(NRCC News) – Republicans are taking action in an attempt to prevent similar problems in the midterm elections coming up on Tuesday to those that occurred in the 2020 presidential election.
Under the guise of COVID, leftists unconstitutionally changed election laws and procedures but now it’s time for Republicans to restore integrity to our most cherished democratic process.
House Republicans led by Rep. Rodney Davis (R-Ill.), the ranking member of the House Administration Committee, have sent numerous letters out to state and local officials demanding that they address prior failures and ramp up preventative measures to ensure Election Day is on the level.
Getting ahead of election issues is the best way to stop them. Trying to address them post-election is just a recipe for disaster and, as we saw in 2020, essentially ineffective. Hogan Gidley, the vice chair of the Center for Election Integrity at America First Policy Institute, agrees.
On Wednesday, he spoke on the John Solomon Reports podcast and explained, “Once that ballot goes to the machine, it’s over,” adding, “You can’t put that toothpaste back in the tube … you can’t put the ballot back in the envelope and try and interpret what someone was thinking when they voted.”
He also pointed out the importance of getting courts to define what constitutes a legal provisional ballot prior to an election taking place so that way legal battles will have a leg to stand on in the post-election days.
“[G]etting out ahead of it, going on the offense, exposing what’s going on, is really the key here to success,” Gidley said.
Just the News compiled a list containing the top 12 election integrity concerns being focused on by House Republicans.
The first issue is that Milwaukee officials, including Mayor Cavalier Johnson, are permitting a “privately funded, government-sponsored, partisan get-out-the-vote effort.” Johnson himself has endorsed the city’s efforts which are being run by a progressive organization seeking to elect Democrats in red states.
“At the very least, announcing support of a partisan campaign effort in your official capacity gives the appearance of impropriety, which can only serve to undermine voters’ faith in our elections processes and confidence in their results,” wrote Rep. Davis, joined by fellow Administration Committee Republicans Rep. Bryan Steil and Rep. Barry Loudermilk. “At worst, this is a violation of the City of Milwaukee code of ethics and worthy of a formal investigation under the standards of conflict regulations.”
“Last election cycle, we saw the use of Zuckerbucks — money more or less coming from [Facebook founder] Mark Zuckerberg — pouring into the state of Wisconsin, allowing partisans to get involved in our election system in some of our largest cities,” Steil told the “Just the News, No Noise” TV show on Tuesday. “Now we see this playing out again, now in the City of Milwaukee.”
The second issue addressed electronic poll books (EPBs) in three separate counties around the US. On June 3, letter were sent to Rockingham County, NC., Berks County, PA., and Fulton County, GA. In both Rockingham and Berks Counties the EPBs “were inoperable for an extended period of time” during the 2022 primary elections, which resulted in the Pennsylvania county to extend polling hours, Davis noted.
In the Fulton County, Ga., primary, security and software updates for EPBs were conducted on Election Day, which caused “polling locations to open at less-than-full capacity,” Davis wrote to the chair of the county’s Election Board.
An April 21 letter was sent to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in which concerns were raised about “voter education” for Atlanta Public Schools’ high school students conducted by “Stacey Abrams’ New Georgia Project in coordination with Rock the Vote.”
The lesson in question “taught students that voter identification laws are ‘restrictive’ and make voting ‘more difficult,’ and that policies limiting ‘flexible voting options’ like mail-in voting restrict people’s ‘freedom to vote,’” according to the lawmakers, citing a Fox News report.
In June 3 letters to Cobb and Macon-Bibb Counties in Georgia, Davis pointed out that “early ballots were illegally tabulated” during the primary election which led him to question “the security of the early-tabulated results.”
In a July 11 letter, following a hand recount in Dekalb County, Davis stated a machine tabulator “inaccurately counted several thousand ballots, leading to official results drastically different from the earlier-reported unofficial results.”
Davis wrote in a June 15 letter to the New Jersey secretary of state about his “concern about a recent report that there are tens of thousands of errors within New Jersey’s voter rolls, including thousands of duplicate registrations and deceased individuals.”
He requested that the state’s elections chief identify “the processes in place to ensure that only one ballot per eligible voter is cast and counted” and explain how the state’s voter rolls were maintained and ballots were verified in the 2020 election.
On June 8, Davis sent a letter to the Clackamas County clerk in Oregon in which he asserted concerns over 60,000 ballots in the primary election that “had blurry barcodes and could not be counted properly by vote-counting machines.” He asked the official to explain how the failure occurred and what steps were being taken to prevent a recurrence.
In an Oct. 24 letter to the Colorado secretary of state, Davis called out voter registration notices that were to 30,000 noncitizens residing in the state.
An Aug. 24 letter to the director of the Pinal County Elections Department in Arizona brought up “an estimated 63,000 erroneous ballots [that] were sent out” in the primary election. Davis requested an explanation as to “how these ballots were mistakenly sent out.”
On Oct. 26, Davis sent a letter to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton asking for an investigation into voter registration applications that were sent out to deceased individuals by Planned Parenthood and Democratic Texas gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke.
“As you know, federal law requires that Texas ensure that its voter registration lists are well-maintained and accurate, and we encourage you to hold all organizations that engage in voter registration efforts to the highest accountability that the law demands,” Davis wrote. “It is deeply troubling that Planned Parenthood and Mr. O’Rourke’s campaign sent voter registration forms that may not conform to state law to individuals who, in some cases, have been deceased for over a decade.”
On March 11, Reps. Davis and Steil wrote a letter to the elections administrator of Harris County, asking about 10,000 ballots that were not originally counted in the primary election. They sought “a detailed timeline, with dates, of when and how the 10,000 ballots were missed, located, and then counted.”
A July 15 letter to Lancaster County, PA., asserted that nearly 16,000 mail-in ballots had a coding error which led to “more than 50 volunteers and county officials to re-mark and count these ballots, significantly delaying election results.”
Lastly, House GOP members have also been sounding the alarm on the federal government using taxpayer-funded agencies in voter registration efforts in line with an executive order issued by Joe Biden last year. The lawmakers have contacted the Department of Labor which has stated that “States may choose to designate American Job Centers (AJCs), a nationwide network of almost 2,400 locally-operated centers providing job training and employment services, as voter registration agencies.”
Hopefully by putting these counties and the relevant officials on notice will help curtail attempts to engage in fraudulent election activities during the 2022 midterm elections. Americans deserve fair and free elections and without them we are not a democracy at all.
Copyright 2022. NRCCNews.org
You say you sent letters to correct the problems. My question is, what was the results??
The true way to deal with these unconstitutional changes in the election laws perpetrated by reprobates like Marc Elias is for the state legislatures to repeal ALL election laws that were illegitimately changed through the courts during the Spring, Summer, and early Fall of 2020, and then go through the appropriate legislative process to do it the right way, as per Article II Section 1.2.
We can never be assured of having free and fair elections as long as we have electronic voting machines and unsolicited mail-in voting.
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