‘America Uncanceled’?

Nothing like losing a presidential election to focus the mind. One feature of the Conservative Political Action Conference is that election integrity has become a hot topic. In the CPAC straw poll of 1,000 attendees, the most important issue, by a long shot, was — at 62% — election integrity. President Trump promptly seized the issue in his first podium speech since the election, calling for a return to a proper election day.We’d call it a surprise development, but our Adele Malpass, in last week’s column, was all over the urgency of reforming our national law on Election Day. She wrote of the need to protect a single election day nationally with results that can be announced after the polls close. It’s not election week, month, or season. The Constitution grants Congress the power to fix the time of choosing electors, and it set up the current election day in 1845.Election reform was by no means the sole topic of the remarks by the 45th president at CPAC. In an hour and 28 minutes, he ranged widely, on and off script, but on no topic more than his call for work on a plan to “ensure we have honest, fair and accurate elections.” The former president reprised his claim that the 2020 elections showed that “we have a sick and corrupt electoral process that must be fixed immediately.”CPAC’s audience was with him, breaking at one point into chants of “you won, you won.” He reiterated that the problems from the 2020 election “should never be allowed to happen again.” His call making Election Day a firm deadline — “we need election day, not 45 or 30 days” — got a standing ovation. He declared that voters should not have to wait days or weeks to hear election results, as was the case in the 2020 vote.It’s not our purpose here to relitigate who won the 2020 election. It’s inevitable, though, that the longer the vote counting is dragged out, the more doubts grow. In the November vote, 44 states managed to produce results that could be tabulated and announced on the evening the polls closed. Only six battleground states failed to meet this deadline. Mr. Trump made it his business to focus on that failure.The former president laced into the Supreme Court — and other courts — for lacking the guts to review the various election disputes. We don’t question any justice’s character. It’s breathtaking, though, that a fourth vote couldn’t be found to grant certiorari to critics of the decision of Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court to set aside, in favor of the Democrats, the statutory deadline for mail-in ballots — even if it didn’t change the result.Mr. Trump was met with rousing applause when he called for limiting absentee ballots to only “people who are very sick or out of the country or military” and unable to vote in person. He went even further with massive mail-in balloting, calling it “insanity” and recommending it be eliminated altogether. The former president questioned who keeps track of the “millions and millions of ballots sitting all over the place.”Mr. Trump also went on to push for voter ID and for a requirement to prove American citizenship in order to register. He mocked the Democrats for requiring an ID to attend their convention but not to vote. His critics will suggest this issue is part of the “big lie,” and a call for voter suppression. The Sun doesn’t want a single vote suppressed for any reason, especially racism, but base sentiments are not the only possible motive for election reform.That election integrity is a vote getter as an issue is being met with skepticism in an editorial in tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal. It notes that Mr. Trump lost the White House and cost the GOP the Senate by making his claims of election fraud the main issue, rather than focusing on Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi. It might turn out as the campaign unfolds that the more explosive issue will prove to be free speech.Mr. Trump also embraced that issue in Orlando, saying: “All the improved election integrity measures in the world won’t mean anything if we don’t have free speech.” If Republicans can be censored “then we will not have democracy.” He spoke under a sign that said “America uncanceled.” The good news is that the GOP just made gains not only in the U.S. House but also down ballot at the state level. So even in the wilderness reform might prosper.

‘America Uncanceled’?

‘America Uncanceled’?

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