A group fighting liberal efforts to use the coronavirus as an excuse to rewrite election laws is countering with a new ad showing how the standard system of in-person voting and absentee ballots worked in Wisconsin last week.
With a $250,000 ad buy and a digital campaign, the new Honest Elections Project is also calling out national efforts to swap out the current system with mail-in voting and ballot harvesting that it fears would be easy to manipulate to help Democrats.
“Politicians and activists are exploiting this crisis to push a political agenda that would permanently change our democracy, including risky new voting schemes like a national all-mail election,” said Honest Election Project Executive Director Jason Snead.
Instead, he added, “States need to take sensible, temporary steps — like expanding absentee voting — to ensure vulnerable people can safely participate and the integrity of our elections are maintained.”
He told Secrets that efforts in Wisconsin to change, stop, and manipulate last week’s presidential primary were not needed despite concerns about the virus. His video title said it simply: “Hard to Cheat.”
He said that the state’s early urgings for people to get absentee ballots and vote early worked. While the state received some 212,000 absentee ballots in its 2016 primary, it reported on Monday that it has received 1,098,489 for last week’s election.
And, while some cities reported in-person voting problems, Snead suggested that was due to individual polling issues, such as a lack of poll officers, and that the problems do not require massive and permanent changes to voting.
He promised that his legal group will fight every Democratic effort to change elections in or out of courts. “The Democrats are circling the wagons to upend our election system, and Honest Elections Project will be fighting all the way to Election Day to defend our election laws and system,” said an adviser to the group.
