Doubts About Election Integrity Hurt Us All
Consider this: Just 12 hours after the U.S. Senate rejected the Democrats’ election bill, the Bipartisan Policy Center released a report on election reform, while proposing a path forward for bipartisan federal legislation. The report itself was a collaboration between a number of noted think tanks and reform organizations that are liberal, conservative, and moderate. They included the American Enterprise Institute, Issue One, R Street, and Unite America. The goal was to develop a list of minimum voting standards to ensure election integrity in four areas: voter registration, casting a ballot, counting the vote, and cyber and physical security. Rather than creating new mandates, the report recommends providing federal funding to help states meet those voting standards.
The most controversial part of the report, however, won’t be the proposed legislation. It will be the scorecard created to evaluate the current election laws in all 50 states to determine how close each of them was to meeting the minimum standards. Only two states met all the minimum requirements. One of them was Colorado, which was only too happy to host the 2021 All-Star Game moved from Atlanta. The other was Georgia, itself. Yes, Georgia, the state that the Democratic Party and a thousand talking heads smeared as racist.
There are elements of the Georgia law that remain problematic, such as giving the legislature control of the State Board of Elections. The BPC report, however, suggests that focusing on the election laws in several other states – including many that have been controlled by Democrats for decades – would have been time better spent.
The report also raises questions about reporters in the mainstream media and their ability to think for themselves, let alone dig into a complex national story with many moving parts. Instead of reinforcing the Democrats’ narrative about Georgia’s election law, the failure of the press has simply reinforced the Republican narrative that the media is largely a megaphone for Democratic Party talking points.
