Well, my my my, as Joe Kenda likes to say when looking at a crime. That is exactly what is happening in Bucks County, PA, as Democrat Commissioner Diane Marseglia made plain in a public declaration last week. She refused to vote to comply with a court order enforcing ballot laws in order to generate votes for Senate Democrat incumbent Bob Casey, who has narrowly but clearly lost his bid for a fourth term.

In doing so, Marseglia openly thumbed her nose at the state supreme court and flouted the law she's supposed to enforce:

McCormick has been declared the victor by both the Associated Press and Decision Desk HQ, but Casey continues to insist the race isn’t over. Casey and his notoriously partisan attorney Marc Elias are pinning their hopes on outstanding ballots, many of them flawed and — based on previous court rulings — ineligible to be included in the final tally.

But that didn’t stop Bucks County Commissioners Chair Diane Ellis-Marseglia. Not only did she and her fellow Democrat Bob Harvie vote to count the flawed ballots, she publicly acknowledged their decision was contrary to the law.

“I think we all know that precedent by a court doesn’t matter anymore in this country,” she said after the fact. “People violate laws any time they want. So for me, if I violate this law, it’s because I want a court to pay attention to it.”

If it were only Bucks County, it might not matter, but several other counties have joined the effort to count illegally cast ballots in the Senate race. Republican campaigns have filed suit against Bucks County to force an end to this lawlessness and a clear attempt to steal the election from Dave McCormick, who defeated Casey to flip the seat to the GOP. 

Casey and Elias refuse to concede, which is a rather mild issue in comparison, and are trying to not just stretch the law but outright ignore it to seize the seat back illegitimately. That earned Pennsylvania Democrats a rather firm tongue-lashing from an unexpected source -- the Washington Post editorial board. Over the weekend, WaPo's editors called out the scumminess of the Elias-Casey effort, albeit with a heapin' helping of a pox on both houses commentary:

Before the Nov. 5 election, Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court ruled that provisional ballots must be signed in two required places and that mail-in votes must be dated. Yet elected Democratic officials in Philadelphia and three other counties — Bucks, Centre and Montgomery — voted this week to defy these and other court decisions at the request of lawyers for Democratic Sen. Bob Casey, who trails GOP challenger Dave McCormick by about 24,000 votes, with almost all of the roughly 7 million ballots cast having been counted. These Democrats’ decisions will almost certainly be overturned on appeal, but the mere attempt to defy judicial rulings is corrosive to democracy and invites similar behavior in future elections. ...

Mr. Casey has almost certainly lost this race. The Associated Press called it for Mr. McCormick on Nov. 7. Mr. Casey’s deficit still appears insurmountable. The three-term incumbent sees it differently and has every right to plead his case in court. State law also entitles Mr. Casey to a statewide recount because Mr. McCormick’s margin of victory is smaller than half a percentage point, though not by much. A recount is unlikely to change the outcome.

No one really minds a recount, which is a legal and sometimes automatic way of ensuring valid results. Casey and Elias aren't fighting for a recount yet because, as WaPo's editors note without explanation, the scale of McCormick's lead is far too great for a recount to change. Elias' most famous election challenge and recount came in 2008 over Minnesota's Senate seat, a legal fight that left the seat open for months. Elias eventually succeeded in getting Al Franken into the Senate after fighting every single legal detail on practically every questionable ballot, but that contest only changed the results by 527 votes. (I reported in depth on the recount in 2009 for Townhall Magazine and reprinted it here in 2016.)

This is no statistical dead heat. McCormick has a substantial lead 100 times greater than Norm Coleman had in the initial ballot count, which is why Democrats are now attempting to count invalid ballots to cut into Casey's deficit. Courts will almost certainly order a stop to that process and a return to the vote counts before these counties began violating the law, but until they do, Casey and Elias will keep trying to corrupt the process in a vain attempt to cling to public office.

That's the real issue -- lawbreaking and cheating, not recounts or concessions. The WaPo's editors fetishize concessions in order to pull Eric Hovde and Kari Lake into the conversation, but it's nonsense. A concession has no legal weight; its practical value is only that it means an end to any further legal challenges. Bob Casey can spend the rest of his life not conceding this race, and it will not have the slightest impact on anyone other than Bob Casey. The same is true with Hovde and Lake. Let them ask for recounts and refuse to concede; at least that's legal, unlike what Elias, Casey, and the Bucks County Election Board are attempting. 

Nevertheless, the wonder her is that the WaPo editorial board blasted Democrats for their lawbreaking, even if they didn't do it particularly well or with the necessary focus. (They also published this on Saturday, the slowest reader day for newspapers. Hmmm.) Perhaps Jeff Bezos' mandate to free the paper from being the mouthpiece of the Progressive Democrat faction has started paying dividends. Perhaps the editors at the Post looked at what happened to their counterparts at the Los Angeles Times and decided to get ahead of the curve.

Or maybe, just maybe, the explicit intent by Democrats in Pennsylvania to steal an election is too much even for the Washington Post. Whatever the explanation, it's a healthy development, and I am realizing that we picked the wrong week to stop passing the popcorn. 

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Update: First, I forgot to include the link to the WaPo editorial; that's been fixed, and please accept my apologies for the oversight. But more to the point, Hovde did concede today after Wisconsin finished its ballot counting. "It's time to move on," Hovde told supporters:

Thank you for your support. It’s time to move on. pic.twitter.com/XiO4XVVcaP

— Eric Hovde (@EricHovde) November 18, 2024

Hovde, who last week said he was weighing whether to request a recount due to "voting inconsistencies," maintained in his statement that the ballots may lack "integrity" and "legitimacy."

"I have heard from numerous supporters urging me to challenge the election results. However, without a detailed review of all the ballots and their legitimacy, which will be difficult to obtain in the courts, a request for a recount would serve no purpose, because you will just be recounting the same ballots, regardless of their integrity," Hovde said in a video posted on X. "As a result, and my desire to not add to political strife, through a contentious recount, I've decided to concede the election."

So much for WaPo's both-sidesism in this instance.