by Tony Perkins
If the Left’s ridiculous crusade against Georgia’s election law was supposed to scare other states, it failed. Across the country, a historic number of bills are moving to keep the disaster we saw in 2020 from repeating itself. Instead of cowering under the Democrats’ absurd lies about racism, leaders seem more motivated than ever to keep the Left and its pals from unduly influencing our elections. And the sweeping reforms in the Peach State were just the start.
“Where I come from in South Arkansas,” Mike Huckabee has joked, “we used to say if you didn’t get the cemetery vote, you couldn’t win. One of the reasons I believe in the Resurrection is that we’d see dead people vote every year.” That’ll be a lot harder in Pennsylvania now, thanks to the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF). J. Christian Adams’s group has been fighting for months to clean up the voter rolls in the Keystone State, and that effort finally paid off. This week, the Department of State agreed to remove 20,000 deceased names from its database.
The decision was part of a settlement with PILF, which had argued in a lawsuit that the voter-registration data conflicted with the Social Security Death Index. “This marks an important victory for the integrity of elections in Pennsylvania,” said Adams. “The Commonwealth’s failure to remove deceased registrants created a vast opportunity for voter fraud and abuse. It is important to not have dead voters active on the rolls for five, 10, or even years. This settlement fixes that.”
Incredibly, the Washington Times points out, 9,212 of the voters on the list had been dead for more than five years! A whopping 1,990 were dead for more than a decade. And yet, amazingly, “hundreds of these dead voters showed up with post-death voting credits in 2016 and 2018.” Even so, the Department of State hilariously insisted that this decision shouldn’t be construed as any sort of shortcoming on their part. “[The agreement] includes no finding of inadequacy on the part of Pennsylvania and its counties.”
Elsewhere, in states like Arizona, Republicans taking aim at rich private donors like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, whose $400 million dollar investment gave him unprecedented power in the election process of 2,500 jurisdictions. No more, say legislators in the Arizona Senate. By a 16-14 vote, they insisted that private dollars are just a thinly veiled attempt to influence the election. Zuckerberg’s Center for Technology and Civic Life dumped $6 million dollars in key swing counties near Phoenix and Tucson, where Democrats were desperate to turn out more voters. “This was targeted in a way to really undermine the integrity of the system under the guise of trying to promote and get out the vote logistics,” state Sen. Sonny Borrelli (R) argued.
Democrats pushed back, insisting that the grants only filled in some of the financial gaps created by COVID. State Sen. Kelly Townsend (R) disagreed. “If this grant was coming from China or if this grant was coming from Russia, we might be calling it Russian interference with our elections… So what’s the difference between international money coming from a state overseas to an individual interested party, regardless of how it was spent and how desperately it was needed?” she asked. “It’s inappropriate.”
Phill Kline, whose Amistad Project is determined to weed out this kind of liberal interference, agrees. “We’ve invited billionaires into the counting room and it will undermine the integrity of our elections. It’s unprecedented.” Big Tech already controls the flow of information — why would we give it control over the election process too? “These are the first things any oligarchy wants to control when it takes power.” Now that the bill has passed the House and Senate, it heads to Republican Doug Ducey’s desk, where we hope his signature encourages other state’s to follow Arizona’s lead.
Down in Texas, after seven hours of heated debate, the state senate voted 18-13 on Thursday to pass a bill that would radically clean up the election process. Under the legislation, a lot of the loopholes for mail-in ballots that liberals have exploited would be closed. There would be more protections for poll waters, a ban on mobile voting sites, a ban on voting machines that can be connected to the internet, more video surveillance in rooms where ballot counting is taking place, and an intentional effort to correct voter rolls. Hours for early voting would be tightened, and ballot harvesting would by and large be outlawed.
“Maintaining the integrity of our elections is vital to preserving public trust so our democracy can flourish, and that’s why I have made election security a top priority again this legislative session,” Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said in a statement. “SB 7 will strengthen the public’s faith in our electoral process and ensure that every Texan knows that when they cast their ballot, their vote is secure.”
These are just a handful of the almost 400 bills moving their way through 47 state legislatures. Make sure that if your state is one of them, your local leaders are hearing from you!