Despite being a non-candidate — thus far — former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is showing a great deal of interest in the 2020 Presidential Election.
Hillary Clinton Thursday urged Congress to “make voting by mail the norm” as a result of the ongoing coronavirus outbreak.
President Trump said earlier this week that he expects the current COVID-19 situation to last through July or August. The Trump administration has not yet said what plans are in place for the November election. He has insisted, however, that the election will not be delayed or procedures in the election process altered.
Clinton’s call echoed a similar one by Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, who urged lawmakers to conduct all Arizona election through vote-by-mail regulations, not opening any public polling locations this year.
Republicans are skeptical, recalling the words of President-elect Barack Obama’s incoming chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, in 2008: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”
Several states already allow voting by mail, though Republicans have warned that California’s system is vulnerable to fraud. There, Democrats legalized a system called “ballot harvesting,” which allows unverified third parties to deliver each other’s ballots — effectively allowing party organizers to bring thousands of ballots to local election offices to be counted.
Opportunities for "ballot harvesting" occur when party operatives collect absentee or mail-in ballots outside of polling locations and deliver them to election offices for counting. The security of ballots is no ensured, given the party workers are not county employees. (Photo: San Diego Union-Tribune)
Clinton attorney Marc Elias proposed the same thing on Twitter Wednesday, providing a link to an article detailing what are called the Four Pillars to Safeguard Voting Rights in the use of vote-by-mail strategies. Elias did not reveal in his tweet that Democracy Docket is his less-than-two-weeks-old organization that appears to be attempting to codify voter fraud protections across the country.
The article includes nationalizing the idea of “party organizers” to bring supposedly “voted and sealed” ballots to the election offices around the nation. Elias’ claims in the “About” section of Democracy Docket that Republicans, in their victory in Shelby v. Holder, proved they “no longer supported voting rights”
What that August 2018 U.S. Supreme Court decision did was eliminate a section of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that continued to punish many southern jurisdictions for the actions of their predecessors 60 years ago in promoting the denial of voting rights to African American citizens. In the past twenty years, there have been a few suits filed under the Act, but none have prevailed.
Less than 24 hours after being incorporated, Democracy Docket also filed a new lawsuit seeking to overturn a North Carolina law curbing absentee ballot fraud.
For perspective, Republicans blamed many of their 2018 losses in California on “ballot harvesting." There have been a few Republican efforts to copy Democrats’ tactics, but they have failed because Republican voters are generally far more reluctant to give up their ballots to others, regardless of the level of trust.
Clinton is familiar with the value of voting by mail. She was thought to be running neck-and-neck with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) in California in the 2016 presidential primary. Instead, she won by several points — largely because she had stronger turnout in mail-in ballots.
Mail-in ballots also helped her run up popular vote margins in 2016.
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