Roy Blunt: Democrats Passed 100 Laws to Change Voting; Republicans Passed 2

Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) the leading Republican on the Senate Rules and Administration Committee, noted Wednesday that Democrats had passed 100 state laws recently to change voting, while Republicans had passed only two such laws.

Blunt was commenting on the Democrats’ “For the People Act,” also known as H.R.1 and S.1, which is an attempt to overhaul the nation’s election system in radical ways that would virtually guarantee Republican defeat in future elections.

In addition to criticizing the text of the law, Blunt noted that Democrats’ claims that their law was necessary to counteract Republican efforts to change voting at the state level were unfounded. While Republicans had introduced some 253 bills to change voting, Democrats themselves had introduced 700. Moreover, 100 Democrat proposals had passed, and just two Republican ones. Those two, Blunt noted, had nothing to do with “voter suppression,” as Democrats had falsely alleged:

“One bill, in Arkansas, further defines the implementation of photo ID requirements,” Blunt noted. “And the other bill, in Utah, requires the lieutenant governor to send the Social Security list of deceased recipients to county clerks so they can initiate the process of removing the names of dead people from the voter rolls.” Democrats called these “voter suppression.”

Among the Democrat-proposed bills that became law, Blunt noted, was “one Illinois law [that] requires the establishment of polling places in county jails so prisoners can vote.”

H.R. 1 (or S.1), he warned, included similar radical changes, such as creating unlimited nationwide ballot harvesting, in which party operatives could hand in an unlimited number of absentee ballots on behalf of other voters with few safeguards. He also said nationalizing elections would create chaos.

Blunt also complained that committee chair Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) had not released the text of S.1 — which is longer than 800 pages — until recently, and that she had added additional Democratic witnesses to the hearing at the last minute.

Both party leaders, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), also spoke at the contentious hearing.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.