House Democrats back 'reforms' to boost their election chances (iStock)
When Democrats reclaimed majority control of the House of Representatives under Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California this month, they had many choices on what to make their top legislative priority.
It says a lot that the new majority made a bill to upend federal election law House Resolution 1. The measure would give Democrats a partisan advantage over Republicans in everything from campaign finance to regulating online political ads.
Democrats would even go after the right of states to set “the time, manner and place” of elections that is guaranteed to them by the Constitution. States would be required to automatically register everyone in government databases as a voter unless individuals explicitly opted out.
In 2012, the Pew Research Center found that more than 3 million people were registered to vote in more than one state. In addition, 1.8 million dead people were on the voter registration rolls.
Requiring automatic voter registration would inject even more errors and potential for fraud into our already dubious voter rolls,
Under the Democratic bill, states would be required to offer voter registration online. They would also be required to offer at least 15 days of early voting and unlimited absentee balloting.
All of these so-called “reforms” trample on the rights of local election officials and raise the risk of fraud. And there is no crying need for such federal big-footing.
As the Wall Street Journal has noted: “Few people who don’t vote cite lack of registration as the reason.” Far more say the two parties put up poor or blandly similar candidates.
Democratic officials at the state and local level are also trying to subvert existing safeguards on election integrity. In Virginia, Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam is backing legislation that would repeal the state’s voter ID law and institute “no excuse” absentee voting.
Then there are elected officials who apparently aren’t interested in evidence that voter integrity in their state is threatened.
In 2012, the Pew Research Center found that more than 3 million people were registered to vote in more than one state. In addition, 1.8 million dead people were on the voter registration rolls.
Take Bill Galvin, who has served as secretary of state for Massachusetts for the last quarter century. Over that period, evidence has come to light that the state’s voter rolls are increasingly inaccurate and prone to corruption.
In fact, improper handling of ballots in Lowell (the state’s fifth-largest city) and staffing problems in Lawrence (the state’s 13th-largest city) finally prompted Galvin’s office to take over the election offices in both cities after last September’s primary.
In Lowell, Galvin found a “significant number of precincts did not reconcile or had missing information,” and that absentee ballots had been handled “contrary of election law.”
The decision was no academic matter. Lowell and Lawrence make up a quarter of the 3rd Congressional District, where the Democratic primary in September was won by Lowell native Lori Trahan by only 145 votes out of 89,000 votes cast.
Officials at the Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance, the state’s largest nonprofit advocacy organization, were concerned by the problems and decided to conduct their own probe. In October, they mailed 63,246 first-class letters to voters who cast ballots in the September primary in some eight cities to test the accuracy of the voter rolls.
A total of 705 – or over 1 percent – of the letters were returned as undeliverable. Since anyone who moves has his or her mail forwarded for 12 months, it’s troubling that so many letters were returned only a few weeks after votes were cast from an address in the primary. State law requires that once voters move they must change their address within six months.
Carl Copeland of MassFiscal says it’s even more concerning that 73 percent of the voters his group flagged for irregularities as having voted in the primary also voted in the general election two months later.
In the 3rd Congressional District Democratic primary, 464 votes were cast from addresses where mail was undeliverable. One of those votes was cast by Beej Das, a Democratic candidate in that primary election. He had registered to vote in Lowell after moving into the district to run, but also voted in the November election from his undeliverable address.
MassFiscal took great effort to collate its preliminary data and present it to Secretary of State Galvin in October, before the November election.
"With early voting starting, it is imperative that your office and others ensure that only appropriate voters vote in the upcoming election," the group wrote to Galvin.
MassFiscal spokesman Paul Craney emphasized to me that since voters are supposed to live at the address where they are registered, an undeliverable letter “is a major red flag.”
You’d think that Secretary Galvin would thank MassFiscal for its birddogging of election irregularities in a very close race, which supplemented the findings of his office that there were problems in the two largest cities MassFiscal surveyed. Nothing of the sort.
Asked about the MassFiscal letter at a news conference just before the November election, Galvin lashed out. Calling the group a Republican-leaning organization he dismissed its research as “political propaganda” and said there was nothing to the group’s findings “other than trying to make political statements.”
Galvin then darkly noted that his office would respond vigorously if any efforts were made to target voters due to their minority status.
MassFiscal says it picked the 10 smaller cities surrounding Boston without any political motive and that they represented a variety of demographic profiles.
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The group certainly acknowledges that some voters may have moved within the same city and thus were not required to update their voter registration within six months. But it still says its findings – when combined with the slipshod work that prompted Galvin’s office to take over election offices in Lowell and Lawrence – cry out for remedial action,
Galvin, along with many other Democrats, may not be concerned about evidence of possible voter fraud, but MassFiscal is hoping the local U.S. Attorney’s Office and the FBI may be. The group has sent its findings to the federal officials and is hoping someone in government will listen.
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