Inside News
A conservative group is pushing a new set of recommendations that could guide GOP lawmakers as they overhaul the voting system. Some proposals could gain bipartisan support while others will face opposition.
As Donald Trump made false allegations about voting fraud and tried to overturn the will of the people in last year’s election, one of his chief allies was conspicuously silent. The Honest Elections Project, a leading advocate for more restrictive voting laws, stayed away from Trump’s doomed effort.
But now the group founded by conservative activist and informal Trump adviser Leonard Leo, is re-joining the debate with a new set of recommendations likely to guide GOP lawmakers as they overhaul voting systems. The suggestions range from ones that are likely to be embraced by Democrats and voting rights groups — allowing election offices to start processing mail ballots weeks before Election Day — to ones likely to spark fierce opposition, such as mandatory voter identification for both mail and in-person voting, and creation of a secure system that would link an absentee ballot to its voter.
The proposals come as the GOP remains divided by Trump’s false claims. Republicans are wrestling with how far to go in overhauling voting laws without embracing Trump’s conspiracy theories or damaging Republicans’ political prospects. Honest Elections’ push is essentially an establishment Republican answer to some of those questions.
“There is much more to the election reform push than what happened after the November election,” said Jason Snead, the group’s executive director.
Snead argued that the proposals are critical to restore what he says is a sliding confidence in the country’s voting system.
“A lot of voters on both sides are primed to view the credibility of elections through a partisan lens. They tend to view the validity of an election through its outcomes,” Snead said. “We’ve learned a lot of lessons and we should be doing what we can to tighten up the process.”
But Snead made a point to separate his group from the post-election efforts — launched by Trump but embraced by many GOP groups and lawmakers — to reverse the outcome of the presidential vote.
The Honest Elections Project was created in early 2020 to advocate for greater controls on elections. The group has drawn scrutiny in part because of Leo’s influence in conservative legal circles. As co-chairman of the Federalist Society, Leo helped spearhead the effort to appoint conservative judges to the federal courts.
The group does not disclose its donors and there will be no public reporting of how it spends its money until later this year, at the earliest.
Last year, Honest Elections was part of the GOP legal strategy to fight voting changes, many of which were aimed at making voting easier during the pandemic. It sued Michigan, forcing the state to clean up its list of registered voters, and blocked a settlement easing absentee voting rules in Minnesota.
But the group, along with some other GOP legal and election policy experts, stayed away from Trump’s insistence the election had been stolen from him. Repeated audits and reviews turned up no significant-scale fraud in the election and Trump and his allies lost more than 50 court cases trying to prove it.
“We looked very carefully at all the allegations that were coming out after the election,” Snead said. “We concluded, as did a lot of other folks, that there was no evidence of widespread fraud.”