On election integrity, we tend to discuss the hot issue at that moment. Usually, it is a new court case or piece of legislation. But we only get a piecemeal view of each side’s goals. Let’s step back and look at each’s ideal system.
The rightwing view is straightforward. Voter rolls should be accurate and only contain eligible, citizen voters. In-person voting on election day (or shortly before) is best with mail or other options for elderly, disabled and folks truly out of town. A voter should show a photo ID and votes should be captured on paper.
All votes should be in by election day and there should be near final results available on election night. There should also be robust reconciliation and post-election audits to ensure that the number of ballots cast equals the number of voters.
The left, on the other hand, advocates for electoral Thunderdome. No rules.
Even left-leaning legislators balk at their ideas, forcing liberal activists to use courts to jam through their vision. The left’s preferred electoral system is not to convince voters to vote for them. Instead, it is to empower activists to find and collect enough ballots to push them to victory.
Accurate voter rolls are the left’s first target. Progressives push for automatic registration which bloats the rolls with people who don’t know they are being registered and may not want to be. Mistakes are inevitable — this is the DMV after all. Once rolls are bloated and inaccurate, the left fights efforts to fix them. This includes removing obviously ineligible voters, including non-citizens.
Ultimately, the left hopes to enshrine non-citizen voting – explicitly in places like New York and Washington D.C., and implicitly in Arizona where they oppose attempts to keep non-citizens off the rolls and Alabama where they fight to keep registered non-citizens on the rolls. In battlegrounds like Nevada and North Carolina, the leftwing machine has fought to keep non-citizens registered after these individuals told courts that they are ineligible for jury service because of their non-citizenship.
Once the left has bloated the voter rolls using courts, they push mail ballots to every name on the roll. In states they control, like California, Oregon, Nevada and Colorado, liberal politicians have all but eliminated in-person voting. Because the rolls are inaccurate, ballots will be sent to voters who have moved, died or are otherwise ineligible.
Once ballots are mailed, leftwing attorneys will fight for paid ballot harvesting — the scheme that lets campaign operative or activists “help” voters fill out their ballots and collect and return them to election officials. Problems with this abound.
But leftist campaigns love ballot harvesting and activists pour money into lawsuits in multiple states, including Texas and Alabama to preserve the practice. The left’s utopia combines unlimited ballot harvesting with another favorite, unmanned drop boxes. Here a campaign operative collects unlimited ballots and returns them in bulk under the cover of darkness. What could go wrong?
Once ballots are returned to election officials, the left’s industrial legal complex will fight attempts to verify that an actual voter filled out the ballot. Some states require an identification number on the return envelope for the ballot. This is the ideal, since it is easy and objective, but the left has sued to block voter ID repeatedly. Other states verify identity by comparing the signature on the ballot envelope to a signature in the voter’s file.
The left has sued to block this as well asking courts to force election officials to presume that every signature is valid. Not stopping there, they have even advocated counting ballots returned without any signature. Indeed, no verification of identity at all.
In person voting is not immune to the left’s attacks on integrity. They fight attempts to require a voter to have a photo ID and, if they win Congress and the White House, could ban photo ID requirements nationwide.
Basic election reconciliation is also on the left’s chopping block. Georgia passed rules to ensure that the number of ballots cast matches the number of people that voted. The left has sued to block them.
Good elections need clear rules. The left is hyper-focused on using courts to wash away our rules and replace them with chaos. They are not winning the argument. Courts and citizens must stand up to these tactics and demand rules that make it easy to vote and hard to cheat.
Chad Ennis is the Vice President of Honest Elections Project.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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