Nancy Pelosi is not going to let this public health crisis go to waste. The house speaker is holding much-needed economic relief hostage to gain for Democrats something they have long yearned for: more federal control over state elections.
In a bill ostensibly intended to save American jobs, Pelosi and her Senate allies crammed a wish list of bad election and voting reforms, including mandatory early voting, mandatory voting by mail, and the legalization of California-style ballot harvesting. Pelosi is taking the country closer to federalized elections than ever before.
What’s in it for them? It creates a one-stop shop to engineer the rules of the game. They believe that if they can manipulate the rules, they can manipulate the outcome of the election. This is their ultimate ticket to defeating Trump. Democrats seem willing to let the economy, and your livelihood, continue to flounder.
By constitutional design, states administer their own elections. States decide how we vote and when. This design preserves federalism and individual liberties. It’s hard to engineer the rules of the game when there are 50 different playing fields with unique needs and demographics. What works for South Dakota could fail in New York.
Pelosi knows that federal control makes imposing her political will on a national basis a much easier task. Her reforms are not only fundamentally at odds with the founders’ design — they are bad policy.
For example, Pelosi’s bill would legalize ballot harvesting. This practice allows any person to collect and turn in someone else’s ballot with little limit on how many voters a single agent is working for. In 2018, Democrats used California’s newly enacted ballot-harvesting rules to flip seven red districts blue. Pelosi’s plan says states must accept unlimited ballot harvesting everywhere.
Nationwide mail-in voting is dangerous. The Public Interest Legal Foundation studies voter rolls across the nation. They are riddled with duplicated registrations, deceased people, and other incomplete or corrupted information. We found one Pittsburgh-area registrant with seven active registrations at the same address. Under Pelosi’s all-mail voting, a ballot (perhaps even more than one) will likely go to people who are no longer alive or residing at their registered address on file. That is the perfect situation for fraud.
Democrats believe early voting also gives them an advantage. The thinking goes that if the election is spread out over several months, there is more opportunity to identify and move otherwise unmotivated voters to the polls. Regardless, needs and resources vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Those who administer state and local elections, not Pelosi, should decide how much early voting, if any, is appropriate.
The November election is more than seven months off. It is far from certain that the coronavirus will still be a major concern by Election Day. If issues remain, there are far less drastic options for protecting the health of voters — the same options currently being used effectively in your grocery store: masks, gloves, disinfecting wipes, and proper distancing. These are better options than fundamentally overhauling 50 systems in a matter of months.
State and local leaders already have the experience, knowledge, and authority to administer their own elections, even during a public health crisis. They do not need Pelosi to decide what is best for them as a part of her eleventh-hour negotiation tactics. Pelosi and her fellow Democrats should focus on defeating the virus, saving jobs, and restoring a historically thriving economy.
Noel H. Johnson is an attorney for the Public Interest Legal Foundation. He can be reached at [email protected].
