On this point, President Obama was right. Decentralized elections are a deterrent to fraud and corruption. Not if the Democratic Party gets its wish. The For the People Act reverses that protection—abandoning our federalist tradition of locally controlled elections and empowering Congress and the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to take charge. Federal bureaucrats and politicians would take over decisions about how to secure election integrity, manage voter lists, and ensure ballot access. What could possibly go wrong?
Now, instead of being run by someone chosen within the community, elections would be run by 535 members of Congress, only three of whom represent any given voter. They would be regulated by appointed federal bureaucrats at the FEC (newly empowered with openly partisan agendas under this bill). Say good-bye to trying to influence election policy in your county. To effect change, you would need to persuade a majority of the 100 senators and 435 House members to listen to you. But they only meet with people who live in their districts. Good luck with that. How this can be described as “For the People” is a mystery.
When Congress sets the rules for elections, that body will not be able to resist the urge to set those rules with an eye to the political implications. This should frighten both Democrats and Republicans, as we know both parties would be loath to give up such an advantage once secured.
Fortunately, H.R. 1 gives us the perfect preview of what elections will look like if we put Congress in charge. The bill is replete with provisions that would secure electoral advantages for Democrats.
By some strange coincidence, the vast majority of the election provisions in the bill make elections less secure rather than more secure. By another strange coincidence, the very provisions that help Democrats win elections also help fraudsters manipulate them.
Weakening Election Security
The list of unfunded federal mandates imposed upon states by this bill is too long to exhaustively catalog here, but we can hit a few of the highlights of those that make our elections less secure.
No-fault absentee ballots: The Heritage Foundation calls these ballots the “tool of choice for vote thieves” because they are so easy to manipulate. But Democrats have long dismissed these claims, pointing to what they call a dearth of voter fraud convictions.
Nonetheless, they could hardly ignore what happened in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District in 2018. This time election fraud was used by a Republican campaign to narrowly win a tight race against a popular Democrat. Had the parties been reversed, who knows how much coverage the race would have gotten. But with a Democrat losing and the race being rerun, there was no way to avoid shining a spotlight on a key vulnerability.
North Carolina’s absentee ballot provision actually has more security than the one H.R. 1 will impose nationwide. It requires ballots to be signed by the voter and witnessed by another person attesting that the voter is who they say they are. Campaign operatives in the North Carolina race violated state law by collecting absentee ballots on behalf of voters and turning them in.
This process, called ballot harvesting, is illegal in North Carolina for very good reason. Campaign operatives or nonprofit political groups could harass voters to turn in ballots, “assist” them in filling them out, and potentially “lose” ballots that don’t support the candidate the ballot harvester is paid to help. In North Carolina, officials estimate as many as a thousand ballots supporting the Democrat candidate may have been destroyed. One witness testified she was paid $150 for every fifty ballots she collected, acknowledging that in many cases she signed as a witness for ballots she had not actually watched the voter fill out.
The same ballot harvesting process used illegally in North Carolina was recently legalized in California, where it helped Democrats flip seven previously Republican seats in 2018. The process Democrats hate in North Carolina they defend in California, where third-party organizations like Grassroots Campaigns Inc. or labor unions are permitted (one might even say encouraged) to collect ballots directly from voters and turn them in on their behalf without a secure chain of custody. Prior to that change, only close relatives or those living at the same address could turn in another person’s completed ballot.
The indication that ballot harvesting made the difference can be found in the vote proportions. Studies of absentee voters have consistently shown they tend to reflect the population or lean slightly to the right. But when ballot harvesting was deployed in California, we saw late ballots break heavily for Democrats.
Take, for example, the race between incumbent Republican David Valadao and Democrat T. J. Cox in California’s rural 21st District. When polls closed, Valadao led Cox by 6,000 votes—or 8 percent. That margin was wide enough for media outlets to call the race for Valadao. But late ballots delivered by the hundreds from third-party groups broke for Cox so strongly that Cox ultimately eked out an 843-vote victory.
The San Francisco Chronicle reported that elsewhere in the state, Orange County voters were calling the registrar’s office asking if it was legitimate for someone to come to their door and ask if they could take their ballot.
Who was coming to the door? According to a January 2019 Los Angeles Times story, illegal Dreamers were deeply engaged in the process—not just delivering ballots, but helping voters fill them out. The Times reports on the experience of one Dreamer, Gabriela Cruz, who “found” a voter smoking a cigarette on a tattered old couch behind a group home hours before election day.
He politely tried to wave her off until she reminded him he had a right that she as an immigrant without citizenship didn’t have. “It could really make a change for us,” said Cruz, 29.
Half an hour later, she was helping Silva look up candidates as he filled out his ballot by the light of her phone.
What are the implications of activists with an agenda “helping” voters look up candidates and fill out ballots? How many of those activists are willing to turn in a ballot that doesn’t help their cause? Should we be exposing people’s ballots to that kind of temptation?
In this case, Democrats got a head start in California, which gave them an advantage. But that won’t always be the case. What happens when the only way to win elections is to have the biggest army of ballot harvesters?
In an ironic exchange, Democratic representative Joe Kennedy of Massachusetts tweeted during the debate over H.R. 1, writing:
As GOP stands unified against a bill to strengthen our democracy & increase transparency in our elections, it’s important to remember that the #NC09 seat is vacant because a GOP candidate tried to steal an election.
In reply, Republican representative Dan Crenshaw of Texas responded:
You do realize your bill #HR1 would actually make that kind of fraud in #NC09 LEGAL. Right?
TRUTH: it would legalize vote harvesting across the entire country, use your tax $ to do it, and limit free speech drastically. All in the name of “democracy.”
Even the ACLU opposes it.
And there’s an interesting tidbit. The Donald Trump–hating, Democrat-aligned, Grassroots Campaigns Inc.–consulted ACLU was opposing H.R. 1. Given that they were likely funding some of the vote harvesting, that was hard to believe. But according to their letter to members of Congress opposing the bill, there were many provisions ACLU strongly supported and long championed—likely no-fault absentee voting is among them. Their reasons for objecting to the bill have more to do with transparency provisions for donors that we’ll talk about later in this chapter.