With Republican prospects brightening ahead of Election Day, Democrats appear to be readying a tactic they denounced in 2020 — Election Denial. Joy Behar of “The View” has been warning that the GOP “can’t win” on its own and will “have to cheat” to win on November 8. President Biden, in a reprise of his ominous Independence Hall speech, will speak tonight about threats to a fair election and the need to “make sure every vote is counted.”

Meanwhile, legal disputes in battleground states show that Democrats are hoping to win in the courts what they may not be able to achieve at the ballot box. While Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court turned down a Democratic-backed effort to count undated mail-in ballots, a New York appeals court upheld an absentee ballot-counting process that Republicans, and a lower court judge, called unconstitutional.

The flurry of insinuations by Democrats over the legitimacy of the election results is raising echoes of the talk before the 2020 election, when voices on the left warned before the voting of a “red mirage” on election night. Any appearance of Republicans being ahead in the vote count on election eve would be an illusion, Democrats warned, because they foresaw that President Trump “ultimately loses when all the votes are counted.”

That suggestion of a vast unseen pool of votes for Democrats arose from the view, amid the Covid pandemic, that most on the right would vote in person, while the left would mail in ballots. Two years later, Covid anxiety is still being used by New York Democrats to manipulate mail-in ballot rules. A judge at Saratoga County gripes that a blanket excuse of Covid fear to vote absentee creates an “Orwellian perpetual state of health emergency.”  

The judge described the measure as being “cloaked in the veneer of ‘voter enfranchisement.’” State Republicans also questioned new policies, written by Democrats, on when absentee ballots could be counted. The GOP warned “it could hamper the ability of a judicial review of problematic ballots,” the Daily News reports. A state appeals court let the policies stand, saying it would be “extremely disruptive” to alter them before Election Day.

The state’s Democratic Party chairman, Jay Jacobs, no doubt panicked by the dwindling of Governor Hochul’s lead in the polls, condemned the Republican effort to probe the validity of the state’s new voting laws. “There’s a lot of shenanigans going on,”  Mr. Jacobs claimed, decrying the GOP efforts to suggest “that there’s something awry.” He added: “We’ve seen this before and we’re not going to allow it to happen in New York state.”

In Pennsylvania, the state’s high court — short a member because of the death of its chief justice in October — agreed on Tuesday with Republicans who sought to bar election officials from counting undated mail-in ballots. Loosened policies on counting mailed-in ballots were one reason why President Trump has been “gripped by the belief that he got cheated in Philadelphia in 2020,” Rolling Stone reports.

Republicans hailed the ruling for making “it easier to vote and harder to cheat in Pennsylvania, as the R.N.C. chairwoman, Ronna McDaniel, put it. The state GOP chairman called it a “tremendous win for election integrity.” Yet the Quaker State ACLU complained about voters being “disenfranchised for an irrelevant technicality.” This sums up the mentality on the left, which sees election laws designed to prevent fraud as mere hindrances.

So why is it that sages like Ms. Behar surmise that “changing demographics” means “the future is not Republican Party, so they have to cheat”? Senator Cruz even ventured on to “The View” to decry their double standard. The show’s hosts have previously lapped up complaints by Secretary Clinton or Stacey Abrams about “stolen elections.” Mr. Cruz observed: “They sat here and said it was illegitimate and you guys were fine with it.”

Expect more of the same from Mr. Biden this evening when he speaks on Capitol Hill — a venue designed to raise echoes of January 6 and the “violence geared towards subverting democratic processes there,” a White House adviser explains. Mr. Biden plans to denounce in his remarks “those who seek to undermine faith in voting and democracy.” If that’s the case, he’ll be pointing the finger of blame at his own party.