Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel accused top Democrats of trying to use the coronavirus pandemic to promote lax voting measures.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Democratic presidential front-runner Joe Biden have both urged Congress to support language in future coronavirus legislative packages that would change the way votes are cast in 2020. Pelosi tried to include a mandate that would require states to allow mail-in voting in the latest coronavirus economic relief bill, but Republicans blocked it. In an opinion piece for Fox News, McDaniel said such measures would facilitate election fraud.
“After failing with their first left-wing laundry list disguised as coronavirus relief, Democratic leaders are already plotting their next attempt to use the pandemic for political gain,” she wrote.
“House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and former Vice President Joe Biden say we must throw election integrity to the wayside in favor of an all-mail election, fundamentally changing how Americans vote in eight months,” McDaniel wrote. “The overhaul would vastly expand opportunities for fraud and weaken confidence in our elections, but all Washington Democrats see is a potential benefit for their party.”
McDaniel noted that Pelosi claimed the changes would “really democratize our whole system” of voting in the United States, but the chairwoman argued the overhaul would lead to “ballot harvesting” throughout the country. “Ballot harvesting” is a term used by conservatives to describe a system in which political organizers can go door to door to collect ballots from specific voters. Republicans distrust the system over concerns about paid organizers singling out like-minded voters and the fact that ballots have to be turned in, creating opportunities for fraud or ballot tampering.
“The Democrats’ all-mail ballots proposal is a ruse to legalize ballot harvesting nationwide,” McDaniel wrote. “Any person would be allowed to return an unlimited number of absentee ballots for voters, opening the door for political operatives to deliver ballots in bulk. They could even be paid as long as he or she is not paid based on the number of ballots returned.”
McDaniel pointed to California as an example of how the process could be abused.
“All voters ‘eligible to cast a vote’ would receive a ballot,” she wrote. “The problem: many states do not clean up their voter registration lists unless forced to. California had to remove up to 1.5 million ineligible voters due to a court settlement last year after its rolls showed registration of 112 percent. In other words, there were more registered voters than adults living in the state.”
The chairwoman also highlighted criticisms of vote-by-mail from the New York Times, which reported that sending in all ballots by mail is the most vulnerable election process because fraud is much easier than in-person voting. She noted that voting by mail can lead to delays in election results and argued that forcing states to implement such a system in the eight months before Election Day would lead to “chaos.”
McDaniel said the Republican Party would continue to block any attempts to “circumvent election integrity” by Democrats, adding, “We are all in this fight together. We will get through it. But we will not throw out our most elementary promises of democracy, because agenda-driven Democrats do not want to let a pandemic go to waste.”
