
No, Election Laws Were Not Changed Just for COVID
The pandemic wasn’t the beginning of leftist efforts to rewrite the rules.
Voting laws, and their timing, make Americans question if their votes in this constitutional Republic have meaning, equal value, and are protected from scandal. In some instances there were warranted changes to the voting laws to accommodate those fearful of COVID-19, but leftists began their efforts to impact the November 2020 election much earlier than this year.
“As Democrats select their 2020 presidential nominee, a constellation of left-leaning groups is looking ahead, laying groundwork for huge voter turnout in November by filing an avalanche of voting-rights lawsuits against state laws they say suppress participation in elections,” said Politico in a February article titled, “Democrats launch massive legal campaign on voting ahead of 2020.” The article adds, “The groups, including state and national party committees as well as outside nonprofits, are spending millions of dollars to fight voter-registration purges, ID requirements and rules regarding signature-matching and ballot order, and they are also hiring voter protection staffers and recruiting and training volunteers in key states. Democratic donors are flooding the wide-reaching legal effort with millions of dollars.”
Without knowing the date, we might think this quote was published just before the presidential election, or at least after March once COVID was known to be a pandemic. In February, however, Politico was describing the legal groundwork underway by the political Left to change voting procedures. But the quote discusses things that came all the way back in January 2019.
House Resolution 1 was introduced that month, as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi resumed her party’s majority control over the House with the aim to restructure voting for all Americans regardless of state laws and jurisdictions. The timing was critical to make these changes, not just because of the determination to beat Donald Trump but because of the redistricting done at the state level set to occur in 2021 based on the Census completed every 10 years.
Nobly named, the For the People Act of 2019 eventually passed the Democrat-controlled House with no Republican support in March of last year. This supposedly honorable piece of legislation filled with 622 pages of changes to the voting process wasn’t supported by anyone from the Center-Right for good reason.
First, despite the fact that public schools have terrible proficiency in Civics and U.S. History, HR 1 would allow children down to age 16 to vote. The law would have begun automatic voter registration for all who engage with the government for any service, such as welfare and the DMV, which in some states does not require proof of citizenship. It would have allowed same-day registration, preventing accurate verification of identity and residency. Furthermore, the Democrat legislation would have prohibited states from purging voter rolls of inactive voters, dead people, or noncitizens. It would have also given the automatic restoration of voting rights to all felons without consideration of sentencing, crime committed, or time served. Among many other federal controls, HR 1, had it passed the Senate, would have allowed activist or third-party groups to canvass neighborhoods and take possession of absentee ballots not returned via U.S. Postal Service.
If this failed bill and well-used excuse of COVID-19 aren’t enough to make the voting process seem unstable, add to it the “eight-figure investment” to flip state legislative races, the “court challenges on tackling barriers to registration and voting, as well as ballot-order rules, in states with high-profile Senate races, including Arizona, Texas and Georgia,” and the work of a super PAC called Priorities USA, working in Arizona, Michigan, and Wisconsin to file suits.
The trust in American institutions is already frayed and eroded with the press, education, and even healthcare assigned to partisans. Now, sadly, American Patriots have lost confidence in their votes being dependably counted.
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