You half to be wholly truthful
Douglas Bloomfield’s “Can Biden protect voting rights?” (July 15) is replete with half-truths, misinformation and insulting conclusory language. For example, he suggests that Republican opposition to the Democrat push to federalize election rules proves that they would oppose the 1965 Voting Rights Act. In fact, they oppose the new law because it would institutionalize voter fraud, making elections far less free, fair or transparent. This new act attempts to make permanent procedures that were adopted in 2020 because of the dislocations caused by the COVID epidemic. As the epidemic wanes, those emergency procedures are no longer needed. The proposed law is also possibly invalid under the Constitution, which reserves to the states the right to determine voting procedures.
Bloomfield asserts without evidence that Republicans are intent on reducing the number of minority voters, cavalierly calling proposed state laws “voter suppression.” Republicans counter that their goal is to maintain the rights of all legal voters to cast ballots, while making it harder for illegal votes to be cast. Taken as a whole, Republican-proposed provisions to which Bloomfield objects without explanation evince a desire to preserve election integrity and restore public confidence in announced results.
These include: Banning paid ballot harvesting; requiring voter ID and signature verification for mail-in ballots, consistent with requirements for in-person voting; maintaining strict chain of custody for all ballots upon submission; updating voter rolls regularly; setting uniform times for early voting, with expanded hours on weekends; allowing observers from all political sides to watch the vote count.
Bloomfield notes that the Justice Department is suing Georgia over its new voter law. This suit exemplifies a two-tiered justice system weaponized for political purposes. How else to explain that Delaware, controlled by Democrats and represented by Joe Biden for four decades, has election procedures far more restrictive than Georgia’s, yet has escaped similar coercive legal inquiry?
Finally, Bloomfield castigates Republicans for blocking an “independent” investigation of the January 6 Capitol Hill riot, which he misleadingly calls a “deadly insurrection.” This fifth investigation of an event that lasted only a few hours is meant to demonize Donald Trump up to and beyond the 2022 elections, continuing four years of failed attempts to prove the “Russia collusion” fantasy.
Escaped slave and leading abolitionist Frederick Douglass observed, “The life of a nation is secure only while a nation is honest, truthful and virtuous.”
Sadly, Bloomfield and many of his Democrat comrades fail this test.
EFRAIM A. COHEN Zichron Yaakov