The Patriot Post® · Americans Overwhelmingly Want Voter ID

Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans are leaning into some big issues in the final days before the election: the economy, inflation, crime, and illegal immigration. And rightly so. Republicans have a winning hand in each of them.

But there’s another issue that bodes well for the Republicans — exceptionally well, in fact: the issue of voter ID.

On Thursday, Gallup published the results of a survey: “With less than two weeks to go in the presidential campaign and voting already underway in many states, 76% of U.S. adults favor the concept of early voting.”

Meh. We strongly prefer Election Day to Election Season, but it might be that the latter is here to stay.

But that’s not the real news from Gallup. This is: “Two other election law policies are supported by even more Americans — requiring photo identification to vote (84%) and providing proof of citizenship when registering to vote for the first time (83%).”

Read that again: eighty-four percent. Is there any issue in American politics on which the people agree more wholeheartedly? I can’t think of one.

Heck, 67% of Democrats and 84% of independents support it, along with 98% of Republicans. And proof of citizenship at first registration gets 66% support from Dems, 84% from indies, and 96% from Republicans.

Clearly, election integrity matters to the American people. Thus, if Donald Trump wins the election, he and his fellow Republicans should use this mandate to pass voter ID legislation nationwide. And in the increasingly unlikely event that Trump doesn’t win, congressional Republicans should beat the drum incessantly for it.

As our Mark Alexander noted a year ago: “Democrats protest any measure to require voter ID, as is required in every other civilized nation on the planet. The result is that millions of votes nationwide were not authenticated, which, in combination with massive Demo ballot-harvesting operations, significantly eroded the integrity of authentic votes — meaning your vote.”

All this brings us to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where a criminal investigation is underway, as election workers there flagged about 2,500 voter registration forms for potential fraud.

As ABC News reports: “The forms arrived at the Lancaster County elections office shortly before the state’s deadline to register this past Monday and were apparently part of a larger effort to sign people up. …. Some had false names, suspicious handwriting, questionable signatures, incorrect addresses or other problematic details.”

Problematic? We’ll say. Pennsylvania is the swing state in this year’s election. If Kamala Harris loses its 19 electoral votes, Donald Trump will almost certainly win the election. That’s because Harris would need to win at least two other smaller states that Trump is currently favored to win in order to make up for a loss of the Keystone State’s haul of electoral votes.

Apparently, two other unnamed counties in Pennsylvania were alerted to look for similar voter registration fraud. Indeed, for every cockroach you see, there are a dozen more in the woodwork.

We wonder: Might Philadelphia County be one of those two other counties? We ask because, whereas the Lancaster County fraud was uncovered by Republicans, there are no Republicans anywhere near the voting apparatus of the vote-rich Philadelphia County. No wonder former MSNBC talkinghead and Philly native Chris Matthews used to brag about his hometown’s uncanny knack for mustering just enough votes to put Pennsylvania into the Democrats’ column. “How many do you need?” he’d laugh.

Election integrity is, of course, no laughing matter. Still, the Democrats and their mainstream media fellow-travelers say it doesn’t exist. Indeed, a week after the 2020 election, The New York Times ran the following headline: “The Times Called Officials in Every State: No Evidence of Voter Fraud.” Nothing to see here, say the state election officials who are responsible for running clean elections.

Elsewhere in the land of “No Evidence of Voter Fraud,” Virginia Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin is fighting for election integrity and running up against dirty Democrats, like U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, who recently sued Virginia for trying to remove ineligible voters from its voter rolls.

Youngkin, having taken up the battle, was dealt a blow when a federal appeals court ruled “that a lower court was correct to re-instate some 1,600 Virginia voters who have questionable citizenship status to the rolls.”

“Questionable citizenship status”? These are people who have self-identified as noncitizens. Why on earth are they being allowed mandated to stay on the voter rolls?

As Youngkin himself put it on Friday: “Let’s be clear about what just happened: only 11 days before a presidential election, a federal judge ordered Virginia to reinstate over 1,500 individuals — who self-identified themselves as noncitizens — back onto the voter rolls.”

Yesterday, Youngkin vowed to take his case to the Supreme Court. Good for him. And let’s hope the High Court has its docket cleared for an expedited ruling. After all, we’ve got an election in eight days.

In his 2021 book Beyond Biden: Rebuilding the America We Love, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich devotes a whole chapter to election integrity. It’s not nearly enough, but Newt has some very good ideas, including a guiding principle for more honest and trustworthy elections. He writes: “To get to the election system that is best for Americans and our system of government (in that order), we need to establish a simple, accepted goal: every American citizen who is eligible to vote should be able to do so securely and easily and have his or her vote counted — exactly once. Every election rule we make must be in pursuit of this goal and no other.”

On the matter of election integrity generally and voter ID specifically, the American people have spoken. And according to Gallup, they have spoken resoundingly.