House Republicans have unveiled a bill that would open up the spigots of dark money nationwide and make voting more difficult, especially in D.C. What they are calling the American Confidence in Elections Act integrates nearly 50 stand-alone bills that House Republicans have introduced to please their grass-roots base and major donors.
This partisan power grab masquerading as a defense of election integrity would nullify President Biden’s 2021 executive order aimed at making voting easier. It would ban federal agencies from helping register voters or even encouraging people to participate in elections, as well as reduce transparency by ratcheting back disclosure requirements to allow individuals and corporations to stay anonymous more easily as they pour money into electioneering.
It would also treat the District as the proving ground for a wish list of aggressive proposals to make it harder to vote. The bill would require D.C. voters to show a photo identification card to cast a ballot or request an absentee ballot; compel the District to create books that compile photographs of every registered voter for poll workers to check; ban same-day voter registration; and restrict the use of ballot drop boxes. It would forbid D.C. from mailing absentee ballots unless requested by the voter and prohibit D.C. from implementing ranked-choice voting, even if voters pass a referendum to allow it.
The legislation would also prevent D.C. from counting ballots that arrive by mail after polls close on Election Day and require the city to announce unofficial results no later than 10 a.m. the next day, except for military and overseas ballots. It would also ban D.C. from counting provisional ballots unless they were cast in the proper precinct.
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End of carousel- D.C. Council reverses itself on school resource officers. Good.
- Virginia makes a mistake by pulling out of an election fraud detection group.
- Vietnam sentences another democracy activist.
- Biden has a new border plan.
The D.C. Council voted on Tuesday to stop pulling police officers out of schools, a big win for student safety. Parents and principals overwhelmingly support keeping school resource officers around because they help de-escalate violent situations. D.C. joins a growing number of jurisdictions, from Montgomery County, Md., to Denver, in reversing course after withdrawing officers from school grounds following George Floyd’s murder. Read our recent editorial on why D.C. needs SROs.
Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) just withdrew Virginia from a data-sharing consortium, ERIC, that made the commonwealth’s elections more secure, following Republicans in seven other states in falling prey to disinformation peddled by election deniers. Former GOP governor Robert F. McDonnell made Virginia a founding member of ERIC in 2012, and until recently conservatives touted the group as a tool to combat voter fraud. D.C. and Maryland plan to remain. Read our recent editorial on ERIC.
In Vietnam, a one-party state, democracy activist Tran Van Bang was sentenced on Friday to eight years in prison and three years probation for writing 39 Facebook posts. The court claimed he had defamed the state in his writings, according to Radio Free Asia. In the past six years, at least 60 bloggers and activists have been sentenced to between 4 and 15 years in prison under the law, Human Rights Watch found. Read more of the Editorial Board’s coverage on autocracy and Vietnam.
The Department of Homeland Security has provided details of a plan to prevent a migrant surge along the southern border. The administration would presumptively deny asylum to migrants who failed to seek it in a third country en route — unless they face “an extreme and imminent threat” of rape, kidnapping, torture or murder. Critics allege that this is akin to an illegal Trump-era policy. In fact, President Biden is acting lawfully in response to what was fast becoming an unmanageable flow at the border. Read our most recent editorial on the U.S. asylum system.
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All of this, even though GOP lawmakers rhapsodized about the importance of federalism and local authority when they unveiled the bill in Atlanta on Monday. Congress has constitutional authority to exercise control over D.C., but doing so this aggressively would be an affront to the principle of home rule. D.C.’s 700,000-plus residents lack congressional representation and therefore won’t get any vote on the bill.