Democrats may have already passed a sweeping election overhaul bill that aims to loosen state restrictions, but key House Republicans are keeping up their work to promote what they call stricter safeguards for ballot and election processes.
Their next step: Lobby state legislatures to change their laws.
In a letter to the president and president-elect of the National Conference of State Legislatures, Rep. Chip Roy of Texas joined with three ranking members on committees with jurisdiction over voting rights issues, Judiciary Committee ranking member Jim Jordan of Ohio, House Administration ranking member Rodney Davis of Illinois, and Oversight and Reform ranking member James Comer of Tennessee, to make recommendations on how states should handle election laws.
“In 2020, several states made last-minute changes to election administration — such as expanded mail-in voting and ballot harvesting, relaxed voter verification measures, and extended deadlines for voter registration and ballot receipt — without the necessary planning, hiring, training, or procurement. This led to uncertainty, confusion, and delay in many election results,” said a letter, first provided to the Washington Examiner.
LINGERING 2020 BITTERNESS INFLAMES DEBATE AS DEMOCRATS PUSH MASSIVE ELECTION REFORM BILL
House Democrats last week passed the H.R. 1 “For the People Act,” an election reform overhaul bill that would create a public financing system and national automatic voter registration, among a plethora of other reforms that would usurp states’ longtime role in election administration.
“Democrats in Congress, unfortunately, refused to join us in addressing these problems. They ignored warnings about last-minute changes to the 2020 general election,” the letter said. “State legislatures are best positioned — and, pursuant to our constitutional framework, fundamentally empowered — to safeguard the integrity of federal elections.”
The letter to the National Conference on State Legislatures recommends increased safeguards for mail-in ballots; prohibiting “ballot harvesting,” the practice of allowing others to return a voter’s ballot to a polling place; stringent signature verification for mail-in ballots; maintenance of voter rolls, and creating deadlines that ensure ballots are counted in a timely manner.
Election integrity has emerged as a top issue for grassroots Republicans in the aftermath of the 2020 election and has been encouraged by former President Donald Trump’s claims of election fraud.
Though Republicans are in the minority in the House and therefore cannot halt Democratic legislation, the letter is the latest sign that Republicans seek to continue pushing their own “election integrity” priorities through multiple avenues.
Republicans in the House and Senate have signed on to an alternative to the Democrats’ bill with the “Save Democracy Act,” a proposal that would require people who register to vote to provide their Social Security number, to have identification when voting, and prohibit automatic voter registration.
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“Conservatives in Texas and across the country have to take action now to fix our elections the right way: by making them more secure through state legislatures and holding the line against overreaching leftists in Washington,” Roy said in a letter to Texans about election reforms last week.
Last month, the Republican State Leadership Committee, which focuses on Republican legislators and secretaries of state, launched a commission to study reforms that “make it easier to vote and harder to cheat.”
