HR 1 Means the End of Free Elections

HR 1 Means the End of Free Elections

by | Mar 12, 2021 | Opinion

By Dr. Thomas Patterson |

The Democrats discovered electoral gold in 2020. They featured a historically weak, senile presidential candidate backed by a radically left-wing US senator. Yet they were able to win a record 85 million votes cast for their unattractive candidates.

How did they do it? They ignored traditional methods of garnering voter support—rallies, platforms, showcasing the candidates and their vision for governing. Instead, they focused on manipulating the election system itself, creating and exploiting ballot uncertainty and potential fraud.

It worked so well that Nancy Pelosi is attempting to permanently institutionalize the stratagems that brought victory with the obvious goal of tilting elections permanently to Democrats. It’s called HR1, the (humor alert) For the People Act.

HR1 would federalize all significant election law, incorporating the most fraud-friendly aspects that made the 2020 election suspect to so many Americans. For example, the bill would greatly expand mail-in voting. Bulk mail voting, by demolishing the chain of custody for ballots, is inherently susceptible to non-detectable fraud.

The New York Times recognized that mail-in balloting makes it “much easier“ to buy and sell votes and renders elderly voters especially vulnerable to coercion and exploitation. The Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project deemed the “significant cost to the integrity of the voting process“ sufficient to justify ending the process. Yes, ending.

Instead, HR1 blocks attempted reforms at mail-in voting. The bill prohibits states from “requiring any form of identification as a condition of receiving an absentee ballot“ or requiring a witness, notarization or any other form of signature authentication.

Moreover, the voter rolls used for mailing would still be protected from “purging“, i.e. updating. This means hundreds of thousands of ballots addressed to dead, moved or ineligible voters can easily be cast by anyone who found them.

Ballot harvesting ratchets up even more opportunities for fraud. For example, party workers walk door-to-door in selected neighborhoods, helpfully offering to assist residents in filling out and delivering ballots and then submitting piles of completed ballots. No safeguards are present to prevent throwing out unwanted ballots. Naturally, ballot harvesting is legalized without limit in HR1.

Bulk mail voting available to anonymous recipients with ballot harvesting serving as the delivery system turns elections into contests to see which party can more successfully scale up legalized fraud. Any party hoping to win an election would be forced to participate. Possessing scruples against organized vote manipulation would be a recipe for failure.

But wait, there’s more. States would also be mandated to except same-day registration. They would be forced to count late arriving ballots for 10 days after the election. Virtually any effort by poll workers to check ID or verify that a vote is legally cast is prohibited.

Let’s connect the dots here. An illegal immigrant, using his “papers”, could register the day of the election and then demand a ballot. By law, poll workers must comply so long as he simply attests to citizenship. (If found out later, he would face no penalties). Thus he could cast a “legal” ballot that is virtually untraceable.

HR 1 would also require political causes and candidates to disclose their donors. Ideally, transparency would be desirable. In the world we live in, the Left has become very aggressive at harassing and canceling supporters of conservative causes.

Countless workers, including CEOs, have lost their jobs and their voice for donating to conservative causes or speaking out. Since sanctions for advocacy work in only one direction, the effect of forced disclosure would be to further hamstring the Right.

The given justification for all this is voter suppression. Yet voter suppression is virtually nonexistent, a relic of our past. It is difficult to find an interested, eligible voter who is thwarted from voting by the system or anyone who thinks they should be. Registration is convenient and broadly available, while transportation is provided free for potential voters.

In the end, HR 1 may come down to a test of whether our Constitution still protects us from tyranny. The premise is that purposeful voter suppression requires that we legalize fraud potential.

If Democrats can get Americans to believe that, they’re in. Free and fair elections are out.

Dr. Thomas Patterson, former Chairman of the Goldwater Institute, is a retired emergency physician. He served as an Arizona State senator for 10 years in the 1990s, and as Majority Leader from 93-96. He is the author of Arizona’s original charter schools bill.

Biden Is Determined To Reward His Political Supporters

Biden Is Determined To Reward His Political Supporters

by | Feb 27, 2021 | Economy, Opinion

By Dr. Thomas Patterson |

America’s recent presidents have been all over the spectrum politically, but they shared one thing in common: near total indifference to our national debt.

George W. Bush wasn’t that interested in fiscal matters, not vetoing a single bill his first six years in office. He exerted little influence as the deficit started to climb. Barack Obama zealously pursued spend and borrow strategies.  He affirmed the mindset of ignoring future implications.

Fiscal conservatives who hoped a Republican president could right the ship were crushed when Donald Trump announced the giant entitlement programs were safe from reform on his watch.

Now, Joe Biden, in a time of peace and prosperity, except for our self-inflicted Covid relief spending, has proposed a $6.1 trillion budget which includes authorization of almost $4 billion of borrowing in a single year.  That’s enough debt, inflation adjusted, to finance the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the Great Depression and both world wars combined (but not the Green New Deal).

Why do presidents matter? After all, appropriations bills must originate in the House and the president has no constitutional spending authority.

The reason is that most politicians, including many who won’t admit it, love spending money without having to raise taxes. Budget cutting is tough work and costs political support.

No matter how urgent the reductions or how indefensible the cause, the deprived party always raises a media-supported stink while the beneficiaries – the taxpayers of the future – are mute. Knowing that your “conservative“ leaders aren’t fully behind your cost cutting efforts stymies even the most stalwart legislators.

But the Biden administration is breaking new ground. They came into office with the virus on the wane, vaccinations becoming available through the prodigious efforts of their predecessors and the economy growing. Meanwhile the graph showing the growth of federal debt, now over 100% of GDP, resembles a hockey stick.

But they didn’t despair at the apparent lack of opportunity to spend now that they had the reins. The New Republic advised to “spend like crazy“ anyway and influential party leftists like AOC and Bernie agreed. So they created an imaginary crisis requiring $1.9 trillion more in Covid relief in addition to the $3.7 trillion already spent.

Pitching a crisis just now isn’t easy to do. The housing market is up 12%, manufacturing is at a five-year high, unemployment is falling and private sector GDP growth was 4.3% in the last quarter.

Still, they soldier on. But the “Covid relief” bill looks suspiciously like a Democrat wish list. There’s a $15 minimum wage mandate.  Those who are still unable or unwilling to work get a $400 per week bonus employment benefit, which will make working a losing proposition for many. Schools get $130 billion, even though they have been mostly closed and unable to spend their previous allocation.

There’s $400 billion to bail out overly generous pension plan promises in big spending states. There’s pork galore. Art, farms, climate, bridges, you name it.  About 4% of the funding goes to directly combating Covid.

Biden is determined to reward his political supporters.  He preposterously insists that he learned the dangers of spending too little from the 2009 “shovel ready“ infrastructure debacle and won’t repeat that mistake. It’s not intuitively clear how, if they couldn’t constructively spend $830 billion, even more money to bungle would have helped. Still, spending for its own sake has become the de facto operating principle.

Republicans as usual are ramping up their anti-spending rhetoric now that Democrats are in charge. Democrats love to point out Republican past fiscal failures to justify their own reckless behavior.

But not one congressional Democrat has stood up to demand a stop to the madness. Groupthink is a powerful force. Surely some of them must be sane enough to recognize that we are on an unsustainable and highly dangerous path and that we are unconscionably victimizing our children and grandchildren.

It’s not rocket science. Yet the desire to be a good member of their tribe trumps all.

So this is how the new Bidenland works. There’s no longer any need for Covid economic relief and, if there were, this “rescue” bill wouldn’t provide it.  We spend because we can.

Dr. Thomas Patterson, former Chairman of the Goldwater Institute, is a retired emergency physician. He served as an Arizona State senator for 10 years in the 1990s, and as Majority Leader from 93-96. He is the author of Arizona’s original charter schools bill.