The conservative Wall Street Journal editorial board tore into President Donald Trump on Friday over his stubborn fixation on passing the SAVE America Act, a controversial piece of legislation that would put new restrictions on the right to vote and has hit dead ends every time it is considered in the Senate.
This comes after the president delivered a rambling primetime speech the day before, alleging foreign election interference rigged the 2020 presidential election, despite none of the documents he declassified providing evidence for this.
“Since Mr. Trump declassified the memo, we can quote the part he didn’t,” wrote the board. Specifically, the memo says, “Vote tabulation systems would be difficult to manipulate on a wide enough scale to compromise election results. The systems in each voting location are not connected to the Internet or to each other, and many methods for exploiting them rely on physical proximity.” And even if some results were compromised, “audits and paper trails very likely would uncover such an effort.”
Furthermore, the board pointed out, the legislation Trump is pushing goes well beyond what the public is comfortable with in restricting access to the ballot box.
“The public likes voter ID, with a poll last year finding 83% of adults, and 71% of Democrats, favor it,” the board wrote. However, Trump’s SAVE America Act requires such rigorous documentation that “most driver’s licenses [would be] insufficient to register to vote, and that’s to say nothing of Mr. Trump’s push to override laws in many GOP states — Florida, Georgia, most of the Midwest — that offer mail ballots for convenience.”
The whole approach of undermining public trust in elections, wrote the board, “is a political backfire for the GOP,” as Trump’s “fraud outbursts” already cost them two Senate seats in Georgia in 2020.
The bottom line, wrote the board, is that the GOP should stop relitigating a six-year-old election and instead “be campaigning on what they want to do with two more years in power. There are ways to improve voting integrity, but Mr. Tillis is right that it’s reckless to sow generalized suspicion that American elections aren’t honest.”
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