David Catron has posted a commentary on American Spectator about the persistent habit of Democratic governors in swing states where Trump is now leading in the polls, to veto  election integrity bills. Catron points to the fact that Arizona’s Democratic governor Katie Hobbs has vetoed such bills 15 times. Wouldn’t this practice occasion questions about whether the Democrats are engaging in “electoral skullduggery”? For me the answer is a no-brainer, but there are those on the opposite side, including Never-Trump Republicans, who see no proof (perhaps they don’t want to see any) that the Democrats cheat and do so bigly. What we view as dubious actions they see as expanding voting opportunities through such thoughtful gestures as vote harvesting, counting illegibly marked ballots favoring Democrats, and removing voter identification.

Some of these Trump-haters of my acquaintance become touchy at the very mention that Democrats may be manufacturing false ballots. Such a charge unfairly assumes bad character in the other party, evidence for which supposedly has not yet turned up. This attribution of innocence to the Democrats seems so ridiculous that I’m almost embarrassed to bring it up. But I will.

 Admittedly, I can’t produce enough evidence to demonstrate conclusively that Democrats manufactured enough ballots in 2020 to account for those millions more votes that went to Biden in his contest against Trump. But I do know there was massive collaboration between the media giants, Black Lives Matter, the Chamber of Commerce, and the deep state to make sure that Trump would lose the last presidential election. Moreover, the same collaboration between high tech, large corporations, BLM activists, and the Democratic National Committee discussed in Mollie Hemingway’s book Rigged, is likely to occur again this year, unless steps are taken to prevent a recurrence of this coordinated effort to destroy Trump’s reputation and in some cases keep his voters from the polls. It is also clear that vote harvesting and the removal of voter identification create perfect conditions for large-scale cheating, for which the media lapdogs of the Democratic Party will happily cover.

Even more relevant, everything the Democratic Party has done and continues to do to create one-party rule in this country indicates that the production of false ballots would be pitifully small potatoes for them. Engaging in voting fraud wanes in significance next to such an outrage as bringing into the country 10 million illegals as future Democratic voters. Why would I think that a party that arranged for a massive invasion of the United States would hesitate to cheat in inner-city precincts in Philadelphia or Atlanta?

 What about Democratic plans to totally nationalize elections to get rid of voter identification everywhere, proposals to make Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico into states to ensure four more Democratic Senate seats, and then packing the Supreme Court to guarantee that it always rules the way the Democrats want? Such plans reveal a will to power for which electoral fraud would be a trivial pursuit. Finally, there is the lawfare that Democratic judges, district attorneys, and the weaponized Department of Justice have been hurling at Biden’s Republican opponent, Donald J. Trump. Should I imagine that those who are using these instruments would hesitate to turn in fraudulent ballots to prevail in a federal race?

Arguably Republicans who think the 2020 election was somehow “fixed” have well-grounded suspicions, particularly in view of how the Democratic administration has behaved in its wake. Allow me to provide a provocative comparison! Would I wonder whether the Soviet occupiers of Eastern Europe after World War II were capable of cheating in an election in one of the countries they occupied? It’s quite possible I couldn’t make an airtight case about, say, an election that took place in postwar Hungary or Poland with the Red Army hanging around. But I would have every reason to distrust how the ballots were processed. The same suspicion overtook me as I watched how the vote counting proceeded in major cities run by zealous Democratic administrations in which zealous Democrats were doing the vote-harvesting. Why would I believe the Democrats play fair in any electoral contest they are doggedly determined to win?

Finally, I don’t believe the two parties are equally honest or honorable. Unlike the Democrats, the Republicans are calling for above-board elections, in supervised polling places on a fixed election day. The Democrats prefer procedures that are open to voter fraud, just as they prefer increasing their electorate by throwing open our borders recklessly and unconstitutionally to “undocumented” future Democrats.

We have every right to assume bad faith from those who have unscrupulously tried to increase their power while behaving unethically toward electoral opponents. Suspecting this happened in the 2020 election is neither paranoiac nor antidemocratic. It is an entirely justified reaction to the duplicitous behavior that we’ve seen from the Democrats in recent years. Even if Democratic actions cannot be shown indisputably to have determined the last presidential election, those who tell us differently have ample cause for suspicion.