by Steve McKee
Based on all the accusations being hurled back and forth over the past eight years, if there’s one thing everyday Americans agree on, it’s the importance of maintaining faith in our elections.
Electoral integrity is a foundational block in our republic’s Jenga tower that, if pulled away, will topple it. Unfortunately, that may be just what a small but dangerous number of Americans are hoping for.
The good news is most voters across the political spectrum want to preserve free and fair elections. Though we may disagree about the best way to ensure election integrity, the majority of us believe it should be easy to vote and hard to cheat and that voter fraud should be pursued and prosecuted.
Unfortunately, research by Scott Rasmussen reveals that 7% of the American electorate would rather cheat than lose an election. That’s quite an alarming admission from what amounts to more than 11 million people. Worse, among the people Rasmussen calls the “politically active elite 1%” (high-income, urban professionals with postgraduate degrees), more than two-thirds would be willing to compromise their integrity to assure victory.
The most charitable way to understand these people is that they believe the alternative to their preferred candidate winning is the downfall of America (“our democracy,” as they often erroneously refer to it).
That’s why they favor the blanket-mailing of ballots despite the fact that, according to the Public Interest Legal Foundation, America’s voter rolls include hundreds of thousands of deceased people (many of whom have apparently voted while dead) and tens of thousands who have voted more than once in the same election.
That, along with the deceptive “there’s nothing to see here” assurances of the progressive media-industrial complex and the Left’s “creative” ballot application and harvesting operations, puts the onus on the rest of us to keep a watchful eye out for shenanigans, so we can have faith in the results of not only this election but future elections.
Will 7% of the electorate actually look for ways to cheat? Certainly not. But human nature being what it is, and The Heritage Foundation’s Voter Fraud Database tracking what it has (a sampling of over 1,500 cases of proven fraud), it would be naïve to expect that none of them will attempt to put their finger on the scale.
But there’s a danger even more grave rooted in the fact that a lack of integrity in one election compromises faith in all elections. Most of the elite 1% are too blinded by irrational fear to connect those dots, but that’s just the outcome in which more than 2 million Americans who have adopted Marxism as their primary worldview would take glee.
The Soviet Union ended up on the ash heap of history, but the Marxist dialectic of oppressor vs. oppressed has not. The mistake communists made in the 20th century is believing that economic class could be used to divide America, neglecting the tremendous economic mobility of our country. The mistake the rest of us are making in the 21st century is failing to recognize that Marxists long ago began seeking other ways to divide us.
In his infamous manifesto, Karl Marx said that communists “openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.” Wherever there’s a cultural conflict, Marxist-backed groups have been there to aggravate it.
What better way to explain the orchestrated chaos we’ve been witnessing over the past several years, from the widespread riots of 2020 to the pro-Hamas protests of 2024, than an attempt to overthrow existing social conditions? And what better prize could they claim than to destroy Americans’ faith in elections?
Those whose primary objective is to tear America down would relish a rigged election outcome, and the more broad and brazen the cheating, the better. Nothing would please Marxists more than to delegitimize democracy, and if they can leverage the “useful idiots” in the elite 1% to achieve that end, all the better. Our destruction is their victory.
Regardless of what political party we belong to, we must do all we can to prevent the undermining of a free and fair election in the 2024 election so that, regardless of the outcome, we can continue the political fight. And we must commit ourselves to fully investigate and honestly prosecute any irregularities we see, no matter how big or how small, how many or how few.
To allow cynicism—or worse, fatalism—to overtake us will be tantamount to surrender. If we can’t trust the process, particularly if it has been compromised right out in the open, we’ll all lose a lot more than one election.
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Steve McKee is a branding expert, author, and visiting fellow at The Heritage Foundation exploring ideas and their influence.
Photo “People Voting” by GPA Photo Archive. CC BY-NC 2.0.
