A bad “emergency” elections plan which would include almost two weeks of in-person absentee voting (a street-money dream come true) and widespread mail-in balloting is set to return to the House and Senate Governmental Affairs committees today after a lookalike plan failed on a 5-1 vote a week ago. No victory in Louisiana politics is ever final; only defeat is final, it appears.

These plans are being pushed by the Republican Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin, who ran on an express promise to keep Louisiana’s elections secure from fraud. No sooner does he win a full term but Ardoin seems bound and determined to use the Wuhan virus shutdown as a backdrop for an idea certain to lead to less-secure elections.

The Left smells victory, as the word is Ardoin’s second plan is likely to pass out of those two committees today. The Hard Left outfit Louisiana Progress put this out in an e-mail yesterday afternoon…

Louisiana Progress is helping to lead an effort to expand Vote By Mail in Louisiana. This week will be critical to accomplishing that goal.

The Commitee on House and Governmental Affairs, and the Commitee on Senate and Government Affairs are convening emergency meetings on Wednesday April 22nd to discuss the Emergency plan put forward by the Secretary of State. This plan is critical to protecting public health and expanding access to Vote By Mail.

House Bill 419 would remove the need to have an excuse to request a mail-in ballot as well as providing prepaid postage. HB 419 was introduced by Representative Mandie Landry in February of this year. The bill has not been heard due COVID-19 sending the Legislature home. This bill will not be heard TOMORROW -Wednesday but expansion of Vote By Mail on an emergency basis will be.

Got that? The people who want to spend your tax dollars on prepaid postage for ballot-harvested mail-in voting are all fired up about an “emergency” expansion of Vote By Mail.

Why? Because they understand the principle of Get An Inch, Take A Mile.

We could go into the minute details of what differences this week’s expansion of mail-in balloting contains from last week’s expansion of it, but none of that really matters.

The fact is that when you introduce a third party between a voter and the vote-counters you have poisoned the election process. Some of that can’t be helped, like in the case of military voters stationed overseas, but that’s why it’s crucial to keep such occurrences to a minimum. What you want, if you’re going to run an orderly and honest election, is to have the voters showing up at convenient, but secure, voting locations on a single day, pulling levers or pressing buttons on election machines behind a curtain to insure secret ballots and then have quick, supervised, verifiable counting of the votes from those machines as soon as the polls close.

Every time they can, with every excuse they can find, the Left pushes departures from that. And mail-in voting puts the post office, run and staffed by unionized government workers who are overwhelmingly Democrats, in control of ballot security. Here’s a chart from Open Secrets on political contributions by postal unions (blue indicates donations to Democrats, red indicates donations to Republicans)…

And the New Orleans Post Office handles a disproportionate amount of mail in the state. Who do you think runs and operates that?

It’s pure insanity to even entertain an expansion of mail-fraud voting in a state like Louisiana with its sordid history of rigged elections. It’s even more insanity for Republicans to be playing along with such an idea.

Why Ardoin is carrying the water for this plan is quite beyond our understanding. We’re told this originally came from the Governor’s office, and the plan killed last week was his idea.

We’re also told following the 5-1 defeat of that plan in the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, Ardoin was given a list of safeguards they’d insist on before any “emergency” elections plan would be entertained. We’re told he promised to revamp his plan to include those and then ignored many of them in crafting this new “emergency” plan.

And now the people who shot this stupidity down a week ago feel like they “have to do something” and are willing to vote for it. Despite the fundamental flaw in mail-in balloting in a place like Louisiana.

To which we ask to these stalwart conservatives contemplating giving away the store on our election security, what are you getting in return?

The answer we received yesterday was that supposedly there will be a lawsuit over ballot access amid the Wuhan virus outbreak and the state will likely lose it.

Which is gibberish.

First of all, a loss in federal district court, particularly in Baton Rouge where the judges are almost all Democrat operatives put in office by Clinton or Obama, is (1) probably guaranteed and (2) hardly the end of the story. Louisiana’s current elections scheme is within the legal scope of the Voting Rights Act, and the 5th Circuit is virtually guaranteed to uphold it, just as it recently upheld Texas’ elections process against a challenge by the same crowd.

And second, giving those people half a loaf won’t stop them from suing. The Soros-funded Hard Left is out to destroy the security of our elections, and they aren’t going to stop with minor victories.

The most generous interpretation we can offer here is that Republican legislators and our Secretary of State think that by bending a little in a time of “emergency,” they can stave off a rout later in normal time. Even that is a poor argument.

July and August, when the two elections this “emergency” plan will be in effect, will be months when no emergency exists in Louisiana. At the rate things are moving there will be no government-induced shutdown by June, much less July or August. Thus it’s by no means clear or even likely that any “emergency” plan will be necessary.

Furthermore, these will be very low-turnout elections, as there is nothing of any real interest involved in any of them. Normally a presidential preference primary would be a big deal, but it isn’t this time; but for something strange happening at the party conventions we already know this will be Donald Trump vs. Joe Biden in the fall. And nobody cares about the municipal elections which will join the primaries on the ballot. Meaning that if ever there was an election where you could both vote normally at the precinct and practice social distancing at the same time, you’ll see it in these two elections. You’ll be practically alone at the polling place when you go.

So here’s what’s going to happen. They’re going to meekly let this through, because the leadership in the Louisiana legislature doesn’t want to make waves about Ardoin’s “emergency” plan, and the Left will claim victory. Then, when nothing of note happens on the vote-fraud front in the July and August elections because there isn’t anything on the ballot anyone cares about, it will be hailed as “proof” that mail-in balloting doesn’t compromise election security.

Then you’ll have a big political push for that bill Mandie Landry, the new Hard Left state representative from uptown New Orleans, is carrying for the Louisiana Progress crowd. There will likely be a special legislative session in September, or some time in the fall, and that bill will come front and center as a centerpiece of “reform” in the state. Ardoin might try to argue against it but his argument will have no weight given what he’s currently pushing, and the same legislators who agree to do this today will be in the same boat.

Not to mention there will be the lawsuit everybody is so afraid of, with the goal, which is now reasonable, of having unlimited, unfettered, mail-in balloting for the November presidential election.

If you think that’s fanciful, you’re in exactly the same position as people in states like Colorado and Oregon were a few years ago. Now, both states are fully invested in mail-fraud elections, and nobody on the Right in either place even saw it coming.

Yes, this is a big deal. It’s the first major test of this brand-new, supposedly more-conservative-than-ever Republican legislature, and today they’re about to completely fail it. They’re setting in motion a process which will make mail-fraud elections as Louisiana as jambalaya, and they’re doing it without even so much as demanding a concession from the other side in return.