OPINION:
With the Nov. 3 midterm election looming, Democrats are determined to dismantle any election safeguards aimed at preventing noncitizens from voting. This includes making sure voter registration rolls stay dirty.
On Tuesday, Democratic congressional leaders and several Democratic groups filed a federal lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security for its directive to states to clean up their voter rolls by removing noncitizens.
Democrats oppose cooperation between state officials and federal officials to share databases to ensure that voter eligibility is limited to U.S. citizens. They argue that it is a matter of states’ rights. This from a party that now embraces socialism and has treated the states like vassals under the federal government.
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The Constitution leaves it to the states to determine when and where to hold elections, but it does not preclude the federal government from ensuring that only U.S. citizens 18 and older can vote in federal elections.
Officials in Arlington County, Virginia, a Democratic stronghold, also filed a lawsuit in federal court against the Justice Department and other agencies. Their goal is to bar federal agents from coming anywhere near polling places, even to collar illegal alien criminals.
The plaintiffs claim that voters would be intimidated if they spotted immigration authorities. Well, anyone ineligible to vote might certainly think twice about voting upon seeing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents outside the polls. Maybe that is not such a bad idea.
The lawsuit was filed with the help of two left-wing foundations, Democracy Forward and the Public Rights Project. Both are funded by leftist philanthropic groups, including the Tides network, which is funded by the George Soros family’s Open Society Foundation.
Democracy Forward is chaired by Marc Elias, who served as general counsel for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. His law firm secured the fraudulent Steele dossier, which was used in the Russian collusion hoax against President Trump.
Mr. Elias has played a major role in the Democrats’ ongoing campaign to weaken or overturn election integrity laws wherever possible. So it is no wonder that Democracy Forward is working to ensure that noncitizens feel comfortable going to the polls.
Democrats are also sowing distrust about the validity of the election in case it goes against them. The Washington Post ran a front-page story Wednesday alleging that a group of “U.S. national security officials” has been advising state lawmakers that the Trump administration may try to interfere with the midterms.
Democratic strategy appears to be threefold: Sow doubts about the elections in case Republicans win. Accuse anyone asking questions about election integrity in Democratic-run jurisdictions of being part of a Trump plan to subvert the process. Keep repeating the old chestnut about voter ID laws “suppressing the minority vote.”
Democrats insist that minorities cannot be expected to have valid IDs like other citizens.
Current polls show a Democratic tide. If Republicans manage to hold the Congress, Democrats will cry foul and somehow blame Mr. Trump for skullduggery.
The Post ran its own survey, along with ABC News and Ipsos, and published an article Wednesday with this headline: “Most Americans doubt Trump would accept GOP losses.” The poll found that 77% of independents and 94% of Democrats said they were not confident that Mr. Trump “would accept GOP losses.”
That is a one-two punch: the scary story with anonymous sources on the front page and the poll just inside.
Speaking of polls, you have probably heard about the Wedgewood Polling scandal. A fake company by that name showed Democrats ahead in key races. Several media outlets took the bait, including The New York Times, MS NOW and The Hill.
On Oct. 20, Wedgewood admitted to faking the data after it was outed by polling aggregator FiftyPlusOne. As of last week, we had yet to learn who funded it.
Wedgewood Polling “gave Democrats multipoint leads beginning in June in all the battleground races: Texas, Michigan, Georgia, Maine, Ohio and Kansas,” according to The Washington Times’ Susan Ferrechio and George Caldwell.
It even made the U.S. Senate race a “toss-up” in staunchly Republican Mississippi, which the nonpartisan Cook Political Report says is “Likely Republican.”
Polls can affect outcomes. Voters who think their candidate has no chance might sit it out or cast a ballot for someone else. In the Michigan U.S. Senate primary in June, Wedgewood said Democrat Mallory McMorrow’s support had collapsed to less than 10%. Ms. McMorrow blames this, in part, for her campaign’s collapse.
Abdul El-Sayed, the winner, is shown by most polls to be leading his Republican rival, former Rep. Mike Rogers, but maybe he is not.
In 2024, three days before the Nov. 5 election, the final Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll, conducted by pollster J. Ann Selzer, showed Democrat Kamala Harris leading Donald Trump by 47% to 44% among likely Iowa voters. Mr. Trump wound up winning by 13 percentage points, a 16-point discrepancy.
At the time, most media reported the poll, which was real, with some at least noting that it differed from other Iowa surveys. Joe Scarborough of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” however, trumpeted it as “a canary in the coal mine.”
It is this kind of phenomenon that media critic and podcaster Stephen L. Miller calls “leftist media wish-casting.”
• Robert Knight is a columnist for The Washington Times. His website is roberthknight.com.
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