In the last several years, Democrats affiliated with George Soros have been hammering talking points to the press about the virtues of early voting, and extended counting, in elections, as all about "expanding" and "strengthening" democracy.

Here's what the Soros-funded Brennan Center was loudly advocating in 2016:

We need more opportunities to vote, not less. Expanding early voting solves the problem. Nationwide, every state should offer early in-person voting a minimum of two full weeks before Election Day, including weekend and evening hours.

Some states already meet this standard, opening the polls a few weeks before Election Day, while others allow voters to submit absentee ballots in person without an excuse, among other options.

Early voting eases congestion on Election Day, leading to shorter lines, improved poll worker performance, and improved voter satisfaction. It also allows for earlier correction of registration errors and voting system glitches.

Here's what the Soros-funded Center for American Progress was promoting in 2012:

Suffrage that is equally accessible to all Americans is the very backbone of our democracy. We rightfully take pride in the fact that no matter how privileged or seemingly disadvantaged someone is, each person's vote counts equally. Our voting laws should reflect this fundamental belief, making the ballot box equally accessible for all. After all, our elections are best when the electorate closely mirrors society. If students and the poor, for example, tended to vote at higher rates — rates more representative of their numbers — it would be more difficult for politicians to ignore their issues. In essence, more voters means more legitimacy.

This paper briefly details 11 pieces of legislation that lawmakers can enact to strengthen voting rights in their state. A number of these policies would make registering to vote more accessible, including online voter registration, Election Day registration, and requiring public schools to help register voters. Others would make it simpler for citizens to cast a ballot, such as expanding early voting, permitting citizens to vote at any polling location, and allowing no-excuse absentee voting.

In addition, the same kinds of people have attempted to placate the public by declaring that we "won't know the results of the election on election night," and that's something to get used to as normal.  Pay no attention to every working democracy worldwide — Sweden, Brazil, France, et al. — being able to do this.  Extended voting "strengthens democracy," see, so anyone who doesn't like it opposed to democracy and we all know what that means.

Turns out the voting public, Democrats and Republicans alike, doesn't see it that way — at all.

Speaking with John Solomon at his Just The News podcast, pollster Scott Rasmussen said he found that voters had different ideas.

Here is my transcript, with a few verbal tics edited out:

One of the 80% issues, there aren't a whiole lot of 80% issues in America, one of them is that all ballots should be in by election day, and that we should know the results on election day. O.K., Alaska is five hours behind us, or whatever, but not three weeks... and I think this is something we're going to have to address through the political process. You lose the Superbowl, you lose, you don't keep stretching it out for a few more games and that's what has to happen in the country today ... if you are talking about reforms that really have strong support, they are things like photo id, get the ballots in by election day, and clean the voter rolls every election, those things would make...

According to Rasmussen Reports: 

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 65% of Likely U.S. voters agree that many states take too long to count the votes and report results on Election Night, including 37% who Strongly Agree. Just 28% disagree, with 13% who Strongly Disagree. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

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The survey of 1,000 U.S. Likely Voters was conducted on November 6-7, 2022 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC. See methodology.

So all those claims about expanding democracy, strengthening democracy, fortifying elections, which have been the pet project of the Soros elites, same as the Soros capture of multiple secretary of state offices (as well as D.A. offices), has pretty well had the opposite effect on the democracy it is supposed to promote.

Molly Ball in her famous Time magazine piece on how leftist elites plotted to rig the 2020 election, under the rubric of "fortifying" democracy, was big on early voting.  Ball described the manipulation here, along with the pretty packaging they put it under:

The best way to ensure people's voices were heard, they decided, was to protect their ability to vote. "We started thinking about a program that would complement the traditional election-protection area but also didn't rely on calling the police," says Nelini Stamp, the Working Families Party's national organizing director. They created a force of "election defenders" who, unlike traditional poll watchers, were trained in de-escalation techniques. During early voting and on Election Day, they surrounded lines of voters in urban areas with a "joy to the polls" effort that turned the act of casting a ballot into a street party. Black organizers also recruited thousands of poll workers to ensure polling places would stay open in their communities.

This is the George Soros philosophy in action — promote extremely unpopular ideas as "democracy" measures, ram these measures through, and brand any opponents "anti-democratic" or worse still, MAGA Trump-supporters and election "deniers."

Now we get word from a very bipartisan public that democracy was the last thing they were seeing with all this early voting and extended counting.  They see a third-world dictatorship dump that seems more suited to Venezuela than the United States of America.

With polling results like these, it should be increasingly difficult for the Soros crowd to defend its bad ideas and yell about strengthening democracy.  They've gotten their ideas tried, and those ideas have been found wanting.  The public knows very well that those ideas and the entire public relations campaign, wrapped in that democracy bow, stinks like a dead fish left on the porch by the mob.

Image: World Economic Forum. swiss-image.ch/Photo by Sebastian Derungs (extracted), via Wikimedia Commons, edited in BeCasso, CC BY-SA 2.0.