David Bossie: Coronavirus vs. voting laws – Democrats exploit crisis for election power grab
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In promoting national vote-by-mail legislation, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her caucus of radical House Democrats are following the advice of Rahm Emanuel, who famously said while Obama chief of staff, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that [is] it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.”
Pelosi recently announced that she will try to insert the controversial election measure into the next stimulus package, which is supposed to focus on helping our country overcome the COVID-19 pandemic.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}In the midst of this crisis, the American people want our leaders in Washington to combat the coronavirus and plan for an economic recovery. Instead, Democrats plan a crass political move that will not even secure the right of each registered voter to cast his or her vote on Election Day. What it will do is undermine states’ ballot security measures – such as voter ID requirements – in order to lock in future Democrat election victories regardless if they are free, fair and legitimate.
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President Trump is right to oppose this attempt liberal to use our national health crisis to rig the 2020 elections.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Voting in person, on Election Day, has been a patriotic American tradition since the beginning of our republic. In recent years, however, states have begun experimenting with alternatives to voting at local polling stations.
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Many have enacted early voting laws, which allow people to vote as many as several weeks before Election Day. They just have to show up at is a prescribed location, show a form of identification to secure a ballot, and then cast a vote right then and there. This process is similar to what was once commonly referred to as “absentee voting.” But traditional absentee voting requires individuals to show cause why they can’t vote in person on Election Day.
A handful of states, including Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington and Utah, have gone even further, enacting laws that make voting exclusively done by mail. In those states, all registered voters are sent a ballot in the mail, which they can complete and return via U.S. mail prior to Election Day.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}The U.S. Constitution generally gives each state the latitude to set the “times, places and manner” of voting within their jurisdiction. But states do not have exclusive authority over all aspects of elections. The Constitution also gives Congress the power to override state decision-making and even set uniform national standards when it comes to elections for federal office.
The elimination of voter ID laws, coupled with the enactment of controversial ballot harvesting policies, are longtime goals of the left designed to upend our sacred election process.
The national motor voter registration law is an example of one of the rare instances where Congress has exercised that plenary authority. For the most part, however, Congress has followed the nation’s federalist tradition of allowing states to set their own approaches for conducting elections.
Aside from undercutting over two centuries of tradition and causing lengthy delays in the release of election results, one of the major reasons states have been reluctant to adopt all vote-by-mail is the concern that it lends itself to substantial risk of fraud, voter coercion and other problems, such as lost or mistakenly delivered ballots. Here’s the bottom line: with voting-by-mail, there are simply no means to monitor who is actually marking a ballot and the conditions under which a vote is being cast. The votes of elderly Americans could be especially susceptible to coercion.
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Moreover, fully two-thirds of the states have enacted some sort of voter ID law that requires an individual to show identification in order to obtain a ballot and cast a vote. These laws are viewed by many as the single most effective means of preventing voter fraud. However, a national vote-by-mail law would render those laws largely obsolete because ballots cast by mail cannot be examined to ensure who is actually casting the vote.
The elimination of voter ID laws, coupled with the enactment of controversial ballot harvesting policies, are longtime goals of the left designed to upend our sacred election process. The left wants to win at any cost. Accuracy, legality and fairness appear not to be their concern.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Democrats know full well they can’t pass their radical agenda under normal circumstances because they lack public support. So they wait for a crisis to come along and try to take full advantage of it – with the help of their allies in the anti-Trump media. This time it’s the COVID-19 crisis, and the Democrats are using it to pass nationwide vote-by-mail legislation instead of focusing on defeating this awful virus and planning our recovery in a bipartisan manner.
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Everyone should be aware that the goal here is not to ensure that every American who is entitled to vote has a fair opportunity to do so. Instead, the goal is to eviscerate voter ID laws and other state-enacted election security measures in time for this fall’s elections.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}If Pelosi manages to pass this legislation in the Democrat-controlled House, it should be dead on arrival in the Senate. As Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said, the government should first faithfully implement the enormous $2.2 trillion stimulus that was just signed into law by President Trump before moving forward with another one.