Texas Pushes For National Election Reform

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Republican Texas State Senator Bryan Hughes joined Washington Watch, Monday, to talk about the state’s election integrity bill, which is designed to mitigate fraud and can be applied to all states in the nation.

“We have to have elections where people can know the results and accept the results and move forward if our system is going to work,” Hughes told the show. “… [O]ur mantra is, ‘Easy to vote, hard to cheat.’ … We found that mail-in ballots can [have] the greatest potential for fraud — that was the case in Georgia and many states. And so we’ve cracked down on these ballot harvesters who are paid by political campaigns, and they go to the homes of vulnerable voters, mislead them, get their signatures, sometimes forge their signatures, and [are] paid by a campaign under the guise of helping the voters. … Now in Texas, we [also] have [a] 24-hour live stream of whenever those ballots are being counted, wherever they are.”

“[In] many states … signature verification processes … were being shortcutted. … We also implemented voter ID for those mail-in ballots … [so] we can verify to make sure it was you, the voter, who requested that ballot and make sure you, the voter, are the one who cast that ballot — simple commonsense reforms like that. [F]or in-person voting, [we also] expanded the hours [to make] it easier for folks to vote. And one more thing we found was happening [at] polling places, we had these vote harvesters being paid by campaigns [to] come up alongside vulnerable voters — maybe first-time voters [or those] with limited English proficiency … They [would] come alongside these voters and say, ‘Oh, let me help you.’ … But then it’s a voter assistant who’s doing the voting and not the voter. We’re cracking down on that. If folks need help, they’re going to get help. But we cannot have paid political operatives in the voting booth influencing voters.”

How This Applies To You

“Mail-in ballots [are] an important tool for folks who are disabled [or] who are going to be out of the country,” he noted. “But as you know, states are pushing for universal mail-in ballots. … That is a recipe for fraud [and] for elections that we cannot trust. So we want to make the in-person voting process as smooth, easy, and secure as we can. And for those folks who need to vote by mail, that’s important. Make sure we have those checks in place [by] making sure it’s the voter requesting the ballot, the voter casting the ballot, [and] mak[ing] sure we’re matching up those signatures and keep[ing] those paid political operatives out of the process. Our elections are not for sale. [We] want to keep it that way,” Hughes noted.

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