Our Election Rules Are A Mess

Supposedly our election rules are left to the states. The problem is most people seem not to care about anything other than our biennial elections for Congress and the President every four years. Bill de Blasio — the worst mayor in American history — was elected by just 8% of NYC voters. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was thrust on the American scene by winning a primary that was arguably tantamount to a general election with just 16,898 votes.  It is time to clean up this mess. The problem is the political parties are worlds apart.

The Democrats have done much to loosen election rules. They argue that even simple rules are voter suppression.  That is even though they know the inherent problems with cleaning voter rolls maintained at the county level.  Just dealing with the deceased is a major problem. Almost 3 million Americans die every year. That means nearly six million dead people are potentially on voter rolls since the last biennial election, not including ones never removed in past elections. Then there are the people who have moved. Forty million Americans move every year many between states or at least change jurisdictions within states.

California has been at the forefront of destroying the integrity of our elections. First, they issue driver licenses to foreign nationals including illegal aliens. They have made the DMV (the least trusted name in government operations) a center point of registering people and all you need to vote is a driver’s license whether here legally or not. Then ballot harvesting was established as a statewide manner of damaging election integrity.  Harvesting allows a stranger to come to your house and take your ballot to deliver it for you. What could go wrong with that?  They mailed out ballots to every registered person in this last election with return postage paid despite all the dead and relocated people still on the voter rolls. Worse, there was little preparation for handling the onslaught of mailed-in ballots.

The U.S. Commission on Federal Election Reform had something to say about this in 2005. Chaired by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker, the commission made clear that “absentee ballots (mailed) remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.” They also stated, “vote-buying schemes are more difficult to detect when citizens vote by mail.” Yet more states are moving that way.

The Democrats want to create even more havoc in the rules of our election. Don’t believe it?  Look at the first bill they presented in the House of Representatives when they took over in January 2019. House Resolution 1 in 2019 was all about rewriting our election rules. It came in at 600 pages just to make sure it was unclear. The more pages the less clarity.

Here are some of the things the bill proposed:

1. The states would be required to offer early voting.
2. The states would have to offer registration up to and including Election Day.
3. The states would have to offer online registration (nothing could go wrong there).
4. The states would have to automatically register people from government databases (nothing could go wrong there).
5. The states would have to register 16-year-olds to vote two years in advance (This is a step toward their wanting 16-year-olds to vote).
6. The bill requires states to accept absentee ballots for any reason.
7. The bill would provide for prepaid return postage for any ballots involving a federal election.
8. The bill would establish ballot harvesting across the nation.
9. The bill would disable most voter ID laws across the nation.

The bill has not passed, but that is not the end of it. Many of the provisions were part of the Cares Act in 2020 before they were cut. These rules will be brought forward until the Democrats get this passed. For elections to have integrity, virtually none of this should be done.

Democrats are always telling us they are the party of science and that we should be more like other countries.  Except when they do not want to do either.

Democrats are constantly making comments that voter ID is racist. It harms Blacks and Hispanics. We all know that is not true. Blacks and Hispanics have a government-issued photo ID for the same reasons everyone else does. More importantly, we are the only modern country that does not require voter ID. The largest democracy in the world, India, does. So do Israel and France and Germany and Britain and Canada and Mexico and Sweden and Norway and the United Kingdom and on and on. We held an election in Iraq and required voter ID.

The question is why Democrats would not want voter ID.  The same answer comes up because it is the only answer – they want to lessen the integrity of our elections. That can be the only answer. That is the answer as to why they want election day registration, limited voter roll cleaning and they think ballot harvesting is a sane idea in a free country.

Oregon has all mail-in ballots and online registration and is the model for much of Democrats’ ideas. Yet they still cut off registration 21 days ahead of election day and require voter ID to register. There are currently four states that have online registration. Arizona, Washington, and Kansas are the other states that allow online registration.  How they verify that the authenticity of the registrant is unclear.

You cannot get an election official to admit there is errant voting in their elections. The NYT contacted election officials from all 50 states, and everyone not surprisingly said it all went swimmingly. That is despite many states having new rule changes that impacted their registration and mail-in-ballots. That is despite independent sources identifying multiple cases of improper election-related behavior.

Christopher Krebs was fired by Mr. Trump. Thus, he had to be a good guy in the eyes of the Media. He was our first director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). He was head of the predecessor organization. After being fired he went on various national news shows and told the world we had the most secure election yet. That defies simple logic with multiple states changing to statewide mail-in ballots despite having inadequate preparation for doing such. More importantly, Mr. Krebs’ organization was simultaneously responsible for the oversight of our cyber systems which had the largest hack in history known as SolarWinds. He should have been fired for that, but Trump jumped the gun and fired him for his oversight of election integrity. Needless to say, his credibility is shot on both issues.

Election officials deny there is anything is wrong with their procedures. There obviously is and with demands for further loosening of the rules, we have two parties in juxtaposition. One wants to assure greater security for our elections and the other wants to make it easier to create mischief in our voting system. One believes as always that our citizens are helpless, and the government needs to do everything for them.

The Dems say voting is our most sacred right. They should treat it as such. When you have a sacred right you should have to work to protect that right. Showing up with a voter ID is not too much to ask. Registering to vote instead of it automatically occurring by a government agency is not too much to ask. Getting your ballot either in the mail or at a polling place and then returning that ballot with your own effort is not too much to ask.  Remember it is a right in a true democracy to abstain from voting, and many people opt for that right.

If we continue to divorce the individual effort from voting, then we will continue to open our electoral system to mayhem. Don’t believe the lies from election officials that this was a safe and secure election. It was a mess because it was designed to be a mess. We need to change that or the value of our vote will be dissolved.

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This article first appeared in Flash Report  on January 10, 2021 and is reproduced with the permission of the author.