Welcome to the 2024 election, the new and improved version. It’s not 2020 anymore.
We should celebrate. Over the last four years, significant improvements have made these 2024 elections better than the fiasco of 2020.
Exhibit A: election officials and bureaucrats aren’t making up the law as they go. COVID is gone and provides no cover for changing, canceling, and suspending election safeguards. That was the story of the 2020 election, and for the most part, elections are now governed by the laws on the book.
After the chaos of 2020, people began to care about following the law. Some states responded by enacting safeguards and modernization. In 2021, Georgia passed election integrity legislation to improve elections there. One positive change was all mail ballots now require identification verification. Ballot harvesting was also banned.
The reactionaries reacted to these improvements like reactionaries do. Stacey Abrams called the election integrity law “Jim Crow 2.0” and unsuccessfully challenged the law in court. Even President Biden chimed in calling the law “Jim Crow in the twenty-first century.” Major League Baseball pulled the All-Star game from Atlanta citing the state’s new voting law as being too restrictive.
We’ve heard it all before, first when Georgia enacted voter ID in 2005. They said the sky was falling, but it never fell.
There’s hard data to show Abrams got it wrong. Georgia just reported record early voter turnout. So much for the myth of voter suppression in Georgia.
Another change from 2020 is that several states are taking list maintenance of voter rolls more seriously. Ohio, Florida, and others are among the states with serious state election officials who know bad rolls can mean sketchy elections. Other states had to be sued to act, and even then, states like Michigan fought voter roll cleanup.
The Public Interest Legal Foundation sued Pennsylvania and successfully forced the Commonwealth to remove more than 20,000 deceased registrants. Some of them even registered to vote after they died. One husband was charged with voting for his dead wife.
Nevada may have the worst system of voting in the United States with automatic voting by mail. Every registered voter is sent a mail ballot, no request needed. That might sound just great until you realize that it took a lawsuit in Nevada to force Clark County to fix registrations at strip clubs, casinos, and liquor stores.
These important victories have removed opportunities for voter fraud. It’s not 2020 anymore.
Another promising development is that many states have gained some access to the Department of Homeland Security’s System for Alien Verification of Entitlements (SAVE) database to identify and remove non-citizens from the voter roll. SAVE is a federal database that contains the immigration status of aliens. SAVE is one of the only effective tools election officials have to validate citizenship. States like North Carolina and Ohio have removed non-citizens from the voter roll using this database.
There is some bad news. Integrity foes are relentless in their campaign to fundamentally transform how power is allocated. Ranked-choice voting is their new fancy system, and they are trying to have states pass laws either through state legislatures or ballot initiatives this November.
Ranked-choice voting is a confusing system where instead of picking one candidate, voters rank all the candidates. The problem is the system is so confusing that even the vote counters mess it up. In Oakland, Calif., they declared and certified the wrong candidate as the winner of an election because of ranked-choice voting.
The Left is also opposing prohibitions on foreign money influencing American elections. Leftists are trying to allow non-citizens to vote in local elections. Foreigners funding and voting in American elections is far worse than anything that was falsely alleged in 2016.
Don’t be discouraged about voting and our election process.
Everyone who cares about the country should vote. If they did, America would be an even better country, not merely because Americans decided to vote, but because of what they believe. This is a country where freedom, limited government, and the Constitution are still treasured by a majority.
Staying home and not voting is the wrong choice. Snag your neighbors and friends and vote. 2020 is history.
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