The following article is sponsored by the Honest Elections Project
When it comes to elections, it should be easy to vote, but hard to cheat. That’s the two-part equation for election success, and most Americans agree.
And so does the Honest Elections Project. Our group was founded to fight for free and fair elections for all Americans. After all, the right to vote is about more than just casting ballots—it’s about preserving a fair system that guarantees each lawful vote is counted.
But that system is under attack. The left is pushing hard to reshape elections for political gain, and they are exploiting the COVID-19 crisis to do it. Today, Honest Elections is launching a new video highlighting the threats their agenda poses to free and fair elections—and showing Americans the clear, safe, and secure alternative to protecting voting rights during the pandemic.
COVID-19 presents unique challenges to voting, and we clearly need plans to keep voting safe and easy during the pandemic. Happily, states are devising ways to protect voter health at polling places, and expanding opportunities to vote absentee.
But we must not forget the second half of the voting equation: protecting the process from fraud. The fact is, voting by mail is not as secure as voting in person. Absentee ballots can be lost, intercepted, and tampered with or destroyed. And, when voting happens outside of a polling place, no one is entirely sure that the voter wasn’t pressured to vote the “right” way. When these sorts of things happen, voters are disenfranchised.
That’s why absentee voting typically has rules in place to verify a voter’s identity and ensure that only lawful voters are casting ballots. They come in many forms—voters typically have to request ballots, or have their signatures matched to one on file, or have a witness attest to their identity—but they all serve the same role: to stop fraud.
All of these sensible policies are now in the left’s crosshairs. In their zeal to radically and permanently transform voting, the left is pushing legislation to mail ballots automatically to every voter registration, undermine voter ID laws, and strip away vital voter protections like bans on vote harvesting. And they have filed an unprecedented number of lawsuits hoping courts will rewrite election laws when lawmakers won’t.
In other words, they want more Americans than ever before to rely on mail balloting, while also stripping away the safeguards of traditional absentee voting.
No matter how the left’s plan is measured, it comes up short. It would force states to come up with entirely new voting systems practically overnight, guaranteeing voter confusion and risking chaos.
And it opens the door to widespread fraud. America’s voter rolls are riddled with errors—one in eight are outdated or wrong, according to one Pew study. Mailing ballots to every registration is not just wasteful, it will send millions of ballots to the wrong address, and in the name of ineligible or dead voters—or to registrations that are entirely fraudulent. What easier avenue for fraud could there be than stacks of unclaimed ballots, unprotected by voter identification laws?
Americans should reject this naked attempt to remake elections for political gain. Instead, we need specific, targeted, and temporary responses to this pandemic that preserve free and fair elections by making it easy to vote, and hard to cheat.
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