If you were still harboring naïve notions of free and fair elections when Democrats are involved, perhaps this will help disabuse you of those fantasies.

From a Fox News report a few days ago:

A prominent Democratic lawyer who represented Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign [Marc Elias] is threatening to sue the state of Nevada unless it immediately suspends prosecutions for ballot harvesting before the June 9 primary, among a slew of other demands, according to a letter obtained by Fox News on Tuesday. Writing on April 10 to Nevada Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske, a Republican, Elias first took aim at Nevada Revised Statutes section 293.330(4), which prohibits ballot harvesting and permits only certain individuals, like family members, to return ballots. Ballot harvesting, or the practice of allowing political operatives and others to collect voters' ballots and turn them in en masse to polling stations, has drawn bipartisan concerns of fraud from election watchers. "We ask that your office and the office of the Nevada Attorney General immediately announce a suspension of prosecutions under this statute for all elections for which mail-in balloting will be the primary means of voting in the state," Elias said. At the same time, Elias called for Nevada to stop throwing out ballots when signatures on voters' ballots appear different from those on voters' registrations, saying "lay election officials have never had the necessary expertise" to make an accurate determination.

Ballot-harvesting is a crime, forbidden due to the inherent opportunities for fraud, intimidation, and outright manufacture of votes. The Democrats tried to legalize ballot-harvesting in the last stimulus go-round, but thankfully, they were caught and prevented from doing so.

Worse still, Elias's threats also seek to force Nevada to send a ballot to all registered voters, regardless of whether a voter requested a ballot or not. As you'll see, Nevada is merely the target du jour. The same will be expected of all 50 states before November 3, 2020.

This effort is spearheaded by former Clinton attorney Marc Elias, a partner at Perkins Coie law firm, the same firm that facilitated and helped disseminate the fraudulent Steele dossier, which launched the Russian collusion narrative. Unsurprisingly, Elias was the attorney who engaged Fusion GPS to procure the dossier using funds laundered through Perkins Coie.

Elias is a prime example of all things wrong with the legal profession these days, a poster child for "whatever it takes" lawyerly maneuvering, regardless of ethics or legality. His involvement also makes it clear that this is no one-off effort concerning Nevada alone.

This well known Democrat fixer has a long history of fighting voter ID laws in state after state, with his legal challenges bankrolled by none other than George Soros. He is the point of the spear in the left's effort to wrest control of the electoral process from the people of the United States. Having licked his wounds after the 2016 debacle, Elias has emerged again, fighting the same battles, singing the same tunes.

Elias wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post, published on March 16, 2020. In his missive, he outlines the same demands he has threatened against Nevada.

It will not be enough for states to simply allow more citizens to vote by mail. Each state must also provide adequate resources for the printing and distribution of millions of extra ballots and to support with extra funds the officials who are tasked with processing and counting the flood of mailed ballots. It will also require states to revisit their laws to provide free postage and community ballot collection. States then need to address the manner in which ballots are verified to minimize rejections based on issues with voters' signatures.

Citing likely difficulties with processing large numbers of mail-in ballots, Elias says:

[A]ll votes postmarked by Election Day must be treated as timely and counted in full. Unfortunately, many states do not currently count ballots received after Election Day, regardless of when voters mail them. Replacing Election Day receipt laws with the more intuitive postmarked-by-Election Day standard is essential.

As all Democrats do, Elias ignores the concept of personal responsibility on the part of the voter, who is naturally expected to consider mailing time when returning his ballot. What his proposal does is completely different from what he claims that it will do.

It permits the exploitation of exit polling, enabling operatives to dump vast numbers of fraudulent ballots wherever needed on Election Day, having seen from exit polling which races and precincts are going to their opponents.

This cannot be permitted, as it provides specific real-time data to enable election-tampering with a specificity not seen outside of North Korea.

Ideally, states will act to correct these anti-democratic laws. If not, Congress should step in and amend federal law to make clear that ballots mailed by a voter on or before Election Day must be treated as cast on Election Day.

In his own words, Elias reveals the framework for stealing an election. Create avenues for mischief, then exploit those avenues for all they're worth. Remembering that by threatening endless lawsuits over clearly fraudulent ballots, it's not too difficult to intimidate a county election commissioner into matching voter registration signatures against received ballot signatures with a very broad standard to avoid litigation that could bankrupt post-COVID budgets.

The pattern is clear. Force a mail-in ballot scenario, suspend prohibitions against ballot-harvesting (citing reasons of health and safety, of course), and then find judges in each state to forbid the invalidating of ballots where the signatures do not match the registration.

Apart from simply declaring themselves the winner at the end of a rifle barrel, the Democrats couldn't possibly have devised a more direct path to hijacking an election.

This is the greatest danger we face in 2020 — not the virus, not North Korea, not even the economic effects of the virus, but rather the clear intention of one party to steal an election by any means necessary.

Don't be distracted: this is one issue you must not let lie fallow. They are arranging for the invalidation of your vote, right in front of your eyes. We must prevent these changes, or, like a miraculous resurrection of Lenin, we will see the whole country "turn" blue November 3.

The author writes from Omaha, Neb. and welcomes visitors to his website at dailyherring.com.

Image: Tom Arthur via Wikimedia Commons.