When discussing election reforms it is important to remember the difference between a ballot and a vote. A ballot is a piece of paper with ovals, while a vote is completed by a person lawfully entitled to cast a ballot. Every illegally cast ballot disenfranchises a citizen who cast a lawful vote.
Electing candidates we trust to lead our institutions is the most essential right and responsibility we have as citizens. No person, whether a local school board member or President of the United States, possesses any authority except that which is granted by eligible voters in an honest election.
For this reason, every eligible citizen’s access to the ballot must be protected, and elections must be conducted in a manner that guarantees every citizen’s lawful vote is accurately counted. Simply put, elections should be conducted so it is easy to vote and hard to cheat.
The bipartisan Carter-Baker Commission, chaired by former President Jimmy Carter and Secretary of State James A. Baker III, was convened to recommend measures states should adopt to restore public confidence in the integrity and outcome of our elections. The Supreme Court deferred to the Commission’s recommendations.
The Commission found absentee ballots and mail-in ballots were the most significant source of voter fraud. It also found ballot harvesting and “vote-buying schemes are far more difficult to detect when citizens vote by mail.” The Commission recommended, “States therefore should reduce the risks of fraud and abuse in absentee voting by prohibiting ‘third-party’ organizations, candidates, and political party activists from handling absentee ballots.”
Michigan’s “Secure MI Vote” initiative proposes three measures recommended by the Commission to improve the integrity of Michigan elections and assure Michigan voters that their ballots will be fairly counted.
First, a person seeking to cast a ballot should first identify themselves as an eligible voter with a photo identification. If a person doesn’t have photo identification, they may still cast a provisional ballot, which will be subject to verification before it is counted. If a person doesn’t have photo identification, Michigan will provide them with free photo identification.
We require photo identification to board a plane, to cash a check, or buy beer. And despite the rhetoric that surrounds this issue, most Americans agree: A recent Monmouth University poll found that 80 percent of Americans support requiring voters to show photo identification in order to cast a ballot.
Second, political operatives should not harvest ballots. Ballot harvesting is a scheme in which political operatives collect mail-in and absentee ballots in the names of persons at nursing homes and elsewhere. Many of these names have not been validated as eligible voters.
Many states have adopted laws to prevent ballot harvesting. In 2021, the Supreme Court upheld Arizona’s law against ballot harvesting in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee. Michigan’s Secure MI Vote initiative adopts measures to protect ballots and voters by preventing ballot harvesting.
Third, billionaires must not be allowed to buy Michigan elections. The Wall Street Journal reported that a non-profit called the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), funded by Mark Zuckerberg, gave $350 million to nearly 2,500 election offices in the course of the 2020 campaign. Zuckerberg essentially paid this money to CTCL, which paid the money to select local election jurisdictions.
CTCL later reported that it paid more than $15.2 million to election officials in more than 127 Michigan jurisdictions. The vast majority of this money was paid to Democrat jurisdictions to increase mail-in voting. Nearly half of these funds — $7.4 million — were distributed to the City of Detroit, including hundreds of thousands to locate remote, unattended ballot drop boxes. Almost 90 percent of the votes counted in this jurisdiction were for Democrats.
The funds were used to increase mail-in voting, remote drop boxes, and other measures that increase opportunity for ballot harvesting. Conveniently, none of the money donated by Zuckerberg was reported because he did not donate directly to the Democrat party or the Biden campaign. A number of states, including Georgia, Arizona and Florida, have passed laws to prohibit donations to election offices.
At the state and federal level, measures are being taken to secure elections from fraud, ballot harvesting, and outside influence. Michigan voters deserve the same protections and to have confidence in the security of their vote when they go to the polls.
Before another election comes and goes and raises more questions and uncertainties than confidence in governance, Michigan should adopt the Secure MI Vote election reforms. Go to https://securemivote.org to learn more.
Thor Hearne is a nationally known constitutional and election law attorney. Thor was President George W. Bush’s national election counsel in 2004, served as legal counsel and advisor to the Carter-Baker Commission, and was appointed by Democrat Attorney General Mark Herring to defend (successfully) the Commonwealth of Virginia’s voter ID law in Lee v. Virginia.