“Our Real Election Theft Justifies Our Attempts To Stop Imaginary Voter Fraud”
By 
Mitch McConnell, the man without shame:
There’s no evidence at all that the Democratic candidate in the race, Dan McCready, benefited from any illegal activity. There’s no evidence that any illegal absentee ballot collection or alteration was conducted by anyone beside Dowless and his employees. And Dowless wasn’t just a volunteer, randomly picking his targets: He was being paid by the Harris campaign. The way his efforts came to light was that results in one county, Bladen County, seemed way out of whack from other counties — to Harris’s benefit.
Here, at this moment, the point of McConnell’s speech is clear. After his party was broadly silent about what happened in North Carolina despite its energetic stance on voter fraud for years, McConnell decided to flip the script.
“Now Madame President,” he continued, speaking to the senator overseeing the morning’s proceedings, “for years and years, every Republican who dared to call for common-sense safeguards for Americans’ ballots was demonized by Democrats and their allies. We were hit with left-wing talking points insisting that voter fraud wasn’t real. Never happens, they said. That fraud just didn’t happen. That modest efforts to ensure that voters are who they say they are and are voting in a proper place were really some sinister right-wing plot to prevent people from voting.”
This is simply dishonest. McConnell is intentionally conflating in-person, change-your-hat fraud with what happened in North Carolina, which wasn’t that.
It’s as though McConnell and his party had been complaining for years about burglars using crowbars to break into houses and then claiming validation when someone created a master key to unlock every front door on a block. The result is the same: The house has been violated. But the thing that the Republicans were warning about isn’t the thing that actually happened.
It’s also like burglars only broke into houses with crowbars a couple of times a year but to keep that from happening Republicans wanted anyone buying a tool to bring a birth certificate with them to Home Depot. And, just to strain this metaphor to the breaking point, that people who buy crowbars for legitimate purposes are mostly Democrats.
It’s all fun and games until it ends up quoted in John Roberts’s 5-4 opinion upholding the No Blacks Can Vote Until We Can Figure Out What the Hell Is Going On Act.