Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, has a story today:
Yes, Voter Fraud Is Real
Maybe ballot security isn’t such a bad thing after all. Democrats, who the day before yesterday were insisting that voter fraud didn’t exist, now believe that it was used to steal a North Carolina congressional seat from them — and they may well be right.
[etc.]
The North Carolina race demonstrates how even relatively small-scale cheating — no one will ever mistake McCrae Dowless for a major player — can undermine faith in our system. And how, if anyone doubted it, voter fraud is real.
This really pisses me off. Lowry knows perfectly well that he’s telling a lie. No Democrat has ever said that voter fraud doesn’t exist. This is not some kind of geeky pedantic point. Democrats just haven’t said this. Ever. Period.
What Democrats have said, over and over and over, is that in-person voter fraud doesn’t exist.¹ ²
This is not a casual “oops” kind of thing. Everyone who writes about election fraud knows the difference. It’s roughly like an auto mechanic knowing the difference between wheels and tires. Of course he knows.
But Lowry went ahead and wrote this anyway. He knows it’s dishonest, and he knows that, in fact, Democrats have been warning about absentee ballot fraud for years. But on the right, I guess we’re all Fox News now.
¹There are probably a few cases here and there, but they number in the dozens over the course of decades. If Lowry had said “in-person voter fraud,” I wouldn’t argue with shorthanding the Dem side of things as “it doesn’t exist.”
²Just to refresh your memory, in-person voter fraud is when someone comes to a polling station, pretends to be someone else, and fills in a ballot. This is the kind of voter fraud that could potentially be stopped by requiring photo ID, but there’s not much point since it never happens. Other kinds of election fraud include registration fraud, where you get people to fill out registration forms with bogus names, and absentee ballot fraud, where you somehow get access to absentee ballots and change the vote before the ballot is mailed in. These kinds of fraud happen periodically, but voter ID laws do nothing to stop them.
