We Need ‘The Gold Standard’ For Elections: Republican Lawmaker Is Bringing Election Integrity To Washington D.C. With Sweeping New Bill

Every subsequent Republican presidential win from the close 2000 election onward has been on some level disputed by the Democrats. Republicans raised objections over the conduct of the 2020 presidential election. Such concerns over the integrity of the vote are also been raised with midterm elections. According to a Rasmussen Report poll, 60 percent of voters think that the 2022 midterm election was affected by cheating. As the legitimacy of democracies rests on voter sovereignty, the need to reform the electoral process to make it more transparent and restore integrity to the process is self-evident.

The Chairman of the House Administration Committee, Bryan Steil (R-WI), has sought to do just that by improving elections in the nation’s capital, according to Just the News.

The declared purpose of the legislation, the American Confidence in Elections Act (ACE), that Mr. Steil expressed interest in passing through Congress dated back in 2022 was “[t]o promote election integrity, voter confidence, and faith in elections by removing Federal impediments to, providing State tools for, and establishing voluntary considerations to support effective State administration of Federal elections, improving election administration in the District of Columbia, improving the effectiveness of military voting programs, and protecting political speech, and for other purposes.”

Chairman Steil opined in an interview with Just the News that the bill will “provide the states with the tools that they need…to be able to enhance voter integrity — things like giving them access to Social Security death databases so that they can clean their voter rolls, so the voter rolls in every one of our states has an opportunity to be accurate and to be ready to go for the upcoming elections.”

“We also use Washington, D.C. — which has had some challenges in the past in their elections — let’s make them the gold standard. Let’s put in place things that are pretty obvious, like photo ID, so that states around the country can actually understand what good voter integrity practices are,” he added.

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A breakdown of the bill made note that it would require “photo ID to vote in person or request absentee ballot, requires annual list maintenance, prohibits same-day registration & ballot harvesting, prohibits automatically mailed ballots, requires post-election audits.” Steil emphasized the imperative for such as bill as this by stating that “when people have confidence in their elections, more people participate.” He cited Georgia and the 2021 election reforms as a prime example of this.

While Democrats, President Joe Biden included, decried the reforms as the modern reincarnation of Jim Crow, as Steil pointed out “more people showed up to vote and people actually liked the process that they had.” The Republican lawmaker’s assertion can be backed up easily by reports from the Associated Press that cited the high turnout in the Georgia 2022 midterms and the re-election of Senator Raphael Warnock (D-GA) as a consequence of this turnout. As noted by The Heritage Foundation, several states that passed similar election reforms witnessed higher turnout than those states without such reforms.

The Wisconsin Republican Chairman relayed that other states can be an example of what best election practices look like. He said, “we’re looking for states that are putting forward good voter integrity provisions — let’s utilize those and share those across the country. Making sure that we have the [Election Assistance] Commission in place to share best practices is going to be a key piece of this.”

The nation needs serious and effective electoral reform that restores to the voter the sense that elections are free and fairly conducted. Censoring political candidates for office does not do this. Neither does lower integrity measures for the vote. Adopting The Heritage Foundation‘s recommendations for best election practices by allowing regular comprehensive audits would also greatly aid in this effort.