It’s been a month since the election and the liberal media, the Beltway chattering class and the hysterical anti-Trumpers have all been reveling in the legal defeats of the president’s team – and gleefully mocking anyone who thinks that there were irregularities in this close election.
The Trump team is running out of options and time.
This week the campaign made overtures to state legislatures in Arizona and Michigan to convince them that there was enough fraud to warrant appointing Trump electors for those states.
Trump surrogates are recommending the same action in Georgia as well.
The state legislative strategy is unlikely to succeed for a host of reasons.
That doesn’t mean the president’s recount effort needs to be considered a failure.
In fact, it has every opportunity to have a lasting positive impact on our elections and the direction of our nation.
What state legislatures can do is safeguard the integrity of elections in their states to prevent them from being stolen through a combination of bad policy and unequal enforcement that invites irregularities.
Republicans owe it to the 75 million Trump supporters, and they owe it to the future of the country to use their power effectively while they have it.
Make this recount effort a real success by making the technical fixes to the election law a top priority. Otherwise, what happened this year will rear its head in more places and with more far-reaching consequences in years to come.
Voter identification has long been a 70-30 issue in this country.
A Newsmax/McLaughlin poll recently showed it’s now more like 80-20.
Of course, the Left in America will call you a racist for saying that people should present an ID before they vote while ignoring the fact that government-issued identification is largely free and is already necessary to perform even the most mundane tasks of American life.
It’s not racist to support voter ID.
It’s bigoted to suggest that people of color can’t obtain or don’t have one.
Centralized electronic voting systems, which were once seen as a way to increase speed and reliability, have failed to achieve those goals and decreased public trust as a result.
Paper ballots plus voting machines monitored by a bipartisan group of poll watchers is still the best way to ensure the integrity of every vote.
I don’t have an issue with no-excuse absentee voting.
I don’t think it’s the government’s business to know that I’m going to be traveling or at work on Election Day.
That’s different than universal mail-in ballots or the government mailing ballots to people who don’t request them.
As we’ve seen in this election, particularly in Nevada, that is asking for fraud.
Dead people voting, people who’ve moved voting, felons receiving ballots and scores of undeliverable ballots that could be filled out by other parties.
Here are some other reforms Republicans should immediately pursue:
Strict requirements for campaign or partisan poll watchers at polling locations, including at all tabulation tables in central counting facilities, would provide clarity and consistency during the counting process.
Eliminating polling locations in union halls and in buildings owned or operated by organizations that make political endorsements.
Laws against ballot harvesting which allows liberal activists and campaign workers to interfere with the secret ballot and manage the collection and delivery of votes.
Mandating and standardizing postmark and signature requirements and their verification.
There are more, to be sure. That’s not even touching on phony non-partisan registration and voter-education programs sponsored by Big Tech or corporations that are anything but non-partisan.
This is how Republicans turn an election that for so many Americans has serious questions surrounding it into policies that strengthen the system.
Republicans control legislatures in more than half the states, including the swing states of Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, Florida, North Carolina and Wisconsin. They need to begin putting together bills that will strengthen the integrity of their elections, now.
If you have any doubt that it’s necessary, just look at failing states like New York and California as windows into our future.
Tom Basile is the host of ‘America Right Now’ on Newsmax Television, Saturday’s from 12pm - 3pm eastern. Basile has been part of the American political landscape from Presidential campaigns to local politics for more than two decades. He has served in government at the local, state and federal level including in the administration of George W. Bush in various capacities. He was an advisor to the provisional government in Iraq from 2003-04. From 2009-2011 he was the Executive Director of the New York State Republican Party. A columnist, commentator and former radio how, his new book "Let it Sink In: The Decade of Obama and Trump" provides a look back at the 2010s to prepare Americans to defend freedom in the 2020s. His critically-acclaimed book, "Tough Sell: Fighting the Media War in Iraq,” chronicled his time in Baghdad fighting media bias and driving coverage of the Iraq war. In 2011, he was featured in Time Magazine's Person of the Year spread about political activism around the world. Basile is an adjunct professor at Fordham University and runs a New York-based strategic communications firm. He is a member of the New York Bar and sits on a number of academic and philanthropic advisory boards. Learn more about him at TomBasile.com or follow him on Twitter @Tom_Basile. Read Tom Basile's Reports — More Here.
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