Talk about stealing elections …
House Democrats passed H.R. 1, the ostentatiously and misleadingly named For the People Act, last Wednesday night on a near-party-line vote. The Senate should reject this dangerous assault on election integrity.
The bill’s primary danger lies in its virtual abolition of any safeguards to ensure that a vote represents the true desire of a single eligible voter.
States would be effectively barred from mandating the use of a photo ID to establish that a person is the registered voter they claim to be, instead permitting a prospective voter to merely sign a sworn affidavit. States would also be required to adopt same-day voter registration in federal elections, even during early voting, so that a person could show up at a poll, sign a registration form and cast a vote without any checks to ensure the person was actually eligible to vote.
Together, these provisions would make it extremely easy for a motivated individual or group to move from poll to poll and cast a number of fraudulent ballots without any reasonable fear they would be caught.
The bill also cavalierly opens the door to voting fraud in its treatment of mail balloting. It would expressly permit a person to collect mail ballots and deliver them to the relevant election agency. It purports to limit this to already sealed ballots, but of course it would be almost impossible to prove a ballot was sealed when it was handed off.
The most recent proved instance of mass voter fraud involved exactly this procedure, when a Republican operative cast fraudulent votes for candidates who paid him by collecting unsealed mail ballots from voters and then filling them out for the preferred person. H.R. 1 would make it much likelier that unscrupulous operatives of both parties could try to use this scheme to tip the scales in their favor.
The measure also disables other possible ways in which election integrity could be assured. It prevents states, for example, from requiring more than the last four digits of a person’s Social Security number on a registration form.
That theoretically opens the floodgates for undocumented immigrants who have illegally obtained SSNs, especially when combined with the requirement that certain state agencies automatically register people as voters when they come into any contact with the system.
Democrats’ claims that there have been no large-scale cases of voter fraud to date are beside the point. Incentives matter, and H.R. 1 creates massive incentives for people to cheat.
It would be easy to create an election system that satisfies people concerned about voter fraud and voter suppression. Our smartphones now have fingerprint- and face-ID systems that protect our devices from unauthorized use. We could easily create a national voter database and attach pictures or fingerprints to every registration.
This would even be compatible with sameday registration, provided each polling place had a computer with a camera that could snap a picture and immediately upload it to the database.
Democratic elections are America’s birthright. H.R. 1 would sell that birthright for no reason and must be defeated.