Von Spakovsky: Election Integrity 2022 in Review: More Improvements Than Damage
As state legislatures begin their 2023 sessions, Americans should know what their states did in 2022 to improve or damage the integrity of the election process.
As state legislatures begin their 2023 sessions, Americans should know what their states did in 2022 to improve or damage the integrity of the election process.
Alaska and Maine have implemented “ranked choice voting,” a confusing, chaotic method of voting. Georgia should not follow suit. “Ranked choice” really should be referred to as “rigged choice,” since it effectively disenfranchises voters and allows marginal candidates not supported by a majority of voters to win elections.
The Biden administration’s open-border policies and its refusal to fully enforce federal immigration laws have imposed huge costs on local communities across the country. Border states are groaning under the enormous cost of sheltering, feeding, educating, policing, and providing medical care for tens of thousands of illegal aliens.
Despite their claims to the contrary, the nine liberal members of the Boston City Council displayed crass, partisan opportunism by recently voting to let 16- and 17-year-olds vote in local elections.
A polling place under the bipartisan supervision of election officials and the observation of poll watchers has numerous advantages. It helps ensure not only that the ballots are completed by the registered voters and deposited in a locked, sealed ballot box, but also that the voters’ eligibility and identity are verified; that no voters are pressured or coerced to vote a particular way by candidates, party activists, and political guns-for-hire, who are all prohibited from being inside the polling place; and that no ballots get “lost” in the mail or not delivered on time.
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments Wednesday in Moore v. Harper, a case that turns on the meaning of a key provision in the Constitution outlining the Framers’ structure for congressional elections.
There is a reason the U.S. State Department and organizations like the Carter Center routinely send teams of American observers to fledgling democracies all over the world: they recognize that transparency is essential to ensuring honest elections. That requires observers to be able to watch every aspect of the voting and ballot-counting process without being intimidated or interfered with.
Election integrity and voter fraud have become so controversial that even if you try to discuss them rationally and reasonably, and cite incontrovertible evidence, you will likely be banned by social media platforms and labelled a conspiratorial vote suppressor by the major media organizations that dominate our airwaves.
Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which took center stage Tuesday during oral arguments at the Supreme Court, prohibits a state from imposing a “standard, practice, or procedure” that “results in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color … .” Courts have found that states violate this provision when they draw new legislative districts that dilute the voting power of minority voters by either packing as many of these voters as possible into a single district or by splitting these voters among various other districts—practices known as “packing” and “cracking” voters.
Culling dead individuals from Michigan voter rolls is a pretty basic task for Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson. Now Judge Jane M. Beckering, an appointee of President Joe Biden, has rejected Benson’s demand to dismiss a lawsuit filed against her claiming she refused to remove almost 26,000 dead individuals from the state’s voter rolls.