Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) contorted facts about a case of election fraud in North Carolina to call for restrictive voting laws.
The state's board of elections called for a new election in the 9th Congressional District after finding irregularities in absentee mail-in ballots that helped Republican Mark Harris claim a victory that was later overturned.
"For years and years, every Republican who dared to call for commonsense safeguards for Americans' ballots was demonized by Democrats and their allies," McConnell said. "We were hit with left-wing talking points insisting that voter fraud wasn't real -- never happens, they said."
A man at the center of last year's North Carolina election fraud, Leslie McCrae Dowless, claimed evidence of individual voter fraud in 2016 similar to what McConnell was describing, but the board of elections found only two cases.
"Modest efforts to ensure that voters who are who they say they are and are voting in the proper place were really some sinister right-wing plot to prevent people from voting," McConnell said. "So now, as you might expect, now that an incident of very real voter fraud has become national news and the Republican candidate seems to have benefited, these long-standing Democratic talking points have been really quiet. Haven't heard much lately from the Democrats about how fraud never happens, they've gone silent. Now some are singing a different tune."
Republicans are signaling that Harris should not run again in the upcoming new election, but McConnell insisted the election fraud the GOP campaign got busted for showed why he'd been right all along to call for restrictive voting laws.
"Now there is a new interest in ensuring the sanctity of American elections," McConnell said. "I've been focused for decades on protecting the integrity of elections, so I'd like to welcome my friends on the left to their new realization. They've just discovered in this subject really matters. but I've yet to see any evidence they're actually interested in cleaning up the conditions that leads to messes like this one in North Carolina."
