I mentioned HB88 in my last newsletter (passed in committee, sent to the House floor).
If you ever helped deliver a neighbor’s signed and sealed absentee ballot to your county elections office or a drop box, this bill will make you a criminal if you do it again.
This bill will prevent votes from being counted. The legal votes of people unable to personally hand-deliver their absentee ballot in time – for whatever reason, regardless of party affiliation – cannot be legally be received and thus not counted.
This bill is a solution in search of a problem. Even the sponsor of the bill admits this. He says we need to write a law in reaction to what someone did – not in Idaho, but in North Carolina. That’s absurd. If we write new laws in reaction to every bad deed by any one individual in any other state, we’d become the most regulated state in the nation. So much for being the government that governs least.
This bill is deceptive. It deploys the term “ballot harvesting” to create the fear of non-existent voter fraud. What we have in Idaho – and what many voters want and appreciate – is “ballot delivery.” These are the signed and sealed legal ballots voters ask someone they trust to deliver for them. “Ballot harvesting” is when people steal ballots from mailboxes and either fill them out or destroy them – which is a real crime. This is not a problem in Idaho or hardly anywhere else.
This bill is an affront to all Idahoans. It is a change to Idaho’s voting laws that almost no one outside the walls of the Capitol Building is asking for or wants – which makes one wonder why it’s even a thing.
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