What happens when a nation founded on Christian virtue loses its mooring and is set adrift on a sea where it is eat or be eaten? People will lie cheat and steal to get what they want.
That’s what’s happening in America.
“Bellum omnium contra omnes” is a Latin phrase that means “the war of all against all.” It’s nothing new. It’s as old as Abel and Cain, where it was brother against brother. It is an ugly story that can be likened to the Civil War.
Today, it’s citizen against citizen.
A new Rasmussen poll sponsored by the Heartland Institute found that “28% of all voters say they would engage in at least one kind of illegal voting practice in order to help their preferred candidate — either President Joe Biden or former President Donald Trump — win the 2024 election,” the think tank said in a news release Tuesday.
If that doesn’t shock you, it indicates just how bad it is in America. What happened? Did parents stop teaching their children that lying was beneath human dignity? How many Americans — having tasted the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil — knowingly choose evil?
Who knows? But when almost 1 in 3 voters surveyed admit they would cheat to get their preferred candidate voted into office, it’s far too many.
Heartland Institute Poll Shows Nearly Three in 10 Voters Would Vote Illegally in 2024 Presidential Election https://t.co/3lq6guAx7A pic.twitter.com/NahH7Fpu46
— Rasmussen Reports (@Rasmussen_Poll) April 16, 2024
Even if the poll is shocking, it shouldn’t come as a surprise. The Heartland Institute commissioned a 2023 poll indicating that in the 2020 general election, illegal mail-in voting was widespread with more than 1 in 5 surveyed admitting to voting illegally. It’s a trend.
Will America ever have an election free from fraud?
Yes: 0% (0 Votes)
No: 100% (6 Votes)
“Now, a new Heartland/Rasmussen poll has found that voters intend to cheat in 2024 on an even greater scale than in 2020,” Heartland research editor Jack McPherrin said in a statement.
“Overall, 28 percent of all respondents stated that they would resort to at least one form of election fraud if it helped propel their preferred candidate in office,” he said. “Doing the math, that means that — if voter turnout remains similar to 2020 — nearly 45 million ballots may be fraudulently cast if they are not prevented.”
Forty-five million fraudulent votes — even if they were distributed equally between Biden and Trump — would spell the end of election integrity. We would no longer have a democracy. We’d have a competition on who could cheat the best, winner take all.
The poll found that self-identified Democratic and Republican voters were similarly likely to engage in illegal voting to get their candidate into the White House.
Independent voters, on the other hand, were much less prone to cheating. Maybe reason still wins out over emotion among independents. It’s hard to say.
According to the poll, voters were willing to take part in a wide range of illegal voting schemes, including voting in multiple states, disappearing mail-in ballots of friends or family members, buying votes, providing incorrect information about place, time or date to cast ballots, and changing candidate selections on mail-in ballots.
The survey had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points with a 95 percent level of confidence, according to the Heartland Institute release.
There’s something wrong with America. A lack of virtue is a sure sign of a diseased spirit.
Romano Guardini, author of “The End of the Modern World,” saw it coming.
“On what does its [the spirit’s] health depend?” he asked. “First Plato and later in the fullness of Revelation St. Augustine made this clear: The health of the spirit depends on its relation to truth, to the good and holy. The spirit thrives on knowledge, justice, love, adoration — not allegorically, but literally.”
What does this sickening of the spirit mean for America? McPherrin has an idea.
“The results of this poll will hopefully galvanize state policymakers to craft legislation designed to ensure election integrity by vastly restricting mail-in voting,” he said. “In turn, that legislation must be enforced to the greatest possible extent by states’ executive branches. Failure to implement such solutions will allow our elections to become even more tainted by election fraud.
“Without secure elections, we will collectively lose faith in our electoral system, and our republic will die with a whimper.”
McPherrin is right. Restricting mail-in voting is needed if there is to be any sense of election integrity in this fall’s elections and beyond.
But it’s not enough for the long haul. If America is to survive, it will need to look back to the Christian worldview of the Founding Fathers for guidance.
Remember George Washington’s anecdotal “I cannot tell a lie”? Those are the kinds of stories America was built on, stories that impart virtues and ethics.
What do we have nowadays? Bellum omnium contra omnes. That kind of story won’t stand the test of time. Everybody loses.
