In an embarrassing rejection of anything remotely related to smart political optics, Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi decided to shill for the federalization of elections to ensure equity and inclusion at the ballot box while standing in front of two women of color, standing behind her, their faces and voices muzzled by masks.

Just for fun rather than because it’s relevant to the rest of the piece, here’s that video. Because what an absolutely spectacular failure of messaging.

.@SpeakerPelosi at an MLK Day event: George Washington & Thomas Jefferson have "tears in his eyes” that the filibuster is being used to stop us from nationalizing elections pic.twitter.com/SOWNNfk6aG

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) January 17, 2022

What is relevant to the subject of the rest of this piece is the attempt by Democrats to codify into federal law the seriously sketchy — and questionably legal — things they did in states to tilt the election to Joe Biden. We’re only now really understanding much of what happened because the tax documents related to the nonprofits that did much of the work helping to privatize the 2020 election are only now becoming available. But Real Clear Politics has a decent rundown of the highlights from Phill Kline, former Kansas attorney general and current Director of The Amistad Project.

The Amistad Project is doing its part and has engaged in litigation in several states to bring transparency to unprecedented practices in our last national election. The following are some of our initial findings:

1. Many key government election offices received more private money than taxpayer money to manage the election.
2. A majority of that money was spent in a sophisticated effort to turn out the vote of a specific profile of voter in order to benefit one candidate.
3. These expenditures greatly exceeded campaign finance limits and violated laws and systems designed to keep government neutral in managing elections.
4. These private interests dictated the manner in which the election would be managed.
5. Amistad litigation and investigation have revealed that a handful of partisan billionaires funneled funds through a collection of left-leaning nonprofits directly into the counting centers of the urban core of swing states.
6. Ballots and voters were treated differently based on access to these funds.
7. A series of lawsuits by the left — and executive branch use of “emergency police powers” due to COVID-19 — radically changed the management of the 2020 election, resulting in different treatment of ballots and voters within several states.

The third from the last should give concerned voters particular pause given the president’s recent (and strangely hostile and Stalin-esque) kvetching about who gets to count the votes after it became clear his party’s attempt to nuke the filibuster and clear the way for passage of their “voting rights” law was dead.

Biden, appearing to admit defeat on ending the filibuster & nationalizing elections, randomly starts shouting: States’ voter reform laws are “about who gets to count the votes! Count the vote! Count the vote!” pic.twitter.com/66LpGL1ckQ

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) January 13, 2022

Despite this apparent legislative failure, Kline warns that what happened in 2020 should not be ignored and forgotten, reminding us that “citizens have a duty to keep asking…questions, and public officials have a duty to answer them.”

A bedrock of American democracy is equal protection under the law, and that government in an election provide for equal treatment of all voters.  In 2020 it did not.  And it appears now that few are interested in it doing so in the future.

This situation is the fruit of decades of policy and intellectual neglect. We have nationalized every issue, and national leaders have responded by claiming to be able to fix every problem facing every American citizen. They pass a vaguely worded law and push authority over to the vast administrative state while ignoring the application of that law and avoiding accountability for the law.

It is likely there will still be litigation surrounding the 2020 election — Georgia is engaged in an investigation of illegal ballot harvesting and a judge in Wisconsin recently decided absentee dropboxes like the ones used in 2020 are illegal — Kline’s warning is well-taken. If too much light develops between the government and the governed, it ironically becomes harder and harder for the average American to see the corruption, much less hold their elected officials accountable for it.