Russians hackers tried to destabilize our election, and even if the actual damage is undetermined, but it is a national security crisis that requires all patriotic hands on deck.
The president says there were 3 to 5 million fraudulent votes in the last election, and even if it is an assertion that makes strangers back away warily, he has the power to set up a commission to look into it.
And all this happened 21/2 years after a commission warned of “an impending crisis” in voting technology.
So exactly what sense does it make for a congressional committee to terminate the only federal agency that is responsible for testing and certifying our voting system?
Pause here for cognitive dissonance.
The Election Assistance Commission is a 15-year-old agency with just 30 employees and a budget of $9.6 million. It was born in the aftermath of the 2000 debacle, when hanging chads and butterfly ballots decided the fate of the country, and it does important work: The EAC analyzes testing data and performance reports from every voting system to improve the certification process, monitors best practices for cybersecurity, and administers funds for tech development.
The Brennan Center for Justice wrote a letter to its EAC’s congressional overlords that read, “At a time when the vast majority of our country’s voting machines are outdated and in need of replacement, and after an election in which international criminals already attempted to hack our state voter registration systems, eliminating the EAC would pose a risky and irresponsible threat to our election infrastructure.”
Thirty-eight pro-democracy groups also sent letters. And each was ignored by the House Administration Committee, which on Monday voted 6-3 along partisan lines to send the grim fate of the EAC to the floor for a full House vote.
The rationale: “If we’re looking at reducing the size of government,” committee chair Gregg Harper (R-Miss.) said, “this is a perfect example of something that can be eliminated. We don’t need fluff.”
Fluff? In 2014, the bipartisan Presidential Commission on Election Administration warned that our voting machines were putrefying. Its report found that the vast majority were perilously close to or exceeded their expected lifespans; that lawmakers were unresponsive to calls for new equipment; and that more problems would arise if upgrades were delayed – including security flaws.
Harper has tried to kill the agency many other times, which is not surprise, because a federal agency with the mandate to make voting easier doesn’t match the Republican obsession with making it harder.
Voter suppression efforts and the weakening of civil rights protections will go into overdrive with a new Attorney General on board, and Jeff Sessions will be eager to serve and to drive another nail in democracy’s coffin: He has opposed the Voting Rights Act, and is clearly disinclined to enforce its remaining provisions.
Meanwhile, there are 20 GOP-dominated states trying to limit suffrage with voter ID laws, the elimination of same-day registration, or the shortening voting periods.
This is another interesting moment for the Republican majority, as the EAC vote is an illuminating example of their priorities: What does it say when there is one federal agency with the mission to improve election administration, and their decision is to kill it? Given the state of American democracy, it needs to be bolstered, not eliminated.
Bookmark NJ.com/Opinion. Follow on Twitter @NJ_Opinion and find NJ.com Opinion on Facebook.
Our editors found this article on this site using Google and regenerated it for our readers.
