The Patriot Post® · GOP Pushes for Election Reform

With a low-level leftist insurgency continuing to roil a major American city, you’d be forgiven for thinking that election integrity isn’t a top priority.

But, hey, we should be able to stomp filthy leftist rabble and keep the Democrats from stealing elections walk and chew gum at the same time, right? And while it’s true that the Democrats long ago declared war on honest elections, that doesn’t mean we can’t keep trying to reform them, right?

After all, if you need a photo ID to get on an airplane, or to adopt a pet, or to apply for welfare, or to walk into a Costco, or to gain admittance to an NAACP convention, shouldn’t you have to prove who you are in order to cast a vote for a dementing presidential candidate exercise the most solemn and fundamental right of an American citizen?

Yesterday, House Republicans introduced a comprehensive election reform bill — one that would require photo ID before voting and verification of citizenship before registering to vote.

The bill is called the Make Elections Great Again Act — a name that certainly dooms it from getting the required 60 votes to beat a Senate filibuster — and is led by Wisconsin Republican Bryan Steil. As Steil put it: “Americans should be confident their elections are being run with integrity — including commonsense voter ID requirements, clean voter rolls, and citizenship verification,” Steil said in a statement. “These reforms will improve voter confidence, bolster election integrity, and make it easy to vote, but hard to cheat.”

If Steil’s name sounds familiar, it might be because he’s been an ardent champion of election reform for a few years now, and because he and his fellow House Republicans introduced an election reform bill, the American Confidence in Elections Act, back in 2023.

For the opposition, here’s Steil’s Democrat counterpart, Joe Morelle of New York: “President Trump and House Republicans are terrified of the American people. They are desperate to rig the system so they can choose their voters. This bill is their latest attempt to block millions of Americans from exercising their right to vote. I will fight this bill at every turn.”

It’s hard to blame the Democrats for their lack of enthusiasm when it comes to voting integrity. After all, our current system works really well for them. Consider this bit of evidence from an AP poll taken prior to the 2024 election:

The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll finds that only 22% of Republicans have high confidence that votes in the upcoming presidential election will be counted accurately compared to 71% of Democrats, underscoring a partisan divide fueled by a relentless campaign of lies related to the 2020 presidential election. Even as he runs for the White House a third time, Trump continues to promote the false claim that the election was stolen.

When folks think a system is broken, they’re less likely to trust that system, and — more important to Democrat electoral fortunes — they’re less likely to use that system. And that’s why the Democrats absolutely love our broken status quo — because they know that requiring folks to, you know, show proof that they are who they say they are, to prove their identity and their citizenship, makes it tougher for them to cheat. (Democrats have long held the racist belief that blacks are somehow less capable of getting voter IDs than whites.)

The unveiling of this House bill comes a day after Senate Majority Leader John Thune said that another bill — the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, which would add a requirement that folks prove their citizenship in order to register to vote — will come to the Senate floor “at some point.”

I wonder how Thune can “promise” a vote here. Maybe he’s talking about a procedural vote, in which the Democrats will certainly not cooperate to get over the Senate’s 60-vote threshold.

And that’s the most frustrating thing about election reform. It’s a great bill, but without a few Democrat votes, it goes nowhere.

And that’s a shame. Because, as The Daily Wire notes, “Recent data suggests that 80% of Americans favor photo ID laws, including 97% of Republicans, 84% of Independents, and 53% of Democrats. Furthermore, 77% of minority voters reportedly support such measures.”

Yep, even a majority of Democrat voters support fixing our broken system.