The cancer of early voting tightened its deadly grip on the American body politic in last week’s midterm elections. This is yet another destructive outcome of Nov. 8.

The mad rush toward early voting accelerated thanks to another disease: COVID-19. Like so many things wrong in America today, COVID lurks just beneath the surface. Because voting in person was “too dangerous,” opportunistic Democrat lawyers sued like ambulance chasers in 2020 to widen and deepen early voting beyond its earlier, lower profile.

This year, with COVID in the rear-view mirror, 2020’s “emergency” measure has become the new normal. The Democrats’ ever-leftward ratchet mechanism always works this way. Yesterday’s temporary concession becomes tomorrow’s permanent civil right.

What the hell is the hurry to cast ballots before seeing the complete picture that voters face each federally defined Election Day? According to 2 U.S. Code § 7, “[t]he Tuesday next after the 1st Monday in November, in every even numbered year,” is the date for electing members of Congress and, quadrennially, per 3 U.S. Code § 1, presidential electors to the Electoral College. Note the key month: November — neither October nor September.

Why not create early deliberations in court? As soon as a jury decides that it’s heard enough evidence, jurors can raise their hands, halt a trial in midstream, and then reach their verdict based on however much information makes them comfortable. If that leaves key facts behind (e.g., those were not really the defendant’s fingerprints on the revolver), who cares?

Next: early baseball. If one team leads by more than three runs, games can end after five innings. Why wait for those pesky four additional innings to unfold? People have places to go and things to do. Chop chop!

And who needs three-course dinners? If your soup or salad is delicious, just ask the waitress for the check and pay for the steak and dessert without actually eating them. That should zip things along.

This sick, warped, twisted, unpatriotic thinking is exactly what some 630,000 Pennsylvanians perpetrated when they voted for the U.S. Senate during the 39 days between Sept. 16, when early voting began, and Oct. 25, when Democrat John Fetterman finally met Republican Dr. Mehmet Oz for their first and only debate. Just as crafty Democrats planned, Fetterman had heaps of votes in the bag before the depths of his post-stroke impairment became excruciatingly obvious even to his supporters.

“Hi! Goodnight, everybody,” Fetterman blurted out as the face-off began. Later, asked to reconcile his years of anti-fracking statements with his sudden, latter-day embrace of Pennsylvania’s $40 billion natural-gas industry, Fetterman said: “Uh, I, I do support fracking. And I don’t. I don’t. I support fracking. And I stand. And I do. I support fracking.”

“If nobody had voted early, and this was the old days, I would say Fetterman is pretty much done after last night,” Suffolk University’s David Palelologos told NBC News on October 26. “But a lot of people have voted already and I’m guessing he banked a big lead already.”

Palelologos was right.

Nice work, early voters!

Through March 6, 2020, by my calculation, 873,088 primary voters had cast early ballots for Mayor Pete Buttigieg (D-Ind.), Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), retired coal financier Tom Steyer, and other candidates before they withdrew from the Democrat presidential primaries.

“When Pete Buttigieg dropped out we had a lot of voters who wanted to know if they could vote over, and later on Amy Klobuchar dropped out,” Salt Lake County Clerk Sherrie Swensen told Fox News. Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold explained bluntly, via Twitter, “If you turned in a ballot voted for a candidate who is no longer in the race, you cannot vote again.”

The day before a May 2017 special election, Montana Republican Greg Gianforte body-slammed and broke the eyeglasses of Ben Jacobs, a newspaper writer for the Guardian. Many of the 37 percent of voters who already had cast ballots were disgusted by Gianforte’s violence. Some contacted officials and tried to change their votes. Too late! Their ballots already were in the system.

If Democrats who demanded early votes had contained themselves and waited until Election Day, Gianforte might have suffered a bipartisan rout. Democrats could have won Montana’s then-single, at-large U.S. House seat. Instead, Democrats insisted on voting RIGHT NOW! and blew this opportunity. Gianforte went to Congress, and, in 2020, voters elected him the 25th governor of Montana.

Impatient Democrats got precisely what they deserved.

North Carolina commenced early voting on Sept. 9, 2016 — 17 days before Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump’s first presidential debate. This was creepy, if not un-American.

“In-person, single-day voting creates many barriers for workers, lower-income individuals, those lacking transportation, or individuals not in their jurisdiction on election day,” former state Sen. David Carlucci (D-N.Y.) whined to the Epoch Times.

Well, cry me an ocean.

Yes, getting to the polls can be tough. And so is reaching the bank before 6:00 p.m., arriving for a dental appointment on time, and boarding a flight before the jet takes off. These are among life’s daily challenges, and meeting them is what separates men and women from boys and girls.

Voters are not lumps of clay to be molded by third parties. Voters must take responsibility for deciding how to find the polls, cast their ballots, and otherwise behave as competent, engaged citizens.

It’s fine to ask for help. Those who need rides to the polls should request them from campaigns and party offices. Get-out-the-vote volunteers are thrilled to assist. Those who are infirm, immobile, or out of town on Election Day should request and receive absentee ballots. Passing a law to require employers to give employees time off to vote (just as they must excuse them for jury duty) is one regulation that even wizened libertarians could support.

Even better: Make Election Day a national holiday. Americans who have the day off need not worry about getting out of work to vote.

If this is cruel, heartless, and extreme, Democrats should explain how voters somehow elected Franklin D. Roosevelt (four times!), Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson (in a 1964 landslide), Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton (twice) when Americans — perhaps through long-lost superpowers — made their way to the polls, in person, on Election Day. They managed this without mass mail-in ballots, no-excuse absentee ballots, and the overall slobs-in-hoodies attitude that has soiled U.S. politics.

If an end to Election Quarter and a return to Election Day is a racist, right-wing, Republican plot, then how did Americans choose these six modern-day Democrat presidents across 10 elections before the adoption of today’s dumbed-down, corruption-ready, confidence-crushing vote techniques?

Some Republicans are ready to surrender to Democrats on early voting and try to beat them at it.

Wrong!

Step one is to go to federal court and sue states with early voting. Republican lawyers should argue as passionately as NAACP counsel Thurgood Marshall did when he pleaded for the plaintiffs in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.

Early voting violates the black letter of the two aforementioned federal statues, 2 U.S. Code § 7 and 3 U.S. Code § 1. State and local officials who conspire to stage early voting for Congress and the White House are federal lawbreakers. Period.

Early voting also hammers the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

For the 2022 general election, according to Ballotpedia, Alabama, Connecticut, Mississippi, Missouri, and New Hampshire had zero days of early voting. (Good for them!) Kentucky had three. Minnesota allowed absentee and mail-in ballots on September 23 — 46 days before Election Day. Pennsylvania permitted such ballots on Sept. 19, 50 days before Election Day.

When it comes to picking congressmen, senators, vice presidents, and presidents, there is zero equal protection here.

With 10 days of early voting in New York, the congressional and presidential ballots for my neighbors and me are treated vastly differently than they are in these other states.

This smacks of a gang attack on the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause.

GOP lawyers should argue this case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. If they win, then early voting will die a well-deserved death. If Republican lawyers lose, then and only then should the Right consider any accommodation with this shonda on the republic.

Until further notice, the time is now to chop the throbbing tumor of early voting out of America’s electoral physique and incinerate it with the rest of the day’s medical waste.

Deroy Murdock is a Fox News contributor.