IT'S AN ABSURD, CONVOLUTED, ROUNDABOUT ELECTION-STEALING PLAN ... BUT IT JUST MIGHT WORK!

I saw this being cited (by Michelle Malkin, by Fox Nation) as evidence of the Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy to Steal the Midterms, and I was confused: um, how exactly is this supposed to tip an election?

An Illinois county election official says that thousands, and potentially hundreds of thousands, of voters who are expecting a ballot sent to them by mail may be disenfranchised.

Chicagoan Rosia Carter is one of 404,000 registered Illinois voters who recently received vote-by-mail requests that were sent by the Illinois Democratic Coordinated Campaign.

"By the time I filled it out and sent it in, my vote would not get counted," Carter said.

She and others called the I-Team when they noticed the return address is not their local election official but instead a PO box for the organization....

The Lake County clerk received a shipment of 500 ballot requests from the IDCC Tuesday. By law, her office has two days to process the ballot requests. The problem is, Thursday is the deadline for election officials to get the ballots out....

Wait a minute -- wouldn't the people responding to an absentee-ballot mailing from the Illinois Democratic Coordinated Campaign mostly be, um, Democrats? Especially if the mailing address for the application is an Illinois Democratic Coordinated Campaign post office box? How exactly is it beneficial for Democrats to prevent Democrats from voting?

Don't strain your brain trying to figure that out. Over at RedState, Erick Erickson explains it all for you:

This is How the Democrats Will Try to Steal the Election

... we know precisely how this will work out. The Democrats, who screwed it up to begin with, will run to a Democrat on the federal bench and beg to have these ballots cast.

“We can’t disenfranchise anyone (except the military),” the Democrats will cry. So the judge will ignore the law and ignore that it was the Democrats’ own fault. And the judge will allow the 400,000 additional votes to come in.

Once the barrier for ballot acceptance is lowered for these people, the barrier for ballot acceptance for other reasons will also be lowered.

And once the Republicans object, the story will not be about ballot integrity. The story will be about Republicans denying people the right to vote.

Oh.

So, to sum up, here's the evil, wicked, deceitful Capone-esque/anti-colonialist/Alinskyite/Marxist/Hitlerian scheme:

Democrats deprive their own voters of ballots. Then they run to the federal courts, where they assume (a) that they'll get a Democratic judge and that that Democrat will not only (b) rule in their favor but (c) extend the ruling far beyond the bounds of the original case. (To whom? Non-citizens? Dead people? Household pets?) This result is such a certainty, in their opinion, that it's worth the risk to initially disenfranchise thousands of their own voters. And they think all this can happen without howls of outrage from the right and the center and good-government groups.

If Democrats have that kind of in with federal judges, why even bother with the damn absentee ballots? Why not just sue and say, "Yo, Judge, throw us a few thousand dead-people votes -- we're dying here"?

Someday I want to belong to a Democratic Party that's even a tenth as powerful and ruthless as right-wingers think it is.