Following Monday’s House Administration Committee field hearing in Georgia, the Washington Post’s Editorial Board released a scathing analysis of the House Republicans’ dangerous American Confidence in Elections (ACE) Act, fully outlining how this piece of legislation is a boon to extremist billionaire donors and special interest corporations while disenfranchising voters.
Even with House Republicans’ best attempts to disguise the ACE Act as a safeguard to future elections, it’s clear that this bill is about boosting their political fortunes—not protecting voters. It’s just another way to suppress the voice of the people in favor of corporations and the wealthy.
Washington Post: Opinion: House GOP election bill expands dark money and curtails D.C. autonomy
Washington Post Editorial Board
07/11/23
Key points:
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House Republicans have unveiled a bill that would open up the spigots of dark money nationwide and make voting more difficult, especially in D.C. What they are calling the American Confidence in Elections Act integrates nearly 50 stand-alone bills that House Republicans have introduced to please their grass-roots base and major donors.
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This partisan power grab masquerading as a defense of election integrity would nullify President Biden’s 2021 executive order aimed at making voting easier. It would ban federal agencies from helping register voters or even encouraging people to participate in elections, as well as reduce transparency by ratcheting back disclosure requirements to allow individuals and corporations to stay anonymous more easily as they pour money into electioneering.
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It would also treat the District as the proving ground for a wish list of aggressive proposals to make it harder to vote. The bill would require D.C. voters to show a photo identification card to cast a ballot or request an absentee ballot; compel the District to create books that compile photographs of every registered voter for poll workers to check; ban same-day voter registration; and restrict the use of ballot drop boxes. It would forbid D.C. from mailing absentee ballots unless requested by the voter and prohibit D.C. from implementing ranked-choice voting, even if voters pass a referendum to allow it.
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The legislation would also prevent D.C. from counting ballots that arrive by mail after polls close on Election Day and require the city to announce unofficial results no later than 10 a.m. the next day, except for military and overseas ballots. It would also ban D.C. from counting provisional ballots unless they were cast in the proper precinct.
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Fortunately, this drastic step backward is going nowhere in the Senate. No Democrat is going to vote for it. But the fanfare with which Republicans rolled it out illustrates the degree to which their base, egged on by former president Donald Trump, is pressuring GOP leaders to address phony allegations of widespread fraud.
- D.C. began sending mail-in ballots to all registered voters in 2020 because of the pandemic and has continued to do so. Republicans speculated during a hearing last month that this invites fraud, but they provided no evidence that any actually occurred. A Heritage Foundation database frequently cited by election deniers doesn’t have a single recorded example of any voter fraud in Washington.
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The GOP legislation would also require the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration to provide voter data to states at no cost so they can remove dead voters and noncitizens from their rolls. One reason there’s a clamoring for this information is because so many Republican secretaries of state have withdrawn recently from the nonpartisan election consortium called ERIC that helps keep voter rolls up to date. They pulled out because they didn’t want to send a postcard inviting eligible new residents to register to vote.
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Meanwhile, the campaign finance section of the bill is a gift to big donors wrapped up to look like a protection of free speech. It would block the Treasury Department from reining in 501(c)(4) dark money groups; exempt organizations that raise less than $50,000 from disclosure and reporting requirements; and prohibit the Securities and Exchange Commission from requiring companies to disclose political contributions, donations to tax-exempt organizations and dues paid to trade associations. It would also repeal limits on coordinated political party expenditures and raise contribution caps for state political party committees.
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Taken together, all of this reveals that the true purpose of GOP legislative efforts to control voting is more about giving themselves a political edge than actually safeguarding elections.
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