POLL: Most Elites Would Rather Cheat Than Lose Elections

If the above title seems like the raving of a wild-eyed conspiracy theorist, it’s understandable. For years we have been told by the corporate media that election fraud is vanishingly rare and anyone who says otherwise is an unhinged “election denier.”

But a strange thing happened when the researchers of the Napolitan Institute polled a representative sample of the people who dominate media, education, business, and government (who are, it must be noted, overwhelmingly liberal). They found that 69 percent of politically active elites “would want their team to cheat rather than accept voters’ decisions.”

In a recentUSA Today column, veteran pollster Scott Rasmussen referred to this as “the most alarming polling result I’ve ever seen.” But it’s just one of several shocking findings about the depths of delusion and anti-democratic impulses that pervade America’s elite class.

Predictably, the survey was ignored by the corporate media when it was first released – not least because of this finding: “Politically, the Elite 1% is strongly aligned with the Democratic Party (70% D, 21% R).”

Despite the rhetoric of these liberal elites, they aren’t big on democracy: “Among the Politically Active Elites, 56% trust government agencies and policy experts more than voters and their elected representatives.” Rasmussen responds thus:

“That is not merely offensive. It is a direct affront to the core American ideals of self-government, political equality and freedom… These attitudes reveal an elitist revolt against the nation’s founding principles. A growing faction within America’s leadership class increasingly believes it is better suited to rule than the public itself. Research commissioned by the Committee to Unleash Prosperity found that Politically Active Elites are far more likely to believe Americans enjoy too much individual freedom.”

To follow all this, it’s necessary to understand how the Napolitan Institute researchers define the term “elite” and how they calculate the percentage of the population that “elites” represent: “This very influential subset of the population consists of people who have postgraduate degrees, live in densely populated urban areas, and earn at least $150,000 annually.”

The number of Americans who meet all three criteria comes to only one percent of the population, but they wield immense influence over key institutions like the federal bureaucracy, media, Hollywood, and academia.

This, in turn, has created one of the most dangerous delusions shared by those who make up this tiny percentage of the population. Because pop culture and mass media have essentially become outlets for liberal elites to talk to themselves, they believe that the public agrees with them on every issue.

As the Napolitan Institute pollsters put it, “Having mistakenly convinced themselves that most voters share their views, the politically active elites use their institutional power to help drive a political narrative and agenda that is contrary to the views and values of the American people.” And, when this inevitably leads to resistance from real voters, these elites perceive that as an attack on democracy itself:

“These delusional understandings of public opinion are especially worrisome since they provide a rationalization for elites to bend the rules in pursuit of their own agenda. A particularly dramatic example of this dynamic was found in a question asking voters how they would respond if their preferred candidate lost a close election… Among the Elite 1%, the support for cheating rose to 35%. And, among the Politically Active Elites, 69% would want their team to cheat rather than accept voters’ decisions.”

This is why the Trump years have produced such widespread concern about election integrity. Because the political positions of President Trump and his 77.3 million supporters differ so dramatically from those held by our ruling elites, Trump and his movement are seen by the latter as anti-democraticby definition. Thus, the elites dismiss anyone who produces evidence of election chicanery as “MAGA conspiracy theorists” peddling debunked claims concocted by “election deniers.”

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the refusal of Democrat states to clean up their voter rolls.

This violates two federal statutes. The National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA) stipulates that states must make reasonable efforts to remove deceased voters from their registration lists and establishes processes to remove voters based on change of residency. The Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) instructs states to have a voter-registration applicant provide a driver’s license number, the last four digits of his or her Social Security number, or a state-assigned ID number. Yet, as Stu Cvrk informs us at American Greatness:

“The DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, under Assistant AG Harmeet Dhillon, reviewed voter rolls from just 16 voluntarily cooperating Republican-leaning states and found tens of thousands of apparent noncitizens and hundreds of thousands of dead people still registered to vote. The administration subsequently sued 29 states—including blue-state heavyweights California and New York, and swing states Arizona and Georgia—to compel production of voter roll data under the National Voter Registration Act.”

This brings us back to our ruling elites and cheating. Eight of the 29 states fighting the Justice Department in court to avoid producing their voter registration data conduct all mail-in elections: California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, and Washington.

In the upcoming midterms, these states will send a postage-paid mail-in ballot to everyone listed on their voter rolls weeks before voting begins. All of these states allow people other than the voter to return their ballot to election officials. Several have legalized ballot harvesting.

It is no coincidence that all but one of these states are controlled by the Democrats and, as noted above, they account for 70 percent of the elites who would rather cheat than accept the will of the voters. Nor are the Democrats content with limiting this system to a mere eight states. The next time they achieve a governing trifecta in Washington, they will reintroduce the “For the People Act,” which will nationalize this incredibly insecure election system.

They nearly passed it in 2021. If they had succeeded, Kamala Harris would be President.

That is precisely why the Napolitan Institute poll is so alarming. It suggests that the people with the most influence over our elections, our institutions, and our national narrative are also the people most willing to rationalize cheating if it keeps them in power.

The real threat to democracy isn’t the citizen who asks questions about election integrity. It is the ruling class that thinks democracy is sacred only when it produces the “right” result.

David Catron is a Senior Editor at the American Spectator. His writing has also appeared in PJ Media, the American Thinker, the Providence Journal, the Catholic Exchange and a variety of other publications.