Abolishing honest elections and re-imagining legislative procedures

Deceptively called the “For the People Act of 2021,” H.R. 1 and S. 1 should more accurately be named the “Act to Encourage Cheating and Vote Fraud.”

Critics of this legislative boondoggle charge that it federalizes and micromanages the election process now administered by the states. It also imposes unnecessary, foolish, and even unconstitutional mandates on the states, and puts the federal government in charge of elections, which is a reversal of the decentralization of the American election process as created by the Founders to protect our liberty and freedom. 

The Founders established a federalist system that deliberately did not cede all power to the federal government. 

Furthermore, it interferes with states and their citizens in determining qualifications for voters, ensuring the accuracy of voter registration rolls, securing the integrity of elections, participating in the political process, and determining district boundaries for electing their representatives.

States will be forced to implement perilous methods such as early voting, automatic voter registration, same-day registration, and no-fault absentee balloting. The latter is the tool of choice of vote thieves.

Early voting is convenient, but voting early can put those voters at risk of casting their ballot before late-breaking developments occur that might affect their decision.

Same-day registration prevents election officials from verifying the eligibility of registrants, and allows ineligible voters to register and vote. It also makes it difficult to predict how many voters will appear at polling places, and thus more difficult to adequately staff the polling places.

The bill would also force precincts to allow voting by persons registered to vote in other precincts, preventing adequate steps to prevent ineligible voters from casting ballots, or to prevent people from voting more than once.

The accuracy of registration lists will be degraded by automatically registering individuals from state databases, such as DMV and welfare offices. These registrants likely will include large numbers of ineligible voters, including aliens, and multiple or duplicate registrations of the same individuals.

Online voter registration allows for massive fraudulent registrants through actions of cyber criminals if registrations are not tied to existing state records, such as a driver’s license.

These election revisions are a strategy for increasing fraud and abuse and are plain stupid. We must have an honest election system that will reflect the actual choices of eligible voters. The election system already needs to be strengthened; this bill will essentially destroy its security.

Elections are too important to allow foolish mechanisms in the system for no better reason than for a bit of convenience, which is a prominent reason cited for making these changes. Voting is too important to be made too easy.

Those behind these absurd changes also cry out against “voter suppression,” which they term any sensible idea that helps to protect the integrity of the election system, such as photo IDs and signature verification for mail-in ballots. We need photo IDs for lots of normal things we do, but somehow requiring an ID to vote is suppressing voters.

In addition to a clean and honest election system, we need a sensible system for creating legislation. Every piece of legislation offered should focus on making things in America better for the American people. Not some of the people; not a political party, but things benefitting the nation at large.

Bills should be limited to one topic and be only long enough to describe that topic. Having more bills of such a limited nature is far simpler, therefore better, than having a few gargantuan bills of hundreds or thousands of pages with multiple issues addressed.

Legislative language should be as brief as possible to get the concept of the legislation across, not written so as to make the intent difficult to understand. Most bills should be no longer than about 50 pages, which still is a significant read for legislators, particularly if there are more shorter bills to study.

Passage of legislation that affects the nation should be passed by a 60 percent or 67 percent majority. A truly beneficial bill will be able to gain that level of support. If it doesn’t gain enough support, it wasn’t a good enough bill.

No cheating! A good piece of legislation that benefits the entire country, and has broad bipartisan support, should not be a mechanism that members can load with pork-barrel items or items to benefit partisan goals. 

Trying to get a pork feature passed by tagging it onto a very good piece of legislation, hoping it will slide through if people are afraid to vote the good legislation down to prevent the bad feature from getting through, is blackmail.

No riders or amendments should be allowed that are not directly related to the topic of the legislation.

And while we are improving things, we need to remember that whatever the job is, the best qualified people are who deserve that job. If they are all men or all women, or all black, or all Asian, or all Latina, or all white or any combination of those groups, those who have displayed the highest level of competence and actual ability for the job in question are who should get the job.