When Joe Biden performed at the State of the Union show last week, one of the applause lines that aimed to get bipartisan support was about voting. “In America, we must protect the right to vote, not suppress that fundamental right,” he said. “We honor the results of our elections, not subvert the will of the people. We must uphold the rule of the law and restore trust in our institutions of democracy.”

Obviously, Biden’s utterance about honoring the results of our elections was a not-so-subtle dig at his predecessor — and obviously not at “election denying” Democrats like House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. Indeed, the president must have forgotten about the debunked claims of Russian interference that were made in the 2016 election, or the Stacey Abrams complaint about voter suppression costing her a chance to be governor in 2018. To be sure, in our humble shop we’ve discussed the issues with the 2020 election at length — and the problems created by the so-called “solutions” put up by Democrats. But one national election later, in too many places we’ve seen little to no action to address the perception that elections are now rigged.

While Democrats use their efforts at election “reform” to weaken and water down voter ID laws, an encouraging new study on its effects was released last week. The two authors, who both hail from the Department of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame, argued that those laws initially favored Democrats as a motivator to turn out, but over the last decade as people adjusted to them their effect was muted. In the end, they wrote, “We conclude that voter ID requirements motivate and mobilize supporters of both parties, ultimately mitigating their anticipated effects on election results.”

Considering that the vast majority of voters in both parties are fine with voter ID, and strong reforms like those undertaken in the state of Georgia were met with near-universal satisfaction, the Democrats are barking up the wrong tree on this one.

But the party of government expansionists like FDR, LBJ, and LGB isn’t known for taking a strictly legislative approach. The new Republican majority in the House is now demanding answers from the Biden regime on an initiative quietly put in place in the early days of the administration. As stated in a section of Executive Order 14019: “Agencies shall consider ways to expand citizens’ opportunities to register to vote and to obtain information about, and participate in, the electoral process. … The head of each agency shall evaluate ways in which the agency can, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, promote voter registration and voter participation.”

The supposedly transparent Biden administration has been less than forthcoming regarding GOP requests like this one on how it’s implementing this executive order. Now, though, the GOP has subpoena power to assist in finding out what steps agencies have taken and who has helped them out, perhaps in violation of the Hatch Act.

In order to restore trust in our republican institutions — there, we fixed it for the president — we need an electoral process where people who are previously legally registered to vote can participate on Election Day (not election months), know their vote was counted, and have the results in hours after the polls close, not days or weeks. Until the most recent election cycles, that was a given in our country, but many of our “reforms” in the last few years have eroded our trust in the institution. Fortunately, it’s still up to the states to lead the way back despite all these federal efforts to intervene.