There was a time, not that long ago, when Americans expected to learn election results on Election Night. Usually, they did. Were voting machines that much more efficient way back in, say, 2012? No, they weren't. The difference was that we just required most people to vote in-person back then.

In-person voting reduces fraud, and reducing fraud and the appearance of fraud used to be important to us. We wanted people to believe the results when they came in. We wanted to protect the system that made all of our good things possible. We wanted democracy to continue. But then everything changed.

The main driver of that change, they will tell you, was the coronavirus pandemic. It simply became too dangerous to show up in person to vote. But think about that for a second. If you can go to the grocery store -- and most people can and do -- then you can go to a polling place. There's no medical reason that you can't vote in person.

Almost no one in the media has ever made that point. They know that mail-in elections help Democrats, and that's the whole point. When Republicans complain about it, the left doesn't answer the question. They just get hysterical and start screaming about racism.

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You may be wondering what racism has to do with the potential health risks of in-person voting. We're going to let Jon Ossoff explain the answer. In a world of shallow politicians, Ossoff makes Beto O'Rourke look like Teddy Roosevelt. But he does know one thing: If you're worried about election fraud, you are a racist. Here he is Monday: 

OSSOFF: My opponent ... Kelly Loeffler and Georgia Republicans have been filing lawsuit after lawsuit to purge the rolls to make it harder for people to vote. It is an open attack on Black voters in Georgia and it's a disgrace and it's an echo of the legacy of Jim Crow.

This scam will continue for as long as people keep falling for it, and they do keep falling for it. Everything Democrats don't like is Jim Crow. Just in the last year, they've told us that in-person voting, the filibuster, even mispronouncing Kamala Harris name -- a name, by the way, she can't pronounce herself -- are all vestiges of America's racist history. So what's the remedy for a history this evil? You guessed it: More identity politics.

Republicans recently argued that thousands of Georgia voters should be excluded from participating in the election for this simple and obvious reason: Post office change-of-address records showed they had left the state. Therefore, they couldn't vote in Georgia because they're not in Georgia.

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That seems simple and obvious, but that standard does not meet the burden of proof in the court of U.S. District Judge Leslie Abrams Gardner. Who is Leslie Abrams Gardner? She happens to be the sister of Stacey Abrams, the Democratic pretender to the governorship of Georgia. The case in question, by the way, involves a group funded by, you guessed it, Stacey Abrams.

Because this is an amazing time in our history, Gardner explained her refusal to recuse herself from the case like this: "One can only assume that the argument is something to the effect that if my sister is actively engaged in a cause, I cannot be impartial ... This argument is mere speculation."

Not surprisingly, Gardner gave her sister's organization exactly what they wanted. Therefore, thousands of people could vote Tuesday in Georgia, even if they no longer lived in Georgia. All they needed to do was identify as Georgia voters. Just as you can change your gender, you can also change your state of residence. You just identify yourself as such. That's how identity politics works.

It goes without saying that the real identities of Georgia's Democratic Senate candidates are off limits. You can call Raphael Warnock, for example, a pastor, a Christian, a pro-choice Christian. But don't you dare mention the words he actually utters in his sermons.

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And Jon Ossoff, what's his identity? It's not an easy question to answer when the sum total of your personal achievements could fit comfortably in the ashtray of a sports car. At various points, Ossoff has claimed he once worked as a senior national security staffer on Capitol Hill, which is pretty funny because, in fact, he was what is called in Washington a "legislative correspondent." That job consists mostly of responding to letters from constituents. In other words, he was the mail boy.

He wasn't even the mail boy in a very impressive office. Ossoff worked for a Georgia congressman called Hank Johnson, who was easily, hands down, the single dumbest member of Congress, and that's saying a lot. Back in 2010, just in case you think we're overstating this, Johnson asked a Navy admiral during a televised hearing whether the island of Guam might capsize if too many troops were moved on to a base there. Mind you, this happened before marijuana was legalized. 

That moment became a blueprint for Jon Ossoff's entire career: Lean into your mediocrity. Don't deny it, embrace it. And when you're challenged, hide behind identity politics. That works. We know it does because that's all Ossoff has ever done.

In 2012, Ossoff went on Twitter and encouraged people who follow him to support one of the leading propaganda outlets for the Communist Party of China.

Here's what he wrote: "Esp. during 18th Party Congress, #follow @XHNews (Xinhua - Chinese state media)."

Most politicians might feel slightly hesitant about endorsing Chinese state run media in public, but not Jon Ossoff. If he learned anything from Hank Johnson, it's that if you're going to do it, you might as well go all in.

Last year, we learned that Ossoff's media company received thousands of dollars from a Chinese-backed media giant. Ossoff didn't even bother to claim to care about transparency. In fact, he refused to release any more financial documents related to foreign investors. But stop asking questions, America is racist.

That's the answer to everything, but it would be nice if someone disagreed with that claim, because that claim is totally false. It's poisonous and it's wrecking what has been, for a couple of hundred years now, a pretty great country. But increasingly, no one pushes back. In fact, a lot of Republicans have been saying the same thing recently.

Last May, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., didn't bother holding hearings on election integrity or mail-in balloting. That might have been nice. No, McConnell was busy attacking police officers and eulogizing George Floyd. Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, was on the street mouthing Black Lives Matter slogans on camera in a sort of Jane Fonda moment. Meanwhile, two Republican senators called for replacing Columbus Day, a day that celebrates the discovery of this country, with Juneteenth.

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If Democrats win both Georgia Senate runoffs, they're not going to be too concerned about Juneteenth. They have much bigger goals in mind, like eliminating the filibuster, adding new states to the union, packing the Supreme Court, and giving citizenship to tens of millions of illegal aliens, now known as their base.

None of that should come as a surprise. We've seen it coming for a long time. The question we need to ask right now is, why did so few Republicans do anything to stop it?

This article is adapted from Tucker Carlson's opening commentary on the Jan. 5, 2021 edition of "Tucker Carlson Tonight."