George Soros-funded organizations are trying to rewrite the rules of how elections are run so that it is easier for Democrats and leftists to win. Flush with millions of dollars, these organizations are seeking to fundamentally transform American election rules so they permanently favor the agenda of Democrats, racial interest groups, progressives, and organized labor.
Below are ten top agenda items of the organized Left to transform American election outcomes by transforming process rules.
You’re probably only familiar with one — the Left’s fight against voter identification laws. But the Left’s agenda goes far beyond opposition to voter ID.
For example, tens of thousands of aliens are on American voter rolls, if not more. And they’re voting. The Soros-funded Left opposes efforts to find and remove aliens on the rolls, because the aliens are voting the way they want.
Voter ID is only one component of election integrity. You need to know about the Left’s expansive agenda to permanently transform the American election process.
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1. Block Citizenship Verification
There are ways for election officials to detect aliens on the voter rolls, but it requires the cooperation of the federal government. Under President Obama, the federal government has interfered with efforts to detect and remove citizens from the voter rolls.
The primary tool for detecting non-citizens on voter rolls is the SAVE database run by DHS (Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements). SAVE lists every alien in the federal immigration process — either caught illegal aliens, those on visas, or those seeking citizenship. Federal law mandates that the states shall have access to the data.
Unfortunately, the Obama administration has made it next to impossible to access the data.
Florida even had to sue the United States before it was permitted a measure of access to the data. DOJ sued to stop Florida’s citizenship verification efforts. Even when access to the SAVE database is granted, the Department of Homeland Security makes it hard for election officials to use the data.
From the DOJ’s complaint, with a swarm of lawyers suing Florida
Hardly any election officials are using a readily available source of citizenship data: jury excusal forms. Aliens routinely escape jury duty by noting they are not citizens. Because jury pools are usually drawn from voter registration data, this excusal should be used by election officials to maintain clean voter rolls, but rarely is used.
The Obama Justice Department has also interfered with citizenship verification. With the collusion of Soros-funded organizations, the DOJ has tried to stop states like Kansas and Georgia from verifying citizenship of voters.
There’s one reason for this: aliens who registered illegally tend to vote for Democrats.
2. Early Voting
The Soros-funded left has made early voting a top priority. While elections used to take place on Election Day, that proved too hard to get the unmotivated to the polls. Early voting allows the organized labor machine and other progressive organizations to run their GOTV campaign for weeks.
Early voting is so important to the modern Democrats that they sued Ohio and North Carolina under the Voting Rights Act when those states dared reduce it by a few days. They tried to constitutionalize early voting by claiming efforts to shrink it violated the Constitution. Soros-money and free help from large law firms poured into the efforts.
North Carolina beat them, but the federal appeals court reversed. Ohio lost to the left but won before the federal appeals court.
There are so many reasons early voting is bad, but perhaps the worst one is that spreading the election out over weeks makes it more difficult to observe the voting process. One side has the manpower to park observers in the polls, and the other side doesn’t. That’s how the left likes it.
3. Out of Precinct Voting
Out of precinct voting means that if you don’t have a clue where to vote, it shouldn’t matter. Out of precinct voting is an agenda item for the fundamental transformation of American elections. Advocates say it makes it easier to vote, and who really needs to know where they are supposed to vote? It’s part of the “lack of responsibility” generation.
But election officials who must manage many different ballots depending on where you live might disagree. State house and school board lines are often tied to precincts. Nevertheless, advocates will demand no expense be spared to build a system where you can vote where you aren’t supposed to.
4. Felon re-enfranchisement
Convicted felons have traditionally had the franchise limited or eliminated. Those who cannot follow the country’s rules should have no say in creating them.
Witness what is going on in Virginia to learn the lawless lengths Democrats will go to give convicted criminals the right to vote. There is one reason the left has placed so much importance on felon voting — it wins elections for the left.
Even some Republicans have been hoodwinked by the rhetoric. A felon who wishes to reintegrate into the political process should need to demonstrate repentance and a commitment to following the law.
But felon voting advocates don’t care much about redemption. They care about politics. Ex-cons vote for Democrats at astounding rates, approaching 9 to 1. Multiple presidential elections would have likely come out differently had felons enjoyed the right to vote. Felon voting advocates want Democrats to win elections, period.
(5 through 10 on next page)
5. Mandatory Voter Registration
Soros-funded organizations seek to end voter registration. Voter registration takes forethought and initiative, something lacking in large segments of the Democrat base.
A variety of groups have pushed for what they call “automatic” voter registration. One would become registered to vote automatically if one appears on a government database somewhere — such as a WIC recipient or other user of social services. Naturally, the federal government is the ideal home for such a system, and efforts are bubbling in Congress for a federal role in voter registration registries. Some states have even enacted mandatory voter registration.
Of course, voter registration plays an important role. It allows election officials to verify the identity of registrants, to place them in the correct precincts, and to ensure that duplicate registrations don’t exist.
These concerns, however, are considered nuisances to mandatory voting advocates.
6. Dirty Voter Rolls
Leftist groups are opposing efforts to clean voter rolls across the country. Millions of phony and obsolete registrations infect the rolls.
These groups have sued the Ohio secretary of State, and have interfered in other attempts to keep the rolls clean. They say their aim is to prevent a valid voter from being removed improperly — but they can’t even find a single voter who was removed contrary to law.
Dirty rolls allow criminals to exploit vulnerabilities in the system. Meloweese Richardson and Lessa Dolla Sowers voted multiple times because of dirty voter rolls, and they aren’t alone.
That’s the behavior organizations opposed to proper list maintenance are trying to preserve.
7. Foreign Language Ballots
Federal law requires foreign language ballots in certain American jurisdictions. In practice, it means that most urban areas have foreign language ballots — Philadelphia, Miami, Houston, Dallas, Phoenix, Denver, Cleveland, Los Angeles and Las Vegas. No, it is not true that because one must have an understanding of English to become a citizen that they must vote in English. The Voting Rights Act says otherwise. Moreover, Puerto Rican Americans in the United States have a right under federal law to a Spanish ballot.
Expanding foreign language ballots into areas not required by federal law has been an agenda item of racial interest groups.
8. Same Day Registration
Same day registration is a law that allows you to walk into a polling place for the first time, register to vote, and cast a regular ballot. It is a top agenda item of the institutional Left.
Voter fraud associated with same day registration allowed Senator Al Franken to win in 2008, and also helped President Obama win Ohio in 2008.
9. State Qualification Instructions on Registration Forms
Groups like the ACLU and League of Women Voters are trying to prevent states from including state qualification rules on the federally mandated voter registration form. Naturally, the Justice Department is on their side.
The federal voter registration form is a product of Motor Voter, passed in 1993. It forces states to accept the form from all registrants in order to vote in federal elections. Some states have enacted qualification instructions, such as proof of citizenship requirements.
Preserving a federal voter registration form without any pesky state qualification requirements is a top agenda item of the institutional left. They have the help, once again, of large law firms like Kirkland and Ellis and Arnold and Porter representing them for free against officials like Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach.
Kansas Secretary of State Kobach
The reason the left is such a fan of the federal form is that it is wholly ineffective at preventing non-citizens from registering to vote.
The Public Interest Legal Foundation has provided multiple federal courts voter registration forms where the applicant said he or she was not a citizen, but were still registered to vote. These forms, gathered by True the Vote, were from one county in Texas, but the problem is nationwide.
We are learning that Virginia is also plagued by aliens registering and voting in federal elections.
Of course it is a federal felony for an alien to register, and another felony for them to vote. But guess who has to investigate and enforce that law?
James Comey’s FBI, and Loretta Lynch’s Department of Justice.
10. National Popular Vote
The left wants to eliminate one of the central features of the Constitution — the Electoral College.
Instead, they want a national popular vote.
This change would shift power and GOTV dollars to large urban areas. The Electoral College reflects the fact that the states are independent sovereigns. The Constitution respects the state’s power to cast votes for president as a sovereign state, and with it comes the consent of the state to participate in the federal system.
The Electoral College decentralizes power over state elections away from Washington and to the statehouses, where after each election, actual electors gather and cast votes days after the election.
In 1996, as counsel to the secretary of State of South Carolina, I managed the meeting of the presidential electors in South Carolina. The event happened days after the election, a time that would give electors nationwide a chance to reflect on the events surrounding the election.
The states control the casting of electoral votes under our Constitution. That’s what the left hates. They prefer large urban areas decide the outcome of presidential elections, areas where an effective two-party system doesn’t exist. When the corruption of Philadelphia and Detroit can directly taint the outcome of national elections instead of being confined to the casting of Pennsylvania’s and Michigan’s electoral votes, the lawless will have triumphed.
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If you can’t remember the particulars of the list above, the theme can be summed up as follows: more federal power, more centralized control, and less state control.
You’ll notice that opposing voter ID didn’t make the list. While voter ID is important, the institutional Left has bigger fish to fry.
These 10 agenda items move hundreds of thousands of votes, while voter ID would stop a comparative whisper of illegal votes.
The institutional Left understands that controlling the process rules leads to power. The machinery matters more than the policy. So watch for these ten agenda items to be repackaged and forced upon an America that once treasured decentralization of power and the rule of law.
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