Adams: The Next Major Battle over Voting Rights is Based on a Lie

Published On: November 29th, 2017

PILF President and General Counsel J. Christian Adams writes in The Hill today:

The next major battle for voting rights is built on a lie. Election officials and policymakers are being browbeaten by national activists and Twitter bots to dump an agreement between states to compare voter lists for identifying duplicates and potential fraud.

Imagine that: Abandon tools to keep our elections more honest. If the digital mob had its way, America’s voter rolls would be maintained according to obsolete standards from the 1980s. Voter rolls would remain an unmitigated mess. Some people must like it that way. As of now, 30 states have agreed to share voter records with each other to keep rolls updated when people move from state to state. The average American will relocate about 11 times in their life. When voters move, they rarely inform election officials. When they relocate and die, their records can live on for decades with their former officials none the wiser.

There is a well-funded and dishonest campaign launching against the important Crosscheck program. Activists successfully pushed Illinois lawmakers to reconsider their membership but later failed to inspire the state elections board to dump the system in a vote on Nov. 20. Although they likely considered the state to be an easy first domino to fall and they failed, they will not stop trying. One county clerk in Idaho tried to hype doubts over the program’s reliability even after his office admitted to cutting corners in handling the data. Crosscheck is slowly being admitted into the canon of grasping rationalizations for why Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Read more, here.

Public Interest Legal Foundation