For years now, Republicans have made it a priority to ensure that as few citizens as possible are able to exercise their constitutional right to vote — the logic, of course, being that the more voters turn out for any given election, the likelier it is that a Democrat will win it. Obviously that’s not the case in more rural areas, but anywhere that there’s a large city nearby, the demographics almost universally favor more liberal candidates.
To that end, they have furiously undertaken Voter ID laws, bolstered by the election of Donald Trump, who continues to claim in the face of all evidence that “millions” of undocumented immigrants illegally voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. Coupled with their efforts to gerrymander red-leaning states into districts that heavily favor Republicans, and you can see their plan for winning elections as America becomes even more liberal is simply to cheat.
But one of the main aspects of convincing Americans that there’s actually a problem with illegal voting is conflating voter fraud with what’s actually election fraud. The first is when a person illegally votes — a non-citizen, someone who’s not registered properly, someone who’s already voted — and the second is when the people running the election itself get up to no good. And any time something untoward happens in a major election, Republicans point at it as evidence of voter fraud, when in reality, it’s electioneering.
That’s exactly what Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell tried to do on the Senate Floor on Tuesday morning, when he attempted to blame Democratic resistance to unconstitutional Voter ID laws for the Republican hijinks in North Carolina’s 9th District, where a lawsuit recently resulted in the NC Board of Elections calling for a new election. GOP candidate Mark Harris hired a man named Leslie McCrae Dowless to tamper with absentee ballots in the district and hand him the election. Caught, Harris is now forced to run the entire election again — though many believe he should simply be disqualified altogether.
McConnell was absolutely shameless as he blamed the Democrats for something the Republicans were responsible for:
For years and years, every Republican who dared to call for commonsense safeguards for Americans’ ballots was demonized by Democrats and their allies. We were hit with left-wing talking points insisting that voter fraud wasn’t real — never happens, they said.
[A]s you might expect, now that an incident of very real voter fraud has become national news and the Republican candidate seems to have benefited, these long-standing Democratic talking points have been really quiet. Haven’t heard much lately from the Democrats about how fraud never happens, they’ve gone silent. Now some are singing a different tune.
[I’d] like to welcome my friends on the left to their new realization. They’ve just discovered in this subject really matters. but I’ve yet to see any evidence they’re actually interested in cleaning up the conditions that leads to messes like this one in North Carolina.”
Once again, Mitch calls what was election fraud voter fraud instead, in the most sarcastic tone possible. He calls it “the wrongdoing,” as though it wasn’t Republicans who committed it, but rather simply “apparently” benefited from it.
We see you, Mitch, you filthy liar. Kentucky will throw you out eventually, and no amount of election fraud will save you.
Watch:
Featured image via screen capture
