We understand the impulse among some Republicans to throw up their hands in frustration when it comes to ballot harvesting. They advocate rapidly deploying their own ballot-harvesting operations in advance of the 2024 election.
Some have likened it to a nuclear arms race. Mollie and Mark Hemingway have recently argued that “…our only hope of getting electoral arms control is if both sides have nukes.”
But the nuclear weapons analogy is deeply flawed. Nuclear weapons are arguably a legitimate means of waging war, whereas universal mail-in ballots should never be legitimized as a way of deciding elections due to the high potential for various types of election fraud and uncontrollable electioneering and corruption of voters.
A better analogy would be biological weapons, which are generally acknowledged to be an illegitimate means of waging war. If your enemies develop biological weapons, the best strategy is not to match them in the hope of persuading them to eliminate their biological weapons. It is to do whatever is necessary to disrupt their biological weapons capabilities.
Covid-19 Radically Altered America’s Elections
Given the current political and legal landscape, it is hard to imagine “emergency” election measures taken in response to Covid-19 in 2020 ever being rolled back, as they have suddenly brought into reality an objective that Democrats have been working toward for decades.
That objective is an electoral world in which polls, historical trends, economic issues, messaging, voter enthusiasm, candidate quality, traditional get-out-the-vote efforts, candidate debates, and voter persuasion no longer matter in
