Cato Says Trump’s Voting Plan Is a Red Flag

By
Richard C. Young
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By MantasIsAI @ Adobe Stock

Walter Olson of the Cato Institute is worried about some comments made by President Trump during an interview with Dan Bongino regarding election law. Trump said “Republicans should say, ‘We will take over. We must take over the elections. We should at least take over voting in 15 places.’ Republicans should nationalize the voting process. We have some states where I won but it showed that I didn’t win.” Olson responds to those comments, writing:

In a Monday interview with former FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino, President Donald Trump said, “The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over.’ We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many—15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”

Cato asked me to write a press statement responding to this, and I wrote the following:

Even coming from an ordinary politician, this federal takeover would be a terrible idea. The Constitution entrusts the administration of federal elections to the states and localities, subject to Congress’s passage of laws regulating the manner of election. Congress has rightly respected the states’ and localities’ lead role, and it should go on doing so.

We also start with a big red flag if such laws do not apply consistently across states but single out some states for an overlay of federal control. The US Supreme Court in the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision said that such two-tier schemes breach a “fundamental principle of equal sovereignty” among the states and can be justified, if at all, only by rigorously documented current (not just historical) evidence of serious voting denial by the states or localities in question. Here, such evidence is grossly absent.

Read more here.

Judge for yourself.