EDITORIAL: Democrats want fair elections, except when they don’t

Democrats have disgracefully exploited the race card to tar any effort to retire “emergency” pandemic election reforms as a bigoted plot to prevent disadvantaged Americans from casting ballots. In fact, the rampant voter suppression narrative from the left is as deluded as the “stolen election” fiction on the right.

Yet for all their clamor about the sanctity of the ballot, the progressive commitment to that notion is an inch deep. Democrats aren’t big fans of secret ballots when the outcome doesn’t go their way. Thus their plan to end secret ballot union elections — and even to circumvent Congress to do it.

In addition to pouring a constant stream of “free money” into an overheated economy through subsidies and handouts, a top priority of the Biden administration is to help make it easier for their Big Labor benefactors to form unions. Legislation known as the Protecting the Right to Organize Act is the cornerstone of this effort. Among other things, it would help unions avoid elections in favor of “card check,” which requires only that organizers get a certain amount of signatures from employees as evidence of union interest.

“But signatures on cards are not the same as a secret ballot,” F. Vincent Vernuccio, a senior fellow at the Mackinac Center, a free-market think tank, noted in a 2021 essay. “The right to be free from intimidation and to vote one’s conscience in a voting booth is a bedrock principle of American democracy, and workers should not be stripped of this right in union certification elections.”

The PRO Act has so far stalled in the Senate, however, forcing Mr. Biden and Democrats into their latest gambit. Reason magazine reports that the president’s selection as general counsel for the National Labor Relations Board is now floating the idea that card check can be implemented under a 50-year old NLRB ruling, which held that “employers must grant recognition to a union claiming a card check majority unless the employer had a ‘good faith’ reason to doubt the card check signatures.”

This is the administrative state run amok.

Workers have every right to organize, of course. But they also have every right to decline to do so. The process must be voluntary to respect the freedoms of all involved. Card check — which can be rife with intimidation and coercion — is an affront to free association, particularly when it is imposed via bureaucratic fiat rather than the legislative process.

It’s doubtful the courts would uphold such a radical change. But the idea that it is even being considered tells you all you need to know about progressives’ true devotion to the sanctity of the ballot box.