When Republican-controlled legislatures around the country have passed laws curtailing early voting, they have invariably insisted that these laws have nothing to do with politics.
Eagle Forum founder Phyllis Schlafly, however, has no problem with admitting the reason she wants to do away with early voting: giving people more time to cast their ballots might help Democrats.
Writing today in WorldNetDaily, Schlafly insists — without any evidence — that early voting is rife with fraud and enables Democratic campaign workers to “harass and nag low-information voters until they turned in their ballots.”
She blames early voting in states like Ohio for President Obama’s reelection victory, and worries that early voting may help Democrats in the upcoming midterm elections as people who have already voted “may wish to change their vote” because of “the Ebola scandal.”
Last year, Schlafly offered a similar defense of a voter suppression law in North Carolina.
Because of the Ebola scandal, some may wish to change their vote, but that is impossible for those who have already voted. Some early voters may die before Election Day, and early voting allows the votes of those dead people to be included. If there is any dispute over whether their votes were valid or fraudulent, they are no longer with us to defend themselves.
Typically, there are no poll watchers during early voting, so the integrity of the casting of the ballots cannot be monitored. Many of the early votes are cast in a coercive environment, such as a union boss driving employees to the polls and watching over the process so there is no guarantee that their votes will be private.
Democrats promote early voting for the same reason they oppose voter ID: because they view early voting as helping their side. In the absurdly long 35-day period of early voting in Ohio in 2012, Democrats racked up perhaps a million-vote advantage over Republicans before Election Day was ever reached.
Republicans have been slow to realize how early voting helps the Democrats. Most top Republican political operatives firmly believed, right up to the morning of the 2012 election, that Mitt Romney was going to win.
In his expert analysis of why Republicans lost the 2012 election, scholar and WND writer Jerome Corsi quoted Mitt Romney’s chief campaign strategist, Stuart Stevens, on the last plane flight of the 2012 campaign, confidently assuring all that Romney would win the presidency because “a positive campaign message trumps a good ground game every time.”
Romney lacked a message, too, but he was mainly defeated by the Democrats’ superb ground game, which exploited early voting in key states such as Florida and Ohio. By continuously updating their computer-based information about who had not yet voted, Democrats could harass and nag low-information voters until they turned in their ballots.
