With the 2024 elections fast approaching, a nonpartisan watchdog group has identified more than a dozen “critical reforms” that states must make to “secure voter integrity.”
The Honest Elections Project (HEP) is a group “devoted to supporting the right of every lawful voter to participate in free and honest elections” through “public engagement, advocacy, and public-interest litigation.”
On Friday, it released the “Safeguarding Our Elections” report detailing what it will take to “rebuild confidence in American elections.”
“We believe very strongly in making it easier to vote and harder to cheat, and in order to do that, there’s a comprehensive set of basic rules and safeguards that I believe every state should adopt and should follow,” HEP’s Executive Director Jason Snead told Fox News Digital. “We’ve built everything in this report out over the last few years, talking with experts, working with states, seeing what works and what doesn’t work, just as importantly, and then trying to bring it all together into a single, consolidated, concise piece of literature that you can drop this on the desk of lawmaker, and they can go out and they can get these reforms passed and make their elections work better the voters.“
Clean up voter rolls.
Conduct routine audits.
Require voter ID.
These are commonsense steps to protect the integrity of our elections.
— Honest Elections Project (@honestelections) January 18, 2024
The report lists 14 “honest rules for honest elections,” including the banning of ranked-choice voting; the blocking of “Zuck Bucks 2.0”; preventing “foreign nationals” from “influencing elections”; and barring non-citizens from voting “in all elections.”
According to HEP: Election dates should be consolidated; only elected lawmakers should write election laws; election results should be “prompt and accurate”; “old and erroneous voter registrations must be removed” from voter rolls; the integrity of the “voter registration process” must be protected; early and mail voting laws must be closely regulated; “mail ballots” must be protected from fraud; voter ID must be required “for every ballot”; and election crimes must be investigated and prosecuted.
The group blasted the Center for Tech and Civic Life, a group that claims to be “a team of civic technologists, trainers, researchers, election administration and data experts working to foster a more informed and engaged democracy, and helping to modernize U.S. elections.”
“Elections should be accountable to the public, not to special interest groups and liberal megadonors. In 2020, left-wing nonprofits pumped more than $400 million from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg into thousands of election offices, giving more money to places that ultimately voted for Joe Biden,” HEP stated in its report. “Dozens of states have banned or restricted private election grants, but the same left-wing group behind ‘Zuck Bucks’ in 2020, the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), has already created a new $80 million program, the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence, to skirt these laws and influence election offices across America.”
Ranked choice voting should be banned “for public elections at all levels of government” by state legislators, according to HEP.
“RCV makes it harder to vote, harder to understand the results of elections, and harder to trust the voting process,” the report explains. “States across the country are banning RCV and dissatisfied cities are repealing it, but a coordinated campaign driven by left-wing megadonors is promoting RCV to skew politics to the left.”
Honest Elections Project Submits Testimony in Georgia Senate Hearing on Ranked-Choice Voting Ban⬇️https://t.co/U8jWrGqIfh
— Honest Elections Project (@honestelections) January 25, 2024
“We’ve seen at this point possibly a dozen states are facing ballot measure fights to bring ranked choice voting to future elections,” Snead told Fox News Digital. “We’ve seen Zuck Bucks 2.0 launch in earnest and they’ve got the new $80 million program. We wanted to make sure that those issues were elevated for policymakers and for folks in the media as well, so that they can understand what these new threats and challenges are.”
Reforms, Snead said, don’t have to be “disruptive.”
“A lot of states are looking for what to do this year that doesn’t involve significant rewrites of election law, doesn’t raise the age-old concern that you’ll get from election clerks and officials that you’re changing things in the middle of an election and that it’s a potential disruptor,” he said. “You can ban ranked choice voting, you can shut off Zuck Bucks 2.0, you can shut off foreign influence in elections by closing foreign influence in polls at the state level. You can bring process audits to your elections and empower secretaries of state to actually go in and make sure that election laws are being followed.”
“None of that is disruptive to elections,” Snead noted, “and it will have meaningful positive impacts for security, transparency and public confidence in the voting process.“
Reminder:
82% of Black and 83% of Hispanic voters favor photo ID laws.
— Honest Elections Project (@honestelections) January 22, 2024
Heading into 2024, Snead appears cautiously optimistic.
“I hope at least that as far as 2024 is concerned, things will work better than they did in 2020,” he said. “We certainly don’t have a global pandemic hanging over us; that alone is a big boon. But there’s still a lot that can go sideways and, of course, in the future, we always need to be mindful of how we can keep improving our elections.”
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