Mollie Hemingway's 'Rigged': How Dems have outmaneuvered the GOP in elections for years

The Federalist's Senior Editor Mollie Hemingway released her new book Tuesday called "Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections," which analyzes the issues with the 2020 election, the Democrats' history of refusing to accept Republican-won elections, and how Republicans are repeatedly outmaneuvered by the Democratic Party in election litigation.

In her book, Hemingway notes how, until 2020, Democrats had been concerned about absentee ballots and voting machines since 2000, when George W. Bush won the presidency. Since that presidential election, she claims, Democrats have refused to accept any presidential elections won by Republicans.

But in the case of the 2020 election, when the use of those methods significantly increased, those who questioned them were labeled conspiracy theorists by Democrats in political, media, and corporate elites as social media seeks to censor reports of election irregularities. 

Hemingway argues the new voting and election methods implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic make the whole process less private and secure, more like it was in the early years of America, when people's votes were public and easily manipulated.

These changes are partly due to how the Democratic Party exploits the legal system to its advantage with elections, she explains, starting with Marc Elias, who chaired the political law practice at the party's law firm Perkins Coie for years.

Elias, who was general counsel for both John Kerry's and Hillary Clinton's presidential campaigns, hired Fusion GPS in 2016, which created the Steele dossier at the center of the Trump-Russia collusion hoax. 

He also has a long history of using courts to benefit Democrats in elections, as was the case with the overturning of Al Franken's apparent loss in a Minnesota Senate election, which ultimately gave the Democratic Party a 60-seat supermajority in the Senate to bypass the filibuster and pass Obamacare, according to Hemingway. Franken's slim, 312-vote victory was brought into question over a year later, when 393 votes in two of Minnesota's largest counties were found by a conservative group to be illegally cast. 

Elias was also at the center of the 2020 election, when in January of that year he urged counting ballots without matching signatures, expanding no-excuse absentee voting dramatically, having the government pay for postage, counting ballots that arrive after Election Day, and implementing and expanding ballot harvesting. 

The 2020 presidential election was also the first since 1980 when the Republican National Committee was allowed to participate in Election Day operations. 

For nearly 40 years, "the Republican National Committee had been prohibited by law from helping out with poll watcher efforts or nearly any litigation related to how voting is conducted," Hemingway writes.

It started with the 1981 New Jersey gubernatorial race, when Democrats accused Republicans of voter intimidation. The two parties settled the case and entered into a court-ordered consent decree, under which Republicans were limited in poll watching operations. 

Judge Dickinson Debevoise, who was appointed by President Jimmy Carter, oversaw the agreement and didn't let the Republicans out of it, as he kept changing it and following Democrats' request to strengthen it for them. While he was only a judge for 15 years, he maintained senior status for 21 years, which is like a "semi-retirement that enables judges to keep serving in a limited capacity," Hemingway writes.

After Debevoise's death in 2015, his successor, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, took over the case and "let the agreement expire at the end of 2018."

While the Democratic Party was able to build up its own coordination efforts for decades, the RNC was prohibited from doing so, as GOP candidates and state parties were left to do those things on their own. 

The RNC was also prohibited from any Election Day-related litigation and recounts. 

On "The Federalist Radio Hour" Tuesday, Hemingway said that when she was interviewing Republicans about the consent decree, they told her that it was just the way it was, which prompted her to think, "It's amazing you people won any elections, given this."