Over the last year, we’ve heard a lot about election fraud. In fact, we’ve heard so much about it in recent months that’s it’s pretty much politically incorrect to talk about it anymore.
And yet, it’s clearly still a matter of great importance. Otherwise, why would states like Georgia pass new laws to prevent such fraud and increase integrity in elections?
But Georgia’s not the only one.
Tennessee has recently also passed new legislation that will increase the prevention of voter fraud in their state.
As The Center Square reported recently, the Tennessee Election Integrity Act was passed in the state’s House last week. And on Monday, a vote on the measure was taken the state Senate, where 27 state senators voted for it, securing its passing in that house.
Now, it will move on to the desk of Republican Governor Bill Lee, who is expected to sign it into law.
So what’s in the bill exactly?
Well, it’s not nearly as complex or vast as the ones recently made in Georgia.
This one really just has to do with absentee ballots and the addition of a non-visible watermark.
According to GOP state Representative Jason Zachary and a tweet sent out on April 27, “We just passed legislation I co-sponsored that requires a non-visible watermark be placed on every mailed absentee ballot, further ensuring the integrity of ballots and elections in TN.”
He added, “No watermark, the ballot is rejected.”
While it might not seem like much, Zachary and other lawmakers around the nation know that this simple addition will go a long way in not only preventing fraud in future elections but also increasing American voters’ confidence and faith in our voting system.
As it stands now, it is believed by many that the only reason Democrats won both Senate seats in Georgia in early 2021 is that voters, and specifically those who lean more conservatively, lost faith in the election process and, therefore, didn’t even show up to vote.
They believed that, based on the results of the 2020 presidential election, that their votes and voices wouldn’t be heard anyway. So what was the point?
Would it have made if a difference in the runoff election? We can’t be sure at this point, as that election, too, was fraught with allegations of fraud.
But one thing is sure: The Republican government there, and now in Tennessee, wants to make sure that the chaos of those elections doesn’t happen again.
They want to give Americans the knowledge and assurance that when they vote, whether it be county leaders and officials or the President’s office, the process is kept confidential, secure and that their voice will be counted and matter.
And as Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton says, the only way to do that is not “capitulate” when it comes to voter security and mail-in ballots.
Paxton recently told Fox News host Maria Bartiromo that his state could have very well ended up having the same results as Georgia did if his state had not fought hard not to mail out ballots to everyone.
He said that, as of four years ago, Texas and Georgia “were very similar” when it came to voting laws. But then 2020 and COVID-19 came, and Georgia’s legislature caved to the demands for mail-in ballots, drop boxes, and no signature verification. Texas, on the other hand, did not.
And the results were vastly different.
Georgia, as Paxton pointed out, now has a government that has moved vastly to the left, while Texas’ has stayed loyally Republican.
Had Texas not stuck to their guns and defended their state laws, Paxton knows that the same things in Georgia would have occurred there.
“I know what would have happened here. They would have stopped counting, just like they did in those states, and they would have been counting mail-in ballots until they get the right number of votes and suddenly Trump loses and we lose the state House here. We lose some of our Supreme Court justices. And it wouldn’t have been a legitimate count because we wouldn’t have followed state law.”
If Georgia had just followed their state laws, which they didn’t, they wouldn’t be in the mess they are today. Voters would still have faith in the system, and they wouldn’t have to backtrack to hurry and create laws to fix all their mistakes.
But what’s done is done. The only way to get back voter confidence now is to place safer voting laws that America can trust, and Tennessee is making a good start.