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CEOs Whiff on Election Integrity
Members of the Public Policy Committee of Greater Phoenix Leadership recently endorsed an editorial titled “Disenfranchising Voters is Not Election Reform.”
“As an organization of CEOs at the helm of hundreds of thousands of employees in Arizona,” they felt it their public duty to warn of efforts in the legislature not only “undermining our carefully crafted voting system” but also “actually attempting to suppress the votes of Arizonans.”
They were especially incensed by the “stringent new identification requirements for those voting by mail” and the “purge of voters from the Early Voting List.” They grouped these bills with other less important measures, then claimed that all of them had “one thing in common: making it more difficult for Arizonans to vote.”
Voter suppression is a serious accusation. It evokes our racist past and implies serious civil rights violations. It’s a cheap slander when charged carelessly without reasonable proof.
There was one critical element missing in the CEOs’ argument: even a single example of how any of these bills would make voting more difficult. Did they even read the bills? There is no such case to be made.
Let’s look at some facts. Voter ID is required for all in-person voters. Their ballots are handled securely throughout the process and their votes are made without any inappropriate influence.
Yet for bulk mail voting (i.e., voting with a ballot not specifically requested by the voter), all the rules go out the window. No ID is required either for receiving nor submitting a ballot.
It’s no surprise that several election experts and commissions have tagged bulk mail voting as a potential source of significant fraud, even though any fraud that does occur is largely undetectable. With mailed ballots, unlike in-person ballots, it’s impossible to know who filled them out and under what circumstances.
The “stringent new requirement” for mail-in voters would simply require the mailed ballot to include either a voter registration or Arizona Drivers License number. The measure is far from a comprehensive solution but…voter suppression? Give me a break.
The purported “purge” of the Permanent Early Voting List (PEVL) is nothing more than routine maintenance of the files of bulk mail voters that inevitably become inaccurate with time. County recorders would be required to send a notice to voters who had not returned a mail ballot in four consecutive elections, most likely persons who have died, moved, or simply lost interest.
If the addressee failed to respond within 30 days, they would be removed from the list. However, they would still be registered to vote and could request reinstatement on the PEVL at any time.
No harm, no foul. Yet this is “Jim Crow 2.0” according to Democrats desperate to maintain the fraud-vulnerable status quo. But even if passed, these reforms would still not be as restrictive as many laws already on the books in California, Connecticut, DC, and other Democrat strongholds never accused of “voter suppression.”
The phenomenon of woke CEOs pressuring legislatures to push left-wing electoral nonsense is not unique to Arizona. Georgia legislators suffered withering criticism from their business community after passing bills similar to those being considered here.
As in Arizona, Georgia activists like the CEO of Coca-Cola were unable to offer any specific objections, other than generic “voter suppression.” With President Biden‘s encouragement, Georgia was nevertheless penalized with the loss of baseball’s All-Star game. Arizona too is facing the threatened loss of scheduled sports championships.
The GPL CEOs, like athletes and entertainers seeking influence, mostly just reiterate the talking points of the Democrat/media crowd. They claim that voting issues are non-partisan when in fact even mild reforms are unanimously opposed by Democrats.
The CEOs write that voters are satisfied with the current system, so there is nothing to fix. Again, the reality is different. Non-partisan polls reveal a clear majority of voters harbor at least some distrust of our system and favor specific reforms like Arizona’s.
Election integrity isn’t racist, it’s essential to our right to vote. Your vote has been stolen if it is canceled by fraud or manipulation just as surely as if you were refused a ballot.
Published in Elections, Politics
I’m waiting for the shareholders of at least one of these corporations to dump the CEO, or whatever else they can do to disempower them. All of the shareholders can’t be Democrats.
Let’s be clear. The motivation for the so-called reforms is the Trump Big Lie that he won the election.
That is not clear at all. Many states had poorly run election processes, and you know that. No signature verification. Mass mailing of ballots. And then calling it voter suppression? Please.
I don’t know that. What I know is that in Arizona we have had clean well run elections for years. The motivation in Arizona is the same craziness that has lead to the so-called audit where they are looking for bamboo in ballots due to a QAnon conspiracy theory that 40,000 ballots were flown in by the Chi-Coms. Give me a break.
If members of the Republican Party would reject the Trump Big Lie that he won the election, I would take them seriously. That hasn’t happened except by a few brave souls like Liz Cheney.
I have explained this over and over to Gary. Always makes arguments like a lawyer. These elections got ‘certified’ but the processes were terrible. Zuckerberg and the Democrat Lawfare.
Alex Marlow’s next book is going to be all over it.
Long ago in a galaxy far, far away… there was a disputed election. Because things were a mess, nobody really knew who the next president was going to be and whether or not everything was on the up and up.
The Grand Council of Judges intervened and stopped all efforts to determine the truth – but a news organization knew that trust in elections was paramount so they paid for a forensic analysis, and while they may not have liked the result, they proved the larger point and the Republic was saved.
Amazingly, it wasn’t that far away and it wasn’t that long ago. A mere 20 years later the answer is “we don’t care, we don’t owe you an accounting and just STFU and go away.”
We are not a serious people intent on preserving the country beyond the next election cycle. We deserve everything we get.
You don’t want to know. You avoid knowing.
What’s most ironic to me is that conservatives have been talking for many years about the slow corruption of the voting process. And now, suddenly, Gary pretends to be unaware of this. Has Trump driven him insane? Or does he see advantages in a corrupted system?
Alex Marlow’s new book is going to cover it really well. I’ve heard everything the Breitbart guys have had to say about it.
You mean Breaking the News? Thanks. I had not heard of it.
I’ve noticed too that there are a surprising number of people who seem oddly committed to beliefs such as that computers can never count improperly, no matter how deliberately they may have been programmed to do exactly that.
It’s been pointed out before, on Ricochet and elsewhere, that the new voting laws in Georgia are nowhere near as onerous as the existing laws in Biden’s home state of Delaware, for example. Or Colorado where the big game was moved to because Georgia had suddenly become so awful…
And then let’s get into other countries, including even that beacon of democracy, Mexico.
Thank you, Tom. It’s important that we keep calling out the Orwellian new-speak that equates voter id requirements with voter suppression. We might also condemn the racist paternalism of the claim, in that it implies that dark-complected people are somehow incapable of doing what essentially every other American seems able to do with ease: get an id.
Good post.