not be successful outside of densely populated areas where homogeneous, highly partisan voting ‘blocs’ can be identified.
The logistical difficulties and expense of a mass mail-in ballot mobilization campaign in less densely populated areas with politically diverse populations would be prohibitive. This is why Republican attempts to replicate Democrats’ urban based ballot harvesting machines in other areas will be prone to expensive failure.
Deep blue urban areas and large universities, with their heavy concentrations of Democratic bloc voters, on the other hand, are perfect settings for successful ballot harvesting and canvassing efforts based on mail-in voting.
Really the only “positive” or “optimistic” part of Doyle’s screed is where he writes that “had [Picasso-faced Texas Attorney General] not been successful in countering attempts by Democrats to send unsolicited absentee ballot applications to every voter, and install private ballot drop boxes in the heavily Democratic Texas counties of Harris (Houston), and Travis (Austin) in 2020, it is likely that Trump would have lost the state,” which kind of comes across as almost like trolling.
It’s certainly true that the corrupt son of a bitch did his damndest before (and after) the 2020 election to try to help deliver a second term for his Orange God Emperor, but the fat bastard won the state by 631,221 votes, making it extremely hard to see – even with a crooked right eye – how that delta could’ve been closed with mail-in voting laws as permissive as Utah’s, where Trump also won. Worth noting that the claim originated with Paxton himself, having recently boasted in an interview with Tucker Carlson that Donald was “one lawsuit away” from losing the Lone Star State in 2020 if not for Paxton’s interventions. Doyle’s just regurgitating it here before closing with:
Republicans must make a concerted effort to better understand the pernicious logic of mass mail-in voting, to mount an “all hands on deck” legislative and lawfare effort to counter its spread, and push for a return to conventional, time-tested election norms.
Mass mail-in voting is not a voting rights matter. It is a matter of greatly expanding the power of leftist nonprofits and partisan election activists to manipulate elections and determine outcomes. Elections should reflect the will of actual voters, rather than the agendas of partisan nonprofit donors, and the fetishes of well funded election activists.
Good luck with that, bro. Of course Republicans can try to staunch the bleeding in redder states and have made some progress on that front this year. Arkansas, Indiana, and Kansas banned unsolicited applications for ballots or ballots themselves. North Carolina and South Dakota banned ballot drop boxes. In May Georgia Governor Brian Kemp signed a bill banning elections offices from accepting private donations – which was some bullshit when you consider that they didn’t do the same to police and fire departments or community colleges or any other publicly-funded entity in the state. Nebraska adopted a law requiring mail-in voters lacking a Nebraska driver’s license or state ID card to include a copy of an acceptable photo ID with both their mail ballot application and their ballot.
Somewhere along that line is where the potential material impact on the outcome of closely-fought races ends and where the “base maintenance” for the MAGA jerkoffs constantly demanding “election integrity” theater begins. But that’s almost academic as far as the national Electoral College picture for 2024 goes since Trump failed to install loyal MAGA Nazis in key governor, attorney general, and secretary of state offices in 2022. With the exception of Georgia there’s no chance for enacting new legislation making it harder to vote by mail in the swing states ahead of next year. In fact they’re probably even going to lose some ground in Wisconsin since the state Supreme Court flipped from 4-3 conservative to 4-3 liberal this year.
Why I Will Object on Jan 6th
“I am committed to restoring the faith of the American people in our elections – that they are free, fair, secure, and according to the United States Constitution.”
WATCH 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/crIgARuIzN
— Elise Stefanik (@EliseStefanik) January 4, 2021
Look back at where we were three years ago when nearly two-thirds of the House GOP and a fifth of the Senate GOP tried that fucking bullshit “States unconstitutionally changed their laws, therefore we object to certifying the Electoral College,” a legal-ish copout that allowed them to duck getting fully on board with the Dominion and election hacking fantasies. In way though that was worse and closer to the honest truth: That more people eligible to vote using legal means to do so as is their constitutional right was, to them, the determinative factor in the 2020 election.
Doyle’s saying more or less the same thing as a warning for the future, but without the benefit of any sort of “vindication” since, like a state Supreme Court ruling affirming Elise Stefanik and Josh Hawley and their ilk’s stupid objections on a day people literally got killed over it. He could actually mention the Wisconsin state Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling banning ballot drop boxes but that one might not be long for this world given the aforementioned changes to Cheeseland’s highest bench since then.
There’s also that, should Joe Biden prevail over Donald Trump in the Electoral College again in 2024, that there’s not really going to be any point for Republicans in Congress to object on January 6th, 2025 given the bipartisan Electoral Count Act reforms passed last year.
So yeah, the whole mail-in voting situation sucks for Republicans, isn’t going to get any better for them in 2024, and we thank William Doyle for being mostly pretty honest about it, especially when you put it next to a stupid Rasmussen poll that elicits similarly impotent whining. If they expected Democrats to say “OH NOES! Rasmussen exposed our dirty secret! Now none of our core constituencies are going to want to use mail-in ballots in 2024!” that would be awesome too.