'Crohn's and Colitis Awareness' Bill Gutted, Restructured to Codify Vote-by-Mail Without Poll Watcher Oversight
With the current state of U.S. politics, you can never trust lawmakers (state or otherwise) to be straightforward.
Even when you think they're passing a bill as innocuous as a codified remembrance of a disease, there's more than likely a hidden agenda at play.
This is exactly what happened in the Illinois State House this past week.
On Thursday, the “Crohn's and Colitis Awareness” bill, originally conceived as establishing a remembrance week for Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis, hit the desk of Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat.
What was introduced as a straightforward bill by three state Democrats, however, was later contorted by other Democrats into anything but.
An amendment to the bill turned it into a vehicle for vote-by-mail by affixing the “Uniform Faithful Presidential Electors Act.”
Among many other alterations, that allows for “physically incapacitated” electors to vote by mail after filling out an application “no later than 5 days before the regular primary.”
According to Just the News, Democratic state Rep. Maurice West was behind the amendment.
Remember all the strange and seemingly irresponsible voting exceptions allowed during the 2020 election, which just so happened to end with the election of President Joe Biden?
Well, West hopes to codify one such exception into law permanently — at least in Illinois.
His amendment would allow nursing home voters to legally cast ballots via mail.
What was once a temporary, emergency COVID-19 procedure might become a permanent practice in the state, if West gets his way.
Republicans can see through the charade, thankfully.
“There have been some concerns that there won’t be poll watchers there if these ballots are mailed in versus the voting effort at the nursing home, and there’s some concerns about the transparency of that process. Why did we add that [nursing home voters can now vote by mail]?” state Rep. Patrick Windhorst said of the bill on the House floor, according to Just the News.
Ballot harvesters have used such laws in the past to take advantage of the elderly.
For example, a nurse in Center Line, Michigan, was convicted of misdemeanor charges for forging nursing home residents' signatures on absentee ballots in the 2020 election, according to the Detroit Free Press.
The U.S. still hasn't quite recovered from the fallout of the 2020 election.
Purportedly temporary election laws and procedures (as if government-grabbed power can ever be temporary) sowed severe distrust in our democratic system.
If that trust is ever going to be restored, we need to put more voting integrity protections on the books, not fewer.
Unfortunately, it appears Democrats will continue to do everything in their power to achieve the opposite — perhaps not coincidentally at the very same time that they allow a flood of illegal aliens to cross over the border.
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