The Democrats are up to no good, according to Rand Paul. The senator from Kentucky is onto their nefarious schemes. So just what are those dirty trickster Democrats up to? Well, they’re winning elections through legal voting methods. This simply cannot stand!
Paul, a doofus who has rapidly devolved from semi-charming libertarian weirdo who was going to transform the Republican Party to full-on MAGA-brained crank who would happily throw away his principles for proximity to power, tweeted out a link to a story in The American Conservative that claimed to document how Democrats stole the 2020 election. To highlight this, Paul cited a passage from the story: “How to steal an election,” he tweeted. “Seeding an area heavy with potential Democratic votes with as many absentee ballots as possible, targeting and convincing potential voters to complete them in a legally valid way, and then harvesting and counting the results.”
That’s, uh ... that’s just voting, Rand.
The entire story in The American Conservative is quite the trip. It alleges that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg “laundered” money through the Center for Tech and Civic Life, a non-profit organization dedicated to increasing civic engagement, which then “purchased” thousands of votes for Joe Biden in Wisconsin. How did they do this? By increasing the access to the ballot in legal ways.
In fact, here are some of the things that Wisconsin did that The American Conservative and Rand Paul have decided are actually bad: fund campaigns to explain how absentee voting works, hire bilingual people to help voters complete ballots, and hire more poll workers. You might hear these things and think they add up to an effort to make sure eligible voters get the rightful opportunity to vote in an election. But listen closely and you’ll hear the dog whistles: The article alleges that because these efforts included outreach to marginalized and historically underrepresented communities, they actually amounted to a campaign to steal the election by the Democrats.
We do have to offer Paul some points for consistency here. He has been nothing if not steady in his belief that letting more people vote is actually election theft. After Biden won the 2020 presidential election, Paul went on Fox News and said that getting more people to participate in democracy is bad, actually.
"I’m very, very concerned that if you solicit votes from typically non-voters, that you will affect and change the outcome,” Paul said, describing how elections work. Paul does not call this fraud, just like the article he linked to the other day doesn’t make any accusations of illegal votes being cast in Wisconsin. Instead, Paul and The American Conservative concede that they just don’t like the results, which means the process must be wrong.
Admitting that nothing illegal happened and that there was no fraud and still referring to the election as “stolen” would suggest that Paul simply believes that Republicans have to win for the thing to be legit. After all, they’ve spent so much time and money implementing strict voter ID laws, gerrymandering districts in their favor, and disenfranchising voters that they surely believe they’ve set themselves up for success. More people voting really puts a damper on all that.
