If You Don’t Care About Election Integrity, You’re A Bad AmericanIn 2005, bipartisan leaders cautioned that systemic problems plagued American elections. The 2020 general election saw every problem they warned about come to fruition.BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND
MAY 12, 2022
Recent polls confirm the majority of Americans care about election integrity. And history proves that if you don’t, you’re a bad American.
The 2020 general election revealed this reality—and not because Joe Biden prevailed or because the election was stolen from Donald Trump, but because our constitutional republic cannot survive without election integrity. That is not just the judgment of the MAGA crowd, or even conservatives or the political right—or at least it didn’t use to be.
Less than two decades ago Americans so universally believed that election integrity mattered that when the bipartisan Commission on Election Reform issued its 100-plus page report, “Building Confidence in U.S. Elections,” the twin goals of election integrity and voting access received equal treatment. While Co-Chairs Democrat Jimmy Carter and Republican Jim Baker explained that not all members of the Commission “necessarily support every word or recommendation,” all members, they stressed, “endorsed the judgments and general policy thrust of the report in its entirety.”
The bipartisan-endorsed fundamentals underlying the report included two unanimously accepted judgments related to election integrity. First, “elections are the heart of democracy” and “if elections are defective, the entire democratic system is at risk.” Second, and a corollary to the first: confidence in elections matters equally, and in fact “is central to our nation’s democracy.”
* * *
Yet, while the Carter Commission declared that having a fair electoral process “transcends any individual partisan interest,” today, Democrats have not just abandoned any care over election integrity, they have declared such concerns racist, and that is with voting access never higher.
* * *
Source:
https://thefederalist.com/2022/05/12/if-you-dont-care-about-election-integrity-youre-a-bad-american/
