Power Grab - Jason Chaffetz Page 0,42

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.

Meanwhile, one can’t miss the irony of Representative Kennedy using the vote fraud in North Carolina to whip up support for a bill that, at a minimum, does nothing to prohibit the very practices used to commit that fraud. Of course, Democrats denied that their bill actually imposes ballot harvesting since there is no explicit language doing so—only a failure to prohibit the practice. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell described the bill’s position on ballot harvesting as “suspiciously silent on the murky ballot harvesting practices that recently threw North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District into chaos.”

Of course, Republicans gave Democrats an opportunity to make the bill more explicit on the issue of ballot harvesting by offering an amendment prohibiting the practice. Democrats promptly rejected the amendment.

Restrictions on voter list maintenance: Voter list maintenance is one of the most egregious targets of the bill. Democrats have branded such activities as a form of voter suppression. The bill uses the sinister term “voter caging” to describe basic list maintenance activities required by the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA). The process by which election officials periodically mail “non-forwardable” correspondence or even ballots is used to confirm whether a voter remains eligible. If the mail is returned because the voter no longer lives there, election officials can flag that voter registration. If the voter doesn’t cast a vote in the next two elections, that registration becomes inactive. It’s important to understand that the NVRA does not allow voters to be removed from voting rolls until either a voter confirms in writing that he/she has moved or the voter fails to respond to the notice sent to the address on the voter registration and then fails to vote in the next two consecutive elections. This is a process Democrats want destroyed.

If you move, Democrats want you to stay on the list. If you die, they still want your name there. If you haven’t voted for decades, they still want you to receive a ballot. If the bill had become law, verifying current addresses of registered voters against the U.S. Postal Service’s national change-of-address system would become virtually impossible. This is a database that stores submissions of change-of-address requests that people submit when they move. State and local governments should not be prohibited from utilizing this tool in their efforts to maintain accurate voter lists.

According to an analysis by the Lawyers Democracy Fund, “the overly broad language of the bill would essentially prohibit the transmission of voter registration lists from one election official to another locality to update its voter records, thus dramatically restricting the current ability of localities to interact with each other to maintain the integrity of the voter rolls.”

To further nullify this provision of the NVRA, Democrats inserted a provision to their bill requiring notification of inactive voters be sent via email rather than mailed to the address on file. Obviously, an email will not detect whether the person has moved and would invalidate the use of such notifications as a means to clean up voter lists.

Democrats have consistently challenged the provision allowing removal of inactive voters in court—and lost. The bill seeks to nullify a 2018 Supreme Court ruling in Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute. The Court held that list maintenance was valid, given that as many as 40 percent of Americans fail to inform the USPS when they move. The volume of outdated addresses on state voter lists compromises the lists and makes them more vulnerable to fraud.

In testimony before the House Judiciary Committee in January 2019, former Federal Election Commission member and election expert Hans von Spakovsky told the committee, “The proposed change would directly interfere with the ability of states to maintain