House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., says a “chunk of money” will be set aside in the next coronavirus stimulus bill to help expand vote-by-mail across the nation.
President Trump has warned that voting by mail, bypassing voter ID laws, creates more opportunities for fraud.
Pelosi, in an interview Wednesday with MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” said funds will go to protecting election “integrity” in response to Russian interference and to expanding vote-by-mail in response to the coronavirus pandemic.
The House speaker was asked about new report by the Senate Intelligence Committee that U.S. intelligence agencies concluded Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election.
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“Well, I’m not surprised. As a member of the Gang of Eight, I watched this whole investigation proceed,” Pelosi said.
“It leads you to the question about what does Vladimir Putin have on President Trump personally, politically, financially, in every way?”
She said that regardless of “what the president says, it cannot be denied.”
“But it takes us to the next step. They have also told us 24/7 the Russians are still at work trying to undermine our election,” she said.
“That is why we have to have an important chunk of money in this next bill that will enable us to protect the integrity of our elections, as well as enable the American people to vote by mail, especially at this time of a health danger in going to the polls.”
Pelosi said voting is the “lifeblood of our democracy.”
“So here we are trying to protect the lives of American people, the livelihoods of the American people, and also the life of our democracy. That is what we are going to do in the next bill as well,” she said.
Contrary to Democratic and media spin, the Senate committee’s bipartisan report confirmed there was no evidence of collusion by the Trump campaign, that it was unclear Russia wanted Trump to win and that former FBI Director James Comey acknowledged the bogus Democrat-funded, anti-Trump “dossier” was part of the Intelligence Community Assessment report on Russian interference in 2016.
See the interview:
The Democrats’ push for nationwide mail-in voting recently got a boost from former first lady Michelle Obama, who proposes that voters be allowed to request ballots online and print them at home.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson said earlier this month that Democrats, sensing an opportunity with the coronavirus pandemic, want mail-in voting because it allows for voter fraud, helping them win elections.
Nationwide mail-in voting, he said, “would instantly destroy the public’s faith in election outcomes, and hence our democracy itself,” he said on his show earlier this month.
As evidence, he pointed to the vote last fall in Orange County, California, where the Democratic-controlled state legislature has established so-called “ballot harvesting.” The practice allows political activists to pick up completed ballots and turn them in by the hundreds and thousands.
In Orange County, 62% of ballots were absentee, and a substantial percentage arrived after election day.
A quarter-million of them were cast by “inactive voters,” meaning people who hadn’t voted in the past four years.
A significant number were found to be fraudulent. The Institute for Fair Elections discovered at least 20 voters whose registered address was a local dog park. Seventy-one were registered to a Starbucks.
“Under California law, there is virtually no way to distinguish a fraudulent vote from a real one,” he said.
When it was all over, Republicans had lost every congressional seat in Orange Country, a longtime GOP stronghold.
“Now, Democrats would like to see this system come to your state — to every state — and they’re using the coronavirus pandemic to justify it,” he said.
The Hill reported governors from New England to the South are signaling a new willingness to expand voting measures such as early voting and mail-in ballots.
“You’re seeing governors, regardless of party, really succumbing to the pressures of the moment, I think, rather than protecting the integrity of the ballot box,” Republican strategist Ford O’Connell told The Hill. “I think what a lot of these governors don’t recognize is that what looks good today, may not look good tomorrow.”
‘A terrible thing’
At the White House Coronavirus Task Force briefing April 7, Trump called universal mail-in voting “a terrible thing” because of its vulnerability to vote fraud.
The president said “there’s a lot of dishonesty going on with mail-in voting, mail-in ballots.”
The next day, CNN’s Acosta asked for evidence of vote fraud in mail-in balloting, which is conducted in several states.
Trump pointed to a Judicial Watch settlement with Los Angeles County requiring the county to remove as many as 1.6 million inactive registrations.
“Thousands of votes are gathered and dumped in a location and all of a sudden you lose elections that you think you win,” Trump said.
“I’m not going to stand for it.”
Trump said the country should have voter ID.
“If you send [in a ballot], you should be sure that that vote is meaningful,” he said.
Judicial Watch announced this month a new lawsuit, in North Carolina, where many of the state’s 100 counties have a large number of ineligible voters on their rolls.
In the complaint, Judicial Watch argues the states’ own data shows a total of 1 million inactive voters on its rolls.
Judicial Watch noted that in June 2019, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission released data showing that voter registration rates in a significant proportion of North Carolina’s 100 counties are near, at or above 100% of their age-eligible citizenry.
Courts consider that to be a strong indication that a jurisdiction is not taking the steps required by law to remove ineligible registrants.
Judicial Watch said its analysis also showed that at the time of the EAC report, the entire state had a registration rate close to 100% of its age-eligible citizenry.
A large proportion of registrations have shown no voting activity for more than five years.
“Dirty voting rolls can mean dirty elections, and Judicial Watch must insist that North Carolina follows federal law to clean up its voting rolls,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.
“We want cleaner elections, as the law requires, and we expect this lawsuit will cause North Carolina to take the simple steps necessary to clean from its rolls the names of voters who have moved away or died,” he said.
Last December, Judicial Watch provided notice to 19 large counties in five states that it intended to sue unless they take steps to comply with the NVRA.
Letters have been sent to counties in California, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Colorado.
In 2018, the Supreme Court upheld a voter-roll cleanup program that resulted from a Judicial Watch settlement of a federal lawsuit with Ohio.
California settled an NVRA lawsuit with Judicial Watch and last year began the process of removing up to 1.6 million inactive names from Los Angeles County’s voter rolls.
Kentucky also began a cleanup of hundreds of thousands of old registrations last year after it entered into a consent decree to end another Judicial Watch lawsuit.
Judicial Watch said that despite the effort, voter registration lists across the country remain significantly out of date.
Judicial Watch’s 2019 study found 378 counties nationwide that had more voter registrations than citizens old enough to vote
The 378 counties combined had about 2.5 million registrations over the 100% registered mark.
That’s a drop of about 1 million from Judicial Watch’s previous analysis of voter registration data in 2017.
