A few weeks before the election, a federal judge has blocked Arizona legislation to combat voter fraud.
Opponents routinely characterize efforts such as this Arizona measure to ensure election integrity as “voter suppression.” Charges of racial discrimination often get tossed in to allow for the customary level of hysterical partisan denunciation.
According to Jon Sherman of the Fair Elections Center, even if HB2243 is “not discriminatory on its face . . . it is an open invitation. It declares open season for discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, dress, English proficiency, anything else.”
Of course,HB2243 extends no such invitation.
The legislation states that registration forms shall contain such things as a statement “that if the registrant permanently moves to another state after registering to vote in this state, the registrant’s voter registration shall be canceled.”
It also authorizes the county reorder to cancel a registration when he “is informed and confirms that the person registered is dead.”
Sounds like it could certainly suppress the zombie vote.
Legislation should be as carefully worded as possible. But no degree of precision in a law designed to prevent persons from voting who are not entitled to vote will prevent opponents from charging that it’s really, deep down inside, about “declaring open season for discrimination.”
Had the Arizona legislature passed the new law in plenty of time to grapple with legal challenges, the reformmighthave been in place for the mid-terms. Let’s hope HB2243 is in place and free of judicial encumbrance by 2024.
Enacting this kind of legislation is of many things that need to be done to safeguard elections.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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16 replies on “Zombie Vote Protected”
What percentage of the vote was fraudulent in the last election?
“After months of work and some $6 million spent, a so-called audit that Trump supporters claimed would show that the election had been stolen from the defeated president found that Joe Biden actually won Arizona by more votes than the official tally — and it found no conclusive evidence that the election had been influenced by fraud.
Draft reports from the review that Senate President Karen Fann commissioned of Maricopa County’s election results declared that a hand count of nearly 2.1 million ballots from the November 2020 election found Donald Trump had 261 fewer votes than the county’s official canvass gave him, while Biden had 99 more. All told, Biden gained 360 votes in the Senate “audit” hand count — which was criticized by election experts as fundamentally flawed — giving him a victory of 45,469 votes in Maricopa County.”
No fraud found!
The political left and right swap declarations about voter fraud, based upon who wins the election. A large share of the population thought that voter fraud had been a determining factor in the outcome of the 2016 Presidential Election. A different but large share thought that fraud had been a determining factor in the outcome of the 2020 Presidential Election.
Over the course of these elections and these reversals, some people just consistently want a system in which not only are the chances of elections being stolen reduced, but the general population is positioned to see that the election was secure.
Biden won by over 7 million votes! How much voter fraud are you proposing existed?
Probably somewhere around 12-15 million votes. Maybe more.
.
The truth will come out, eventually.
And remember:
Truth vitiates everything.
One of the stupidest statements ever made! You need a good psychiatrist!
Show me the money (evidence). You can’t!!!
Pam, you need to address the point that I actually made.
A lot of people believed or still believe that the Presidential elections of 2000, of 2004, of 2016, or of 2020 were decided by fraud. In three of those cases, most of those people come from your part of the ideologic continuum.
Many people, regardless of whether a candidate that they favored won or lost, have said we need more secure elections. A share of those people believe that significant fraud occurs or may occur in the foreseeable future, but others just want to remove doubt.
Despite having cast doubt on the outcomes in 2000, in 2004, and in 2016, the left starts flailing its arms when discussion begins of indeed making elections more secure.
Trump saying that there was fraud is not evidence. The right is just following his lead no matter how absurd it is.
Where is the evidence of fraud in Arizona? There is none!
Pam, why shouldn’t the vote in Arizona be more secure than it is? Why shouldn’t it be more secure in other jurisdictions as well?
(See my prior comments to this entry.)
If there is so much fraud, where is the evidence? You have no evidence just hyperbole. 60 suits dismissed for lack of evidence. Of course the republican lawyers are not very smart, in fact they are pretty stupid.
Pam, you haven’t answered either of my questions, so I’ll ask again: Why shouldn’t the vote in Arizona be more secure than it is? Why shouldn’t it be more secure in other jurisdictions as well?
If there is no fraud, which you are unable to show, it appears that you have identified a huge problem that doesn’t exist.
If there is any fraud you should be able to identify it. You haven’t because you CAN’T!
Pam, in my earlier comments (which you read but now ignore), I did identify a huge problem: “A lot of people believed or still believe that the Presidential elections of 2000, of 2004, of 2016, or of 2020 were decided by fraud.” More secure elections greatly reduce that problem.
Moreover, just as most people won’t leave their houses unlocked simply because nothing much has been stolen so far (just a few knicknacks), we shouldn’t leave our elections insecure simply because we don’t think that one has been stolen recently. (It’s trivial to find more distant cases of a Presidential Election being stolen.)
Red herring!!!!!!!!!!
Pam, if it’s a red herring, then the best thing for Democrats to do is to stop allowing it to be a distraction by ceasing to oppose more secure elections. Most Americans — including most Americans who are people of color — want more secure elections; let them have what they want, nd they won’t be distracted by the issue.
The republicans don’t want secure elections! They want to control the outcomes of elections through the state legislatures. How dumb are you? Do you believe that Trump won the last election?
Pam, we’re discussing measures to make elections more secure; not what Republicans do or don’t really want, but what’s actually in the law that Democrats are trying to get tossed-out.
Lapsing into your mode of insisting that anyone who disagrees with you must be stupid doesn’t help your case. Argue to the point — find something actually in the law that is objectionable, and explain why it is objectionable.