EDITORIAL: North Carolina proves Democrats wrong on voter fraud

The Democratic narrative that voter fraud is a fiction of the paranoid right is being tested in North Carolina. And the shenanigans that went on in the Tar Heel State’s 9th Congressional District highlight the dangers trying to juice turnout by relaxing standards intended to ensure ballot integrity.

At issue are the results of the November election involving a U.S. House race between Republican Mark Harris and Democrat Dan McReady. Mr. Harris won by a mere 905 votes, but allegations have since surfaced that GOP operatives may have violated the law with their handling of absentee ballots.

On Sunday, the state Board of Elections released affidavits from voters who said they turned over their absentee ballots to people working for the Harris campaign. Some voters said they had signed and filled out a ballot, others said they had merely affixed their signature and made no candidate selections.

The Associated Press reports that “it is illegal” under North Carolina law “for anyone other than a close relative or guardian to take a person’s ballot.”

The implications, of course, are that Republican field workers either failed to turn in absentee ballots that favored Democrats or improperly filled in such ballots that were signed but left blank. The Washington Post reported this month that North Carolina officials are also “pursuing criminal investigations related to irregularities in mail-in ballots.”

These suspicions are be taken seriously, and those who broke the law should be prosecuted to the fullest extent. But the idea that this controversy is “politically fraught for Republicans,” in the Post’s words, is utter nonsense. In fact, the opposite is true.

One obvious lesson here is that voter fraud is real — and can potentially change the results of an election. Another lesson that runs counter to the Democratic talking points is that allowing more voters to cast absentee or mail-in ballots without concurrent safeguards can be a recipe for illegal activity.

In recent years, Democrats have capitulated to radical progressives and now argue that even the most rudimentary protections designed to promote ballot integrity that were once considered noncontroversial — voter ID, for instance — are discriminatory and racist efforts to suppress the minority vote. As a result, many jurisdictions have loosened restrictions on voter registration and the use of absentee ballots. California, for instance, recently legalized “vote harvesting,” which allows anyone to collect and turn in mail ballots.

But as the fiasco in North Carolina reveals, many policies promoted as removing “barriers” to potential voters can also be manipulated to undermine election integrity. For years, Democrats have insisted otherwise. They’ve now been proven wrong.