The 2020 election cycle has been like one never before with a pandemic, civil unrest, and an unprecedented expansion of voting by-mail. RNLA Vice President Audrey Perry Martin argues in a recent article for The Daily Signal that there is a lot to learn from this year to make our election system stronger moving forward.

The DC Board of Elections held a special meeting today to allow for public comment regarding its plan to mail ballots to every voter and to have only 40 polling locations open throughout DC for the November election – over 100 fewer polling locations than it usually has during an election.  The RNLA submitted a comment in opposition to the Board's plan due to its potential to disenfranchise voters. 

On Tuesday, June 3rd, the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties held a hearing on elections just one day after primaries in 8 states and the District of Columbia were fraught with difficulties due to unrest over the death of George Floyd and the COVID-19 pandemic.

The left denies vote fraud exists even when their own leaders admit it.  An example that surfaced yesterday is of Rep. Jerrold Nadler, one of the leaders of House Democrats' impeachment efforts, speaking on vote fraud in 2004.

Jerry Nadler in 2004: “Paper ballots are extremely susceptible to fraud...I can show you experience which would make your head spin.” pic.twitter.com/L7zJhoB3O8

— Danny De Urbina (@dannydeurbina) May 25, 2020

While House Speaker Nancy Pelosi continues to push a federal power grab for elections with the HEROES Act, the problems with her attempted election administration dictates have been exposed. Just yesterday in Pelosi’s birthplace of Baltimore, Maryland, a story came out about how one of her top priorities, vote by mail, disenfranchises people:

Nearly 1 in 10 ballots could not be delivered to Baltimore City voters during the special election in April, raising concerns for the June 2 primary, which is also being conducted by mail.

The data, released by the Maryland Board of Elections late Tuesday, shows that 20,367 of the more than 230,500 ballots sent to Baltimore City voters could not be delivered before the April 28 special election. An additional 4,355 ballots were undeliverable to Baltimore County voters, while 3,886 were not delivered to Howard County voters — about 3% of all ballots in those two jurisdictions. . . .

An additional 660 were not counted because they lacked a signature.

While reasonable people can disagree about how elections should be changed in response to the unique challenges of COVID-19, there should be universal agreement not to make them more dangerous and less effective.  Yet that is what the left and California are trying to do.

Hillary Clinton's 2016 lawyer and Steele dossier funder Marc Elias has made ballot harvesting one of his four pillars for election reform.  As Logan Churchwell explains in an op-ed entitled, All-mail ballot harvesters could be the next COVID-19 superspreaders:

Picture a harvester in a densely-populated city visiting dozens of houses and apartments each day — often crossing thresholds into living rooms to promote a particular candidate, cause or party. Think of the air they breathe, the touched surfaces and the collected ballot envelopes sealed with human saliva from each home. It only takes one untested, asymptomatic COVID-19 carrier’s ballot being harvested to risk exposure for the rest of the neighborhood as that political operative continues door-to-door.

Proponents have a tough sell in credibly convincing the public that all-mail ballot elections are actually safer with respect to sanitary concerns. 

RNLA Board of Governors member and former FEC Chairman Matthew Petersen and RNLA member and former EAC Chairwoman Gineen Bresso, both currently attorneys with Holtzman Vogel Josefiak Torchinsky PLLC, wrote in The Hill about how Democrats in Washington are trying to use the COVID-19 pandemic as an excuse to federalize election administration and overwrite many state laws, systems, and rules before the election this fall.  They describe how important our decentralized election system is:

It is not an optimal situation but let’s be real, context and the rule of law matter. Honest liberals and even Joe Biden give qualified agreement for holding the Wisconsin elections today.  Yet this is a bit extreme but typical of the reaction on the left.  

There are many problems with the left's reaction. First, keep in mind what Democrat Presidential frontrunner Joe Biden stated:

“There’s a lot of things that can be done; that’s for the Wisconsin courts and folks to decide,” former Vice President Joe Biden said last Thursday in a virtual press briefing, in which he insisted that in-person and mail-in voting could both be done safely—even though he considers the possibility of a national convention in the state to be a potential risk to public health.

While election officials need to make sure that no voters are disenfranchised during the COVID-19 crisis, they also need to make sure that the integrity of the election is still protected.  The expected and understandable increase in mail voting will present unique challenges, as mail voting is uniquely susceptible to disenfranchising voters through fraud and mistake.  After describing some specific examples of fraud through ballot harvesting, former RNLA Ed Meese Award Winner Hans von Spakovsky and Christian Adams wrote today:

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. . . .