Democrats and the left-wing media have been demonizing the Texas Legislature's election reform package, SB 1, which is designed to protect voters by correcting vulnerabilities in the registration and election system. The left has pulled out the usual playbook and claims, among other things, that the new law is "restrictive."
"We're not just concerned with presidential elections," says Hans von Spakovsky, senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation's Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, where he manages the Election Law Reform Initiative. "We should be concerned with every single election from the local town council all the way to the statewide races like the governor, and if there is an ability to commit fraud, folks unfortunately are going to take advantage of that. Texas has had a huge number of prosecutions of individuals committing election fraud in the past few years, and they need to put remedies [in place] to prevent that from happening."
Von Spakovsky believes there is only one possible motive the Democrats could have for opposing voter integrity.
"What possible reason is it the Democrats are against that unless they want aliens to be able to register to vote and get away with it," the attorney poses.
He says no member of the public with any common sense would think this voter ID requirement, or any of the other provisions in SB 1, is "restrictive" or would prevent an eligible person from voting.
Governor Greg Abbott (R) signed the election overhaul into law early last week.
What about election audits in other states?
Meanwhile, Republican state lawmakers in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are pressuring their states to follow Arizona in conducting a full-scale audit of the 2020 election in order to prove or disprove claims the election was stolen from Donald Trump. The legal scholar argues that it's very important for every state in the U.S. to conduct audits of the 2020 presidential election.
"Audits are routine in the business world," he points out. "The opposition to doing audits is not understandable from any point, other than individuals don't want problems found."
Von Spakovsky continues: "The importance of the audit is to ensure that in the last election all the laws and regulations were followed, that everyone who was eligible was able to vote, that the votes were properly counted, that there were no illegal votes, and that the voting equipment worked the way it was supposed to. They should want to ensure that we have fair and secure elections."
Regardless if evidence of fraud is found, he adds, it's not going to change the outcome of the election.
"It's too late to do that. The time under state laws to contest the outcome of an election; that deadline is long past," he informs. "[But] what might be possible is if they find intentional wrongdoing, there could be criminal prosecution. If there were mistakes and errors made, it will give folks the opportunity to correct that to make sure it doesn't happen again."
The mainstream media and liberal critics continue to call claims of voter fraud "baseless" – but continue to fight against conducting audits … which could potentially prove them right.
