“All politics is local” is a famed aphorism that many forget in the face of an overbearing national media. However, numerous recent condemnations of arrogant politicians by local GOP organizations illustrate the untapped power of grassroots activism.
Our unique federalism is designed so that most power is vested in the states and the people. While Congress wastes its time and our money infringing on the First Amendment rights of Trump supporters, state lawmakers can step up and save our country.
In most conservative states, legislatures only meet during the first half of the year, and Texas legislatures only meet once every two years. So the window of opportunity is now.
Ensuring election integrity should be a top priority in every state after the fiasco of the last presidential election. Polls continue to show that a majority of Republicans believe the election was unfair for a number of unprecedented reasons. Joe Biden did not win legally.
A presidential election that half of voters consider illegitimate cannot be saved by the barbed wire that today mars the history, grandeur and beauty of Washington. The American presidency must be based on election integritynot the thousands of soldiers stationed in our Capitol.
Luckily, The U.S. Constitution gives state legislatures full power to direct the election of presidential electors who will ultimately choose the president. The courts, which are dominated by liberals at the state and most federal levels, play no role in this process.
Control of the U.S. Senate is at stake in next year’s elections as the current 50-50 vote split hangs in the balance. Already three GOP senators – from Alabama, Ohio and Pennsylvania – have announced they will not seek re-election, and many other states will fight in elections that will depend on the voting procedures used.
Since 2016, polls have shown that there are few undecided voters in our country, which is why the election results depend more on the course of voting than on the political message. Consultants make a lot of money by taking commissions to place political ads on television, even though the ads have no effect on voters who have already made up their minds.
The gold standard for election integrity is personal votingused almost exclusively (and successfully) for over 200 years in our great country. This ensures ballot secrecy, no ballot harvesting (where political partisans collect unverified ballots from union stores and nursing homes without supervision), and stalwart poll monitoring so both sides can check who can vote.
Justice Clarence Thomas, in a persuasive opinion Monday, expressed dismay at the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear a challenge alleging the improper counting of mailed ballots in Pennsylvania on a timely basis. To explain how to do this, he cited liberal sources Voting by mail is inherently susceptible to fraud.
Quoting the New York Times, Judge Thomas noted this “the risk of fraud is ‘much more prevalent’ with mail-in ballots.” Citing as his authority current dean Heather Gerken of his progressive alma mater, Yale Law School, Judge Thomas further explained that virtually “all evidence of a stolen election involves absentee ballots and the like.”
Justice Thomas pointed this out back in 2012, when a New York Times Supreme Court reporter declared that “voting by mail is now so common and so problematic that election experts say there have been many elections in which no one “could not say with certainty which candidate was the deserved winner.” These prophetic words from this reliably liberal source have come true in 2020.
To end this open invitation to fraud, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis called on his Legislature to restrict mail-in voting. As a result of the recent census, Florida will likely gain two more presidential electors and will play an even bigger role in the next presidential election than in the last one.
In the crucial final weeks of the last election, President Trump had to spend valuable time campaigning in Florida. If Florida embraces election integrity, Trump can safely count on retaining it next time to buy time to campaign in other battleground states.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has reportedly made election integrity a priority in the country’s biennial legislative session, and curbing illegal mail-in voting is one of his priorities. The filling of the ballot box with mail-in votes has caused the Republican Party’s margin in this country to shrink as Democrats become more adept at winning votes through election follies with each election cycle.
States should enact legislation based specifically on election of presidential electors regarding in-person voting, except for active-duty military personnel and narrowly justified mail-in voting, as would be the case with Idaho House Bill H0105. Nothing requires that the voting process used to elect presidential electors be the same as the process used to elect the city dog catcher.
