Thanks to the leadership of Senators Mitch McConnell. Richard Shelby and Roy Blunt and the constant vigilance of House Administration Committee Ranking Member Rodney Davis, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her fellow Democrats were unsuccessful in their efforts to hijack the COVID-19 relief bill for the legislative priorities on matters such as elections.  But the left is not done and will undoubtedly keep fighting for their own election desires over the needs of the American people.   

Two conservative leaders are hitting back hard against the Democrats' unprecedented and fortunately ultimately unsuccessful federal power grab in the recent CARES Act.  Christian Adams and Hans von Spakovsky wrote:

We always knew that liberals considered federalizing control over elections to be an important priority. We just never dreamed it was more important than fighting the coronavirus pandemic or preserving American jobs. . . .

For example, Pelosi’s coronavirus plan includes mandatory voting by mail. That means the next president would be determined by ballots that have been marked behind closed doors by who knows who, perhaps collected and dropped in the mail (or not) by another who knows who, and then swiftly processed by the U.S. Postal Service, the same organization that routinely delivers us our neighbor’s mail.

When both of us were at the Justice Department, we worked on a case in Noxubee County, Mississippi, where systematic voter fraud was being conducted by a local Democratic Party political machine. 

A central component of this fraud was mail ballots. Notaries paid by the machine would roam the county, plucking ballots from mailboxes and voting the ballots in place of the intended voter. 

In another article von Spakovsky draws on his experience as an election official in two states to point out there is no need for expanded vote by mail for as von Spakovksy writes

Every state already allows absentee balloting, and two-thirds don’t require you to have an “excuse”—such as sickness, disability, or being out of town on Election Day—for using them. As a former county election official in two different states, I can guarantee that every election official in the country would consider the current threat posed by COVID-19 to be more than sufficient reason for citizens to avoid the polls and vote absentee instead.

While vote by mail already exists, Democrats also used the COVID-19 crisis to push for "ballot harvesting."  This is incredible in that ballot harvesting would force contact between some of our most vulnerable COVID-19 populations and generally young activists who may not know they even have it.  Lori Roman of the American Constitutional Rights Union Action Fund writes on ballot harvesting:

This bill makes “ballot harvesting” a federal law, so political operatives could collect ballots from institutional settings and individuals, ensuring they are cast for the candidate of the operative’s choice. . . .

There are already multiples cases of documented ballot harvesting fraud in the United States. In Texas in 2018, several vote harvesters—known in the state as “politiqueros”—were charged with marking and delivering ballots without voter consent. At least one of these fraudsters is not even a U.S. citizen.

It should not be just conservatives and Republicans fighting these reforms but everyone.  We should be focusing on helping people right now, not making fraud easier for one party.