Voting Rights Are Enhanced—Not Destroyed—by Laws That Make Elections More Secure

AP Photo/John Bazemore

Voting rights are restricted to citizens over the age of 18 who are not otherwise prohibited from voting by state law. After many years of legislation at the federal level, every citizen who is 18 or older and registers to vote is allowed to do so without impediment. The only common exception at the state level is convicted felons and those who are currently incarcerated. Some states require a valid ID, but the dirty little secret is, so does the Democratic National Convention. However, no one accuses the DNC of trying to exclude minorities from their convention.

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But when any state requires a valid state ID to vote, especially one below the Mason-Dixon line, we are told that it’s an attempt to suppress minority voters. That is really weird since voter ID is one issue that Americans agree on at a rate of approximately 70%. Voter ID pulls majority support from Democrats, Republicans, and unaffiliated voters, so it seems most Americans don’t see this as a barrier to voting rights. Yet, Democrat-affiliated lawyers still fight these laws. The roughly 30% who reject voter ID are likely white liberals, as Ami Horowitz demonstrates beautifully in these on-the-street interviews:

The white liberals interviewed are afflicted with the soft bigotry of low expectations, as is evident in the responses Horowitz received in the black community. In addition to voter ID laws, Democrat-affiliated lawyers fight almost every election security law that ensures legal voting rights and ballot access. These two issues must be balanced for the vast majority of Americans to have faith in the electoral process.

The 2020 election saw unprecedented relaxing of election security laws using the pandemic as a pretext. An article in Time outlined the months-long effort to push unrequested mail-in ballots and circumvent election laws without the state legislatures’ approval as required by the Constitution. In my state of Georgia, we somehow ended up with ballot drop boxes thanks to a consent decree between a group formed by Stacey Abrams and the secretary of state. Nowhere in state law are these allowed.

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The article also details the effort to fund election offices nationwide with donations by left-wing not-for-profits. In my home state of Georgia, not-for-profits distributed funds in Fulton County. In 2016, voters cast 407,173 votes, and Hillary Clinton won the county in a landslide with 69.2%. In 2020, voters cast 523,931 votes, and Biden, who attracted a few dozen voters when he visited Atlanta, exceeded Clinton’s haul in a single county by nearly 100,000 votes. No rational person, poll, or even most Democrats believe there was that much enthusiasm for a husk of a man who rarely left the basement.

Instead, as PJ Media contributor J. Christian Adams wrote, the left-leaning not-for-profits, like the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) funded by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, created voter turnout machines in deep blue districts:

What these grants did was build structural bias into the 2020 election where structural bias matters most – in densely populated urban cores. It converted election offices in key jurisdictions with deep reservoirs of Biden votes into Formula One turnout machines. The hundreds of millions of dollars built systems, hired employees from activist groups, bought equipment and radio advertisements. It did everything that street activists could ever dream up to turn out Biden votes if only they had unlimited funding.

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So, states that provided room for pandemic-related changes like Georgia, and those who rejected them, like Florida, are looking to enhance election security. Georgia is attempting to reinstall the election security laws passed by the state legislature before the pandemic, such as voter ID. Multiple states, including Florida and Georgia, are trying to ensure elections are funded solely by federal, state, and local governments. Of course, The New York Times is having the vapors:

In dozens of states, the Republican Party has responded to Donald Trump’s defeat by trying to change election laws, often to make voting more difficult.

The Democratic Party is struggling to figure out how to respond. And voting-right experts are worried that the result could be the biggest rollback of Americans’ voting rights since the demise of Reconstruction in the 19th century.

“Voting-right experts” are left-wing activists whose goal is to make every state’s voting laws as insecure as California’s, where ballot harvesting and automatic registration are the norms. Democrats in Congress are attempting the same with HR-1, also known as the “For the People Act.” For some odd reason, Democrats think Republicans are striving to suppress minority votes. They missed the 2020 trend. The GOP coalition is rapidly becoming a multi-racial one animated by a working-class ethos. The last election showed turnout and demographics do not only benefit Democrats. Given the radical leftward shift in the Biden administration’s first month, this trend will only accelerate.

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Republican leaders are trying to balance access and security. In Georgia, the proportion of minority voters who participated in elections was growing faster than the white population. This trend is the same as the national trend before 2020:

Minority voting, despite state voter ID requirements and despite voter registration purges, surged in Georgia, with black voter registration increasing from 43% in 2014 to 60% in 2017—higher than the percentage among white registration.

Georgia’s fortunes mirror a national trend. According to the Census Bureau, black turnout nationally grew around 27% in 2018. A Pew Research Center study found that “all major racial and ethnic groups saw historic jumps in voter turnout.”

So, voting rights activists like Stacey Abrams will have to develop better excuses for losing elections as states look to return to pre-pandemic voting regulations and stop the latest tactics used by Democrats in 2020, such as outside funding. Try better ideas centered on Americans’ prosperity and security as a governing principle instead of divisive identity politics, encouraging a rush on the southern border, and destroying election integrity. Jim Crow ended in 1964, and the only people with political power who are trying to segregate or suppress us by race in any way are the radical left.

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