The patient is sick and in dire need of a doctor.
It’s autopsy time for the elections, and Americans would be wise to seize the moment and take stock of what just happened in the much-ballyhooed midterms. It wasn’t merely another disappointment for the Republicans because a big, beautiful Red Wave didn’t materialize. A much more critical issue surfaced that must be addressed: The two-party system has mutated into two separate, but not equal, elections.
This is not an off-the-wall theory, and many Republicans have begun to recognize the problem: Democrats gather ballots for months while Republicans take time on Election Day to go to the polls and vote. One can easily determine the more successful system by reflecting on the last two elections, in 2020 and 2022.
Gathering ballots wins hands down. And it will win every time if Republicans don’t stop whining, get off their collective conservative behinds, and take action to level the playing field.
Since the first step to effectuate change is the ability to recognize the problem, let’s begin there.
Pamela Geller asserts in her widely read blog, “A *vote* cannot be cast by a person who is no longer alive, or no longer lives in the area. However, a *ballot* can be printed, distributed, completed, and returned regardless of the status of the initially attributed and/or registered individual. ‘Votes’ and ‘Ballots’ are two distinctly different things.”
The Conservative Treehouse reviewed the successful candidacies of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman and observed, “Whitmer and Fetterman were not campaigning for votes, that is old school. Instead, the machinery behind both candidates focused on the modern path. The Democrat machines in both states focused on ballot collection and ignored the irrelevant votes as cast.”
Fox News Host Jesse Waters picked up this theme and intoned, “The longer some of these races drag out … the better it is for Democrats because they’ve created a system centered around ballots, not votes. It’s not about winning your vote anymore. It’s not about persuading you. It’s about flooding the state with as many ballots as possible and getting them filled out Democrat.”
Perhaps it’s something in the nature of conservatism that keeps Republicans playing by Marquess of Queensberry rules while the opposition has invented a system that takes much less effort but boasts a higher degree of success: Spend months gathering ballots and drop them off in boxes before Election Day.
The success of this strategy lies in its simplicity.
US Elections: Voting Has Become Outdated
It doesn’t take much to fill out a ballot and stuff it into a box. The voter has plenty of time to do it and is less likely to pay attention to the worthiness of individual candidates than simple ideology. This is how people like President Joe Biden and Fetterman – both of whom have trouble spitting out a coherent sentence — get elected.
Alternatively, it takes more motivation and dedication to go to a particular place on a specific day between selected hours and cast your vote. People who do such things often are the ones with skin in the game; they know the candidate they have chosen and why. However, this voting structure has become passé in the last two election cycles.
For some bizarre reason, Republicans seemed to believe balloting as a means of voting ended with the pandemic. Still, all they had to do was look at the voting rules in states like Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Arizona and see it wasn’t so. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that Election 2022 turned into a ghastly case of déjà vu. Here’s how the nightmare goes: A Republican takes the lead on Election Day, the counting slows to a crawl, and then the GOP sits and watches that lead dwindle to zero until the Democrat gets out in front. Then – boom – it’s all over: another checkmark in the D column.
One has to wonder why party apparatchiks didn’t grab governors like Arizona’s Doug Ducey by the lapels and get them to change the election system in their states back to voting instead of balloting.
Possible Solutions
Republicans have several ways to handle this separate but unequal election system. They can:
- Start playing the balloting game and forget the business of electioneering to get out the vote.
- Make certain Republican state legislatures (especially ones with GOP governors) establish a statewide election system that does not include endless balloting.
- Limit voting to just a few days – perhaps a long weekend – which sets parameters on balloting and at the same time extends the in-person voting over that same period to balance out the system.
The Conservative Treehouse observed: “It’s time for voters to start seeing the difference between elections decided by ballots and elections decided by votes. Perhaps the 2022 midterm election will awaken people to the two completely different electioneering systems.” Point taken.
Anyone who has listened closely to former President Donald Trump knows he’s been railing against more than just a personal loss in 2020. He found out the hard way that endless ballot gathering makes Election Day essentially moot. Republicans will need to do something to change the way Americans vote or prepare to suffer a similar fate in 2024.
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