RALEIGH – You could see this coming from a mile away.

After months of fomenting panic and fear regarding the coronavirus, the Democrats naturally launched a campaign to encourage voting by mail. They did so knowing full well that mail-in and absentee ballots routinely get rejected, or marked ineligible, for not being completed properly, lacking signatures, violating instructions, or even getting spoiled, or non-legible.

They were counting on it. That way, whatever happens on election day, there will be a historically gargantuan pile of (legitimately) rejected ballots that Democrats can now DEMAND are counted, lest President Donald Trump be blamed for stealing an election and suppressing the vote.

Well, absentee ballots are already flowing in to Boards of Elections in North Carolina. Right on cue, the Leftist sympathizers at FiveThirtyEight (Nate Silver of Obama polling predictions fame) are out with a piece titled:

North Carolina Is Already Rejecting Black Voters’ Mail-In Ballots More Often Than White Voters’

Wow. How very racist of North Carolina, right? Judging by the headline, Democrat readers can already affirm that Donald Trump and the evil racist Republicans are already cheating to nullify black people’s votes and steal the election. Why even read the article itself? They already know what they need to know.

But if you DID read the article, and were actually reasonable while doing so, you’d quickly realize that the headline is nothing more than a massive, unfounded smear, designed to incense the zombie mobs with a manufactured narrative of racism by Republicans.

From the piece:

“In every election, a small percentage of mail-in ballots get rejected. But this election is likely to have a whole lot of mail-in ballots. And in an election where a record number of voters are expected to cast their ballots by mail, you’re likely to hear a whole lot about ballots that don’t count, especially because voters of color have ballots rejected at a higher rate than white voters. […]”

So, right away, the author admits this is normal. Yet, they still avoid the ‘Why?’ for a moment while they use North Carolina as an example of the racist voter suppression afoot.

(Emphasis added)

“[…] It’s already happening. In North Carolina, absentee ballots have already been sent back and the state has been updating statistics on those ballots daily. As of September 17, Black voters’ ballots are being rejected at more than four times the rate of white voters, according to the state’s numbers.¹ Black voters have mailed in 13,747 ballots, with 642 rejected, or 4.7 percent. White voters have cast 60,954 mail-in ballots, with 681 — or 1.1 percent — rejected. In addition, 434 ballots cast by white voters and 127 ballots cast by Black voters were marked “spoiled,” which can mean literally spoiled or something as simple as a voter informing the election office that the address they had requested a ballot to is wrong. (These are a tiny portion of the votes from one state, so obviously we have a long way to go before we know the full landscape of ballot rejection rates.) […]”

So, let’s assume a Ridin’ with Biden voter is reading the article. Boom, there are the numbers, the proof, that Trump is racist — four times more black voters rejected than whites.

After that narrative-supporting bombshell, there’s no need to consider that very next line. You know, the one that shows that, of the ballots marked ‘Spoiled,’ more than THREE TIMES of them were cast by white voters. Does it matter? NO. But neither does the purported proof of racist ballot rejections against black voters.

Actually — after explaining that a mere rejection doesn’t necessarily mean the denial of votes because in North Carolina there IS recourse for rejected ballots — the article tells us why it doesn’t really mean what the article’s headline was meant to make you believe.

“[…] Meanwhile, the racial gap in rejected ballots is not a problem unique to North Carolina.

Black voters and other voters of color frequently have their ballots rejected at a higher rate than white votes (so do younger voters, on average). […]

Part of this gap could be due to the fact that many Black voters and voters of color casting mail ballots are doing so for the first time, and first time vote-by-mail voters tend to make more mistakes because they’re less familiar with the requirements. That’s true in North Carolina, too. Michael Bitzer, a political scientist at Catawba College in North Carolina, compared historical voter records in the state and found that most voters who had their ballot rejected so far voted in person in 2016.

“We’re seeing already a lack of familiarity with the process, whether it’s signing the ballot or having the witness information completed,” Bitzer said. “There tends to be a greater number from voters who were previously in-person voters. If you look at the numbers [from Sept. 14], the ballots denied due to incomplete witness information, 55 percent of those voters had voted in person in 2016.” […]”

Oh! So the headline specifically crafted to make a reader think a racist plot to disenfranchise black voters was afoot, is in fact completely explicable by other non-racist-voter-suppression-plot factors.

Alas, this logic and reason does not matter. Leftists hellbent on identifying and calling out systemic racism wherever it (doesn’t) exist are going to find their target every single time.

“[…] Even if inexperience is largely to blame, that’s still a reason for concern since we’re expecting a record influx in mail-in voters this year. In North Carolina alone, 837,685 of the state’s 7.1 million voters have requested absentee ballots so far. […]”

In other words, ‘It doesn’t matter that our headline purposely, implicitly suggest racist voter suppression, because we know systemic racism is a problem, and with so many mail-in votes and four more years of Trump on the line, it’s more important to count (mostly Democratic) rejected ballots than ever before.