As the Democrats try to pass the Voter Rights Bill, the real threat to democracy is election integrity, not lack of access. Many countries have elections that mean nothing not because they could not vote but because those that control the process decide the winner. The voter rights bill is a step toward federalizing our election process. This is a mistake.

!t is an advantage for the U.S. to have the Electoral College run state by state. Local control is a barrier to fraud in a national election because even if there is an anomaly in one state or precinct, it is very difficult for someone to tamper with all the states and control the

entire election. Does anyone really believe that federalizing elections would mean less fraud? No, it just means less local control of the process.

All these changes proposed under the guise of ending voter suppression, but it is really integrity that has been the problem. We have had two elections in a row that have had the results disputed and not because of

access. Confidence in the process is at an all-time low and even if you don’t believe there were problems with the 2020 election, we need to fix the optics.

It bothers me that legislation intended to improve election integrity is called out as voter suppression. Access to voting in the United States is available to everyone with minimal effort. I don’t think we

want to lower the standards. Do we really want those who won’t take the time to register, request a ballot or provide an ID to vote? Someone who won’t go through the minimal steps is probably not going to research the

candidates and be an informed voter. Yes, we could marginally increase the numbers of voters in vulnerable classes by removing certain restrictions, but is it worth exposing the whole process to fraud? Are these unreasonable protections? No way. Those that want to increase their participation do so to manipulate and exploit their votes.

I am amazed that anyone would think it is a good idea to mail out ballots to all registered voters without request. It is also amazing to me that we have a political party wanting to prevent states from banning ballot harvesting. The combination of ballot harvesting and mail out ballot means the candidate with the best ballot harvesting campaign will probably win. Do we really want that? I have told Republicans that if it’s not banned that we need to just be better at ballot harvesting

ourselves. If we were better the Democrats would probably want to ban it. As I said above, we need to at least fix the optics. At minimum, count the mail-in ballots first so there is not the impression that the

election board is “finding” enough ballots to win.

I applaud states that had problems in 2020 take steps to fix them. It is disappointing that the Democrats are introducing this bill to thwart those efforts. I hope it fails.