Voting legally is "cheating."

Rand Paul said the quiet part out loud.

Rand Paul accused Democrats of stealing the 2020 election because Democrats voted legally.

It looks like parody. It isn't. It is just indiscreet.

Rand Paul's tweet, unedited.

A significant number of Americans believe that Biden won by stealing the election. 

People have sorted themselves politically by geography, religion, education, and political tribe. A White, male, Evangelical Christian without a college degree living in a small town or rural area would find that nearly everyone he knows likes Trump. (This describes the demographics of Jared Schmeck, the subject of my previous two blog posts. Such people saw Trump had huge rallies. People flew Trump flags on pickup trucks. Biden had neither. It doesn't have to be proven. It just makes common sense from observation. Trump is unwavering in saying he won in a landslide. Trump can sell.) 

Some people want a mental path that explains away audits that came up empty. Electronic manipulation provides one. We know technology does mysterious things, and some of it is malevolent. We are reminded that technology can be hacked by repeated "security updates." The fact that paper ballot audits don't show fraud is unpersuasive. Technology does magic, and magician performances teach us not to believe our eyes. 

Some people want a technical legal justification. My own congressman, Cliff Bentz, is among the Republicans who voted to disallow Pennsylvania's presidential vote. Changes to voting procedures made by election officials were vetted and approved by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, and were the same for all residents of the state, but were not specifically approved by its legislature. A Republican state legislature, therefore, arguably, can choose their own electors and assign them to Trump. Trump asserts this today and faults the Supreme Court for not backing him. This idea still festers.

Rand Paul's justification is yet another way to believe the election was stolen from Trump, and it is the most dangerous. It most affects future elections. He complains that voting legally is cheating when the wrong sort of people vote. Rand Paul's tweet links back to an article posted in The American Conservative. The article asserts that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg donated money to fund voter outreach in several states, including Wisconsin, and it succeeded in increasing the Democratic vote:

The American Conservative

The article lists four strategic objectives of the effort:

***First, to “encourage and Increase Absentee Voting (By Mail and Early, In-Person),” mainly through providing “assistance” in absentee ballot completion and submission, and the installation of ballot drop boxes.
***Second, to “dramatically expand strategic voter education & outreach efforts, particularly to historically disenfranchised residents.”
***Third, to recruit new election workers, mainly from among paid young activists who would replace the usual, older election day volunteers.
***A distant fourth, both in emphasis and level of funding, was the funding of Covid-19 related safety measures.

The article complains that voter outreach targeted "cities" and "certain voters," and "a variety of communities," and "historically disenfranchised residents." There was almost no mention of race or ethnicity in the article, but anyone reading it understands who those "certain voters" are. The effort targeted and turned out urban Black and Hispanic voters. That is the complaint.

There is a premise underlying what Rand Paul said, and it was voiced most explicitly in 1980 by Paul Weyrich, a co-founder of The Heritage Foundation and the Moral Majority. Readers can watch him say it or read it below:

Click: 40 seconds

Many of our Christians have what I call the "goo goo" syndrome. Good government. They want everyone to vote. I don't want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people--they never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the election quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.

Rand Paul is noteworthy within GOP senatorial circles for his outspokenness. He tweeted "in the open," not in code, what Paul Weyrich said. The idea is best said in code because it is heresy. It contradicts the American civic religion that we are the good guys who practice the beliefs in our civics textbooks. Our civic religion says that every American is equal, and that everyone has a stake in our democracy, everyone is subject to the laws, to taxes, perhaps to military service. We believe in equal opportunity, which is what justifies un-equal outcomes. Equality means voting must be legally and practically available to everyone. That is the "good government" idea.

There is a contrary idea, understood but usually left unsaid: We don't want some people to vote. Amid the dog whistles and code and obfuscation, Rand Paul said it directly: Democrats did not win. They stole the election by getting too many people to vote legally. Those voters are Democrats generally, of course, but they cheated by especially targeting--you know--them. Those people in cities. You know. Those people who don't really have a legitimate right to turn out to vote. You know.