“Georgia has become ground zero in the fight over election integrity,” Margaret Brennan, host of Face the Nation on CBS, alerted her audience on Sunday, introducing the state’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican who, she reminded, “became known nationally in the wake of that election because [he] refused to succumb to pressure from President Trump.”
Given the walk that Mr. Raffensperger has walked, his talk should carry some street cred with media outlets that are truly non-partisan and interested in election reform.
Raffensperger proposed three reforms to secure elections: (1) No ballot harvesting, wherein a person gathers up or “harvests” many mail-ballots not his or her own; (2) “a constitutional amendment . . . that only American citizens vote in our elections,” and (3) “photo I.D. for all forms of voting.”
“Only U.S. citizens do currently vote in elections,” Brennan critically interjected (incorrectly), “but go on.”
Raffensperger did, explaining that “cities are trying to push noncitizen voting.” A few years ago, the council in Clarkston, Ga., voted to study allowing non-citizens to vote. Just last month, the New York City Council gave the right to vote in city elections to 800,000 non-citizens (including 110,000 Chinese nationals); last year, the Vermont Legislature approved non-citizen voting in two cities; and non-citizens (documented and undocumented) have been voting in San Francisco; and in 11 more cities across the country.
The Secretary of State noted that citizen-only voting, “just like photo I.D.,” is “supported by all demographic groups and a majority of both political parties.”
Citizen-only voting belongs in our state constitutions so that any future decisions on providing the vote to non-citizens requires a vote of the people, and therefore, cannot be made by politicians alone.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Note: Illustrating the usual split between politicians and voters, the New York City Council enacted a law for non-citizen voting while a poll of New Yorkers showed more than 60 percent opposed the measure.
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5 replies on “Reforms from Ground Zero”
It appears that True the Vote, using only their own private limited resources and without having access to information on the whole state of Georgia has been able to show non-dismissable proof that as many as 6000 votes in the November election were questionable, done under illegal procedures,and possibly invalid for counting in the election. Evidence sufficient that it has made it necessary for Secretary of State Raffensperger to open a full state investigation, disregarding his previous statements of there being no reason to doubt the election results.
Populist left-wing pundit statements that there may have been some voter fraud but there is no evidence of there being actual election fraud;
it appears that is no longer true.
Wonder how many corrupted votes there actually were?
Reportedly not the only state.
Cannot find any information that Secretary Raffensperger is opening an investigation as you state. Links?
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Georgia’s Secretary of State’s office opened a probe on Monday into former U.S. President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the state’s 2020 election results, a step that could lead to a criminal investigation by state and local authorities.
Also, Inside Georgia’s 2020 election
By David Wickert, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Dec 30, 2021
Former President Donald Trump and his supporters have made many allegations of voting fraud in Georgia. Investigators determined there was no evidence to support them. Here’s a look at what investigators found about five fraud claims:
Tens of thousands of illegal votes
Trump claimed tens of thousands of ineligible voters cast ballots in Georgia. He alleged that some had moved out of state. Others were supposedly dead or underage or otherwise ineligible to vote.
The allegations were based on research that compared Georgia voter records with information contained in other databases. For example, to find dead voters, Trump’s analysts said they matched the names and birth dates of voters to those of people contained in death records. They also compared voting records with change-of-address records to find voters who apparently had moved out of state.
Election experts took a close look at the analysts’ work and found it “highly inaccurate,” “unreliable” and “worthless.” They said the researchers relied on incomplete data and flawed methods.
For starters, matching people between large databases is prone to error. Databases of millions of people are bound to include different people with the same names and birth dates. And publicly available voter data includes only a person’s birth year, making such matches even more dubious.
That and other flaws yielded wildly exaggerated findings of fraud. For example, one Trump analyst concluded that 10,315 dead Georgians voted in the November 2020 election. When the secretary of state’s office investigated, it found four dead voters.
The Just the News article notes that True the Vote “does not allege the ballots delivered by couriers were fraudulent,” which Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, has reiterated as well.
“Ballot harvesting, those are still lawful ballots, they’ve just been handled fraudulently. Many states actually allow ballot harvesting,” Raffensperger told the National Desk. “We outlawed it because we think that the only person that should touch the ballot is the voter and the election worker and there shouldn’t be any people and intermediaries in between.”
Who gets to vote in local elections is local, not state or federal, business.
The only utility of that becoming an “issue” is that it’s a nice demonstration of how conservative “federalist” claims go right out the window the instant a state or a locale does something said conservatives don’t like.