EDITORIAL: Dems for democracy — but only if you vote for them

Politics has long been an incubator for hypocrisy, but efforts by Nevada Democrats to keep competitors off the November ballot are particularly shameless.

With polls showing that Americans aren’t enamored of the Biden administration’s failed immigration and economic policies, Democrats have opted to direct attention to Donald Trump and his supposed danger to “democracy.” Fair enough.

But while progressives repeatedly tout the virtues of “democracy” — apparently unaware that the nation was founded as a democratic republic, not a pure democracy — they also fight persistently to limit the choices available to voters. In Nevada last week, the party filed suit in Carson City to prevent the Green Party from placing a candidate, likely Jill Stein, on the state’s November presidential ballot.

Nationally, Democrats also aggressively tried to keep a possible No Labels candidate from appearing before voters and have made efforts in various states to block Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from ballots.

Apparently, democracy can be saved only by curtailing democracy.

The lawsuit is especially odd because state Democratic Party officials admit that they have yet to gain access to all the signatures the Green Party submitted to the secretary of state’s office for review.

To qualify for the ballot, the Greens needed to gather at least 2,524 signatures from each of the state’s four congressional districts. In May, the party turned in more than 29,000 signatures. Later that month, Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, a Democrat, published a “notice of sufficiency of raw count” and directed county registrars to begin the validation process.

State Democrats sought to pore over the signatures in search of flaws. Mr. Aguilar’s office, the lawsuit contends, “provided some of the petition signatures submitted by the various counties, but it did not provide all the signed petitions for all Nevada counties.” Washoe and Clark counties, the most populous, were among those omitted. Democrats claim, however, that the “few signatures” they have been able to examine contain enough errors to keep the Greens from the ballot.

“Upon information and belief, the Green Party did not submit sufficient verified signatures from each petition district,” the lawsuit claims. Thus, the petition “is invalid and the secretary of state should be enjoined from taking further action upon it.”

Note the phrase “information and belief.” State Democrats admit they haven’t reviewed all the petitions. Yet simply because they “believe” — with scant evidence — that two-thirds of the signatures are bogus, this should override the secretary of state’s office and the Greens should be barred from the Nevada ballot.

The next time you hear a Democrat candidate wax poetic about the importance of democracy, take it for what it is: a crock.