COURIER: Threats to Free and Fair Elections Loom Large – But They’re Not What You Think
BY RICK WILSON — SEPTEMBER 13, 2024
I’ve been a Republican political consultant, communications expert, and ad-maker for over 30 years. To say I know how the sausage gets made would be an understatement. There is surprisingly little coincidence in politics, which means that the rise in voting restrictions is not an accident. It’s part of a well-funded, coordinated attack on our democracy — one that’s been underway for far longer than anyone has noticed — but it’s not too late to stop it.
Voting, the most fundamental element of the American democratic process, has been weaponized into a partisan tool as part of a full-scale assault on the very foundation of our republic. With every passing election cycle, and particularly since 2020, we have seen the passage of new laws and restrictions that limit the ability of millions of eligible Americans to cast a ballot, all in the name of the “protection of electoral sanctity.” Don’t be deceived – these laws are not the guardians of democracy; they are a tool to destroy it.
Take, for instance, the deceptive allure of voter ID laws. On the surface, requiring identification seems innocuous. It might even seem to some like a common sense checkpoint. But these restrictions were designed to be unambiguously prohibitive for millions of Americans. As political camps continue to debate the security of elections, our priority must be to increase eligible voters’ access to the polls, not to erect more barriers. While voter ID laws disproportionately impact marginalized communities, they have a markedly negative impact on eligible voters across every demographic, on both sides of the aisle, and on our shared democracy.
This spring, Speaker Mike Johnson introduced the latest proposed voting rights restriction in the House of Representatives, the ironically titled ‘SAVE Act’. Speaker Johnson gave away the game at a press conference in May: the right’s concerns around non-citizen voting are based on their so-called “intuition” and not grounded in reality or anything close to it.
Non-citizens voting in federal elections is a phenomenon that factually does not exist and is already illegal. This disenfranchising legislation gives a platform to the same tired conspiracy theories we’ve heard for years. False claims that non-citizens are voting in federal elections are a deliberate ploy to breed fear, stoke hate, and make some voters fearful of showing up on Election Day.
In July, the SAVE Act was passed by the House and sent to the Senate. If enacted as written, this legislation would give states less than two weeks to implement a law requiring voters across the country to provide documentary proof of citizenship– such as a birth certificate, US passport or passport card, or a Naturalization Certificate– before registering or casting a ballot. Call me alarmist, but I don’t see this going smoothly.
New research shows that 21.3 million people – that’s 9.1% of voting-age American citizens – do not have easy access to proof of citizenship documents. Millions of voters do not possess these documents in the first place. They may have been lost or stolen, and the financial, time, and bureaucratic barriers to replacing them are prohibitive.
