Show Notes
The Supreme Court looks ready to overturn a Mississippi law that allows absentee ballots to be collected as late as five days after the election. Meanwhile, Congress is struggling to consider a bill called the SAVE Act that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote in all states and require voters to show a photo ID to vote.
On the most recent episode of The Drill Down podcast, host Peter Schweizer asks “will either of these issues determine the outcome of November’s elections?”
Co-host Eric Eggers, author of a 2018 book about various types of election fraud throughout American history, notes this stems from pandemic lockdowns. “Mississippi passed a law, as many states did, during COVID in which they extended the deadline by which ballots could be received,” he explains.
The hosts play a clip from Justice Amy Coney Barrett asking Mississippi about its assumption under that challenged law, that state governments can make their own rules as to who controls ballots. That clip prompts Schweizer to say, “In terms of the integrity of getting them to the ballot box, you could literally have a state government like California say that Democratic Party officials can receive your ballots, but Republicans can’t.”
So, it would appear that some national standardization around ballot handling would be a good way to prevent that kind of corruption of the process. Eggers points out that during the 2022 election it took a full 35 days for all votes to be counted nationally in those mid-term elections.
“If they say ‘we’re not going allow ballots to show up after the fact,’ that could affect elections in 14 different states,” Schweizer says. “In some states, when you mail in a ballot, it doesn’t even have to have a stamp on it from the post office. So, you don’t even know when it was actually mailed. As long as it arrives within five or eight days or whatever they designate at the state level, it’s okay to accept that ballot.”
“I mean, that is just crazy.”
Schweizer quoted a recent interview of Harmeet Dillon, head of the Justice department’s Office of Civil Rights. “She said eight different states don’t even require postmarks” on absentee ballots.
Some of these measures were put in place using COVID as an excuse but, as the Supreme Court heard in oral arguments, during the Civil War, soldiers voted from the field using absentee ballots that had to be mailed back to their states by Election Day, not a few days afterwards.
Meanwhile, across the street from the Supreme Court building, things are proceeding slowly in Congress. The House passed the SAVE Act, which would require that registering to vote requires documentary proof of citizenship and also that voting would require a photo ID, but the bill languishes in the Senate. Senate Democrats are mounting a “silent filibuster” to prevent its coming up for a vote. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) has been criticized for not trying to force the issue with the so-called “nuclear option” to bypass the filibuster.
Eggers divides the questions on either side of the street this way: “There are two essential elements to an election,” says Eggers. “The first part is the issue of who gets to vote. That is part of what Congress is debating right now, making sure that the people who are supposed to vote are the only people that are allowed to vote. The second part is that once people cast their ballot, are those ballots safe?”
Americans know that absentee voting has grown significantly in recent years, as some states have made the process easier. But Schweizer points out that the 2020 election, conducted during the Covid restrictions, included 33 million more absentee ballots than in the 2016 election, yet the total number of rejected ballots was about the same – about 560,000 – despite the massive increase in volume.
“We have a lot of people that distrust American institutions. And what separates a democracy from any other system of government is you have votes,” Schweizer says. “When you start questioning whether the process is fair or whether it’s being manipulated, that’s a huge problem.”
“I think John Thune, the majority leader in in in the Senate, is making a huge mistake because the calculation he’s making is, ‘We don’t want to go the nuclear option route and force Democrats to have a vote on this because (in the future) they might do it to us.’”
“The bottom line is they’ve already done it.”
