While many were disappointed that Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, vetoed a Republican-led voter ID bill, “he’s not wrong that Ohio’s elections are generally very well-run,” according to GAI’s Eric Eggers.
DeWine vetoed HB-472, which would have required absentee voters to include a copy of their government-issued photo ID with their completed ballot, as Ohio already does for people voting in person.
Eggers joined Chanel Rion on OAN’s Fine Point program and noted that the bill would give state officials no new fraud-fighting abilities, and that a bipartisan group of election administrators warned the governor they wouldn’t have enough time to implement it.
Eggers is the author of the 2018 book, FRAUD: How the Left Plans to Steal the Next Election. His research for the book convinced him that stopping voter fraud involves many steps beyond requiring voter identification/ Keeping a state’s voter rolls updated and accurate is critical to stopping absentee ballot fraud, something states such as New York, Illinois, and California have failed to do.
“I give Ohio a lot of credit for having sued for the right to clean up their voter rolls,” Eggers told Rion.
“They typically have had a good track record, but that doesn’t mean that they will always be. I think the point of the Republican state legislature was that this would increase public confidence in elections,” he said.
Voters are looking for reassurance that the elections process everywhere is truly fair and conducted in a secure way.
“There is a sea change in the way we talk about elections. People are afraid. They’ve looked at what happened in California. They look at the fact that, California has allowed for the destruction of anything resembling common sense in election law,” Eggers said.
“They feel we should do anything we can to make sure that doesn’t happen here. That’s what this push was about. It also indicates support for Donald Trump and his effort to pass the SAVE Act,” Eggers argued.
“So, Mike DeWine is caught between trying to do what his state election officials want and what a lot of voters want. I think he chose to err on the side of bureaucracy at the moment,” Eggers said.
Voters in other states are making efforts to make their elections more secure. “I know in Washington state, for example, they’re trying to collect signatures to put a ballot initiative in November that would require proof of citizenship when you register to vote. Based on people I talk to in Washington, that polls at more than 80 percent,” he said. “That’s the way the country’s going.”
After the recent election in Los Angeles, where Republican Spencer Pratt was elbowed out of being in the November runoff by a flood of late-arriving absentee ballots for a progressive Democrat candidate, “people are waking up to how ridiculous it is in Democrat states in how they conduct elections,” he concluded. “In California, the shame of it is that it’s legal in many ways.”
“People want more security. They want more confidence. They want fewer hands and less process between the person casting the ballot and the person who’s counting it,” Eggers said.
