Whenever anyone comes up with a truly bad idea and they are trying to gaslight folks on the right into going along with it, you can rest assured you will see articles appearing in leftwing outlets and center-right outlets where the writers spend their days pining for that call up to the big leagues, you know, to be a staff writer on The Atlantic, or an invitation to one of the “in” parties headlined “The Conservative Case for XXX.” For example:

The Conservative Case for Class Actions

The Conservative Case for Carbon Dividends
The Conservative Case for Voting Out Donald Trump
The Conservative Case for Organized Labor
The Conservative Case for Voting for Clinton
The Conservative Case for Impeachment — and Removal
A conservative’s case for Biden
The conservative case for ranked choice voting
The conservative case for universal health care
The conservative case for the Democratic Party
The Conservative Case for Biden’s Foreign Policy

You get the picture.

Given the widespread instance of “voting irregularities,” if not outright fraud, one can expect that it is only a matter of time until someone pulls out Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals and opens it to Rule 4, “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.”

How would this look?

The entry point is Federalism. If you recall, this was sort of the same gambit used to rationalize the irrational institution of gay marriage before Anthony Kennedy discovered a gay butt-sex codicil to the Constitution.

Sure there is every reason to dislike early voting and mail-in voting and a lot of other avenues for vote fraud like ballot harvesting and same-day registration and the absence of a requirement that the voter presents proof of identity, but we have to look big picture. Federalism. States control the “time, manner and place” of elections. To get rid of obvious abuses, like ballot harvesting, would require federal intervention and a violation of Federalism. The violation would probably be a “soft” violation, much like the 21-year-old drinking age and the unlamented 55-mph speed limit. That is, the changes would be required in order for states to receive certain federal grants. But who is to say that once federal meddling in “time, manner and place” decisions get started, then who is to say where they end. If we are to practice what we preach, then we need to accept widespread vote fraud in some states to avoid hypocrisy.

There is a lot of room to disagree with this. We’ve had federal courts making decisions on how late ballots can arrive this election season. This is clearly not federalism. There would also seem to be an equal protection issue for citizens of states prone to ballot fraud because the value of legal ballots may be swamped by ballots cast by illegal means. But let’s take this out and play with it for a while. Taken to its logical conclusion, if California, and I hesitate saying this because it may give them ideas, started a system of “super voters” whereby elected officials cast ballots that were of greater value than the voters (think preferred and common stock), what would be to objection? Federalism, don’t you know. One-man-one-vote refers to apportionment. We already count illegals for redistricting and we know that illegals vote in federal elections, we have several jurisdictions where it is not unusual for a precinct to have more ballots cast than there are registered voters. This is done without protest and has the effect of diluting the votes cast by living, breathing citizens. Why not just formalize the system? We could even have a ballot measure each election to allow parties to cast several thousand votes on their own behalf. I mean the sky is the limit.

And whatever you see out there that you object to, just remember if the Democrats start writing the rules for all elections, things will be really bad. So just shut up and deal with it.

We either have a system where the vote is respected or we don’t. No amount of gaslighting or clever legalism can make an unfair election fair. If we will not stand up and fight for the integrity of our electoral system we might as well consider shuttering the whole place and starting anew. If you aren’t willing to do that, then you probably aren’t a conservative and the folks nodding their heads and making pleasing noises as they read such a suggestion aren’t very conservative either.

t