President Joe Biden recently delivered remarks to donors and party officials and stated, “The struggle is no longer just who gets to vote or make it easy for eligible people to vote. It’s about who gets to count the vote; whether your vote counts at all.”
Biden was speaking about proposed changes to U.S. elections by congressional Democrats who are now ditching their stalled multi-trillion dollar Build Back Better bill and pivoting back to radical election legislation. (Update Jan. 11, 2021: This bill is now S.2747, or the Freedom to Vote Act.)
Democrats often frighten their base by framing election issues in racial terms — they falsely assert Republicans are trying to dilute the minority vote and return to an era of Jim Crow laws — and market election bills as “protecting voting rights,” which is a complete misnomer, considering everything this bill does would exponentially degrade election security and catastrophically raise the potential for fraud.
The legislation increases the likelihood of a disputed election and should be rejected outright, especially considering the chaos this country endured after the 2020 election. The United States already has the knowledge, resources, and technological acumen to design and deploy secure election architecture that minimizes the potential for fraud and inspires confidence in election results. The policies currently being put forth would make things worse, not better.
Dems Pushing for Sweeping Election Law Changes
Congressional Democrats’ proposed legislation includes many sweeping provisions. It would force states to implement automatic voter registration, early voting, same-day registration, and no-fault absentee balloting. It would require states to allow ballot harvesting, ban voter ID laws nationwide, and limit access to federal courts for anyone who challenges such legislation.
It would require states to automatically register people (not necessarily “citizens”) whose names are in government databases (such as with the Social Security Administration, Department of Motor Vehicles, and Federal Bureau of Prisons). It would ban witness signature or notarization requirements for absentee ballots, prevent election officials from verifying voter eligibility of voters and removing ineligible names from voter rolls, and expand government censorship of political speech and activity (including online speech).
If passed, Democrats’ extreme election laws would cause widespread chaos that would make the 2020 election fallout look like a walk in the park.
This supposed “voting rights legislation” would violate the Constitution by wresting control of elections away from states and federalizing our elections. Centralized, top-down control of the process whereby citizens elect the officials who represent them is precisely the system the Founding Fathers sought to avoid in their careful formation of America.
Flawed Proposals
Ballot harvesting has been abused by partisan, political operatives for years and has been a conduit for fraud. Though one might argue it could potentially add a layer of convenience to the voting process, that convenience should never come at the expense of security. The use of ballot harvesting should be minimal, if not eliminated entirely.
Same-day registration makes it easier to commit fraud, as officials don’t have time to verify the accuracy of the registration information.
Automatically registering any name in a government database all but ensures ineligible people will be on state voter rolls, names which this legislation prevents from being purged.
Voter ID laws provide an obvious layer of security. They are supported by three-quarters of the country, including minorities (blacks favor voter ID laws by 69 percent, other minorities by 82 percent). Also, contrary to the gaslighting from many on the left, they don’t diminish voter turnout.
Although Democrats’ election legislation is marketed as a civil rights matter that would increase security in our elections, it’s all a lie: everything in it would exacerbate the worst problems we’ve seen in the last few elections in this country.
If elected officials truly want Americans to avoid nasty, protracted, divisive skirmishes over election outcomes, this bill is the absolute last thing they would pass. Elections are only as good as the confidence we can have in their outcomes.
Politicians should be providing policy prescriptions that reduce the capacity for fraud and result in a high degree of assurance that our elections are secure and administered fairly with only legal votes being counted. This bill does the exact opposite.