No, America doesn't need international observers for the election

California Congresswoman Karen Bass (D) is still enjoying the opportunity to stretch out her fifteen minutes of fame in the runup to the election. She was rumored to have been on Joe Biden’s shortlist in the veepstakes and her position as Chair of the Congressional Black Caucus gives her a larger megaphone than many of the backbench members of the House Democratic Caucus. She was invited back on MSNBC yesterday (where else?) to comment on the 2020 presidential race. Rather than talking up the Biden-Harris ticket or trotting out the usual list of accusations against President Trump, Bass decided to make a more bizarre demand than usual. She called for international observers to be brought in to oversee the election and avoid any sort of skullduggery by the Republicans. Of course, the Democrats are as pure as the driven snow. (Free Beacon)

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Congressional Black Caucus chairwoman Karen Bass (D., Calif.) called for “international observers” of the 2020 election on Thursday, comparing the United States to African nations that recently held elections in need of outside legitimation.

“I frankly think we need international observers for this election,” Bass said on MSNBC. “I have gone to Kenya, I’ve gone to Zimbabwe. I have been an international observer, and I think we could use that here.”

Bass, who was on the shortlist to be Joe Biden’s 2020 running mate, said she wanted to go beyond former director of national intelligence Dan Coats’s call for a bipartisan, domestic commission to oversee the 2020 race, saying Republicans could not be trusted because of their push for “voter suppression.”

This insulting suggestion really shouldn’t come as any sort of surprise at this point, but it’s still pretty offensive. International observers are used in many countries where abusive regimes put on sham elections as window-dressing while knowing that they’re going to remain in power no matter how the people vote. These observers generally don’t do all that much good, of course, as was seen in Venezuela during their last round of voting. You can stand around and watch people voting at their polling places all day long, but that doesn’t give you a very good look at what’s happening under the covers when the actual votes are being counted.

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But even that isn’t the real issue. The point here is that you can’t, in one breath, accuse the President of fomenting doubt over the validity of the election and then, in the next, demand international observers. Either you’re concerned over the security of the electoral process or you aren’t. The same people who continually accuse Republicans of trying to “suppress the vote” by ensuring the voter rolls are up to date and people aren’t cheating are the ones who insist that voter fraud is rarer than unicorns and the GOP is fearmongering over nothing. Congresswoman Bass falls into this category.

Of course, we’ve already seen more than ample proof that fraud taking place in mail-in voting has not only happened, but it’s taken place on a large scale over many years and people have gone to jail for it. But to listen to people like Bass and her media enablers, you’d think that such things are a virtual impossibility. What they try to define as efforts at “voter suppression” don’t hold a candle to the number of votes that will be “suppressed” if the states begin mailing millions of ballots to addresses where voters no longer live. (Or, for that matter, if some of the ballots turned out to be spoiled because of incorrect candidate information on them.)

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You know, now that I’ve had time to mull it over, perhaps Karen Bass is correct. Maybe we could use some international observers in November. But instead of the polling places, they should be keeping an eye on the Post Office.

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Ed Morrissey 12:40 PM | November 21, 2024
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