The Democrats are proposing the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act of 2022. This is in answer to the Republicans questioning the election results of the 2020 Presidential election. This is a rather questionable action given that the Republicans questioned the 2020 election because of obvious irregularities. These occurred in the process leading up to the election day as well as the shenanigans that occurred the night of the election and in the week that followed. There were too many to recount here, no pun intended.

These irregularities and questionable actions can be found documented here at the website 2020 Election Irregularities, among many other places where these problems are disclosed.

The concern now is what are the Democrats and some Republicans planning to do about it. They call everyone who questions the results “election deniers.” They have convenient election amnesia because it has always been the Democrats that objected to the presidential election results. This occurred in Presidential elections in 2000, 2004, and 2016. The 2016 election resulted in a bogus investigation by former FBI director Robert Mueller. The Republican National Committee released a ten-minute montage of Democrats denying election results 150 times.  

A newspaper clipping from 1928 stated that Franklin Delano Roosevelt sent 100 attorneys to upstate New York cities questioning potential fraud in the governor’s election. Are the Democrats going to call FDR an election denier? Think of how history may have been changed. Roosevelt’s opponent, Albert Ottinger, conceded the election. The vote was  48.96% for FDR and 48.34% for Ottinger -- a .6% difference!

Did Roosevelt send these attorneys to protect the election from fraud or to cover it up? The counties in question were heavily Republican, as can be seen from the map.  Imagine how much history may have changed if the election went the other way. Would Roosevelt have run for President in 1932?

The January 6^th committee is focused on what happened when the Republicans questioned the results of the 2020 election. The Republicans did so in accordance with the Electoral Count Act of 1887. Which is exactly what the Democrats did in every Presidential election they lost beginning in 2000. The 1887 law was written after the controversial election of 1876 when Rutherford B. Hayes prevailed over Democrat Samuel J. Tilden. Hayes was elected, after much negotiating, by one electoral vote. The negotiations resulted in the removal of Union troops from the southern states. Other concessions demanded by the Southern Democrats paved the way for the Jim Crow laws that were in place until the 1960s.

The voter turnout in 2020 was the highest since that same 1876 election. The 1876 election was disputed because of suspected voter fraud. Is the highest voter turnout in 1876 and 2020 a reality, or could it be that in both elections, fraudulent votes were the cause of the inflated numbers? It seems a definite possibility.

The Democrat party keeps using the “election denier” tagline as a campaign tool. In the debate for the 25^th Congressional District of New York between the Democrat Joe Morelle and Republican Laron Singletary, Morelle accused his opponent of being an election denier. Quite an arrogant stance for a candidate from the party that disputed every lost presidential election in the 21^st century. A better question is, why is questioning the results of the 2020 election an issue? What does it have to do with a candidate’s ability to do the job? What about issues that are presently of concern to voters: crime, inflation, the price of gasoline, illegal immigration, education and child welfare, poverty, drug overdoses, food shortages, and supply chain issues?   

What is it that the Democrat-sponsored bill proposes to do? It makes it more difficult to contest an election. The law in 2020 specifies that one member of the House and one member of the Senate could object to the electoral vote count. The proposed law S.4573 -- 117th Congress (2021-2022)  (1) specifies that the role of the Vice President during the joint session shall be ministerial in nature, and (2) raises the objection threshold in Congress to at least one-fifth of the duly chosen and sworn members of both the House of Representatives and the Senate.

In other words, the Democrats didn’t like the fact that the Republicans used the same law that Democrats always used. This is consistent with the Democrat playbook. They never like it when the proverbial shoe is on the other foot. If the Republicans take back the House in November, they need to make an issue of past election “denial” going as far back as Roosevelt in 1928.

What does Senate Bill S.4573 do to ensure election integrity? Nothing. It only makes any objection to the results that much more difficult. That alone could result in increased incentives to steal an election. It’s about as foolish as trying to cut down on shoplifting by raising the felony shoplifting minimums. How did that idea work out? Now they want to apply their foolish soft on crime policies to election law.

David Ennocenti is a retired accountant and Graduate of the State University of NY at Buffalo, School of Management with a degree in Accounting and Finance. He passed the CPA Examination in 1983. His writing has appeared in American Thinker,  USA Today, The New York Times, and several other publications. His screenplay, Sniper Queen, was an official selection of The Artemis Women in Action Films Festival. He is a past winner of the Writer’s Digest Annual Competition. His essay 1984 Arrived: Now What? How Progressive Policies Decimated a Once Vibrant Community is available on Amazon.

Image: Thomas Nast