© Reuters/Brian SnyderHillary Clinton
Now, twice-failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton wants the other 49 states to follow Newsom's lead and order vote-by-mail for November's election. "I hope other governors around the country follow @GavinNewsom's lead. No voter should be forced to choose between their safety and exercising their civic duty this fall," she wrote.
Democrats are pushing strongly for an immediate transition away from traditional in-person voting to a vote-by-mail system in all 50 states ahead of the 2020 election amid the coronavirus.
Those efforts got a gigantic boost when former First Lady Michelle Obama and her celebrity-laden organization When We All Vote got involved. Obama and her group — for the first time ever — will publicly support federal legislation put forward by Senate Democrats that would greatly expand access to mail-in absentee ballots for everyone as well as ensure up to three weeks of in-person early voting access ahead of an election.
In a statement to Axios, the former first lady said,
"There is nothing partisan about striving to live up to the promise of our country; making the democracy we all cherish more accessible; and protecting our neighbors, friends and loved ones as they participate in this cornerstone of American life."The legislation being backed by Team Obama, which is called the Natural Disaster and Emergency Ballot Act of 2020, would, "ensure that voters in all states have 20 days of early in-person voting and no-excuse absentee vote-by-mail" as well as "guarantee that all voter registration applications submitted by mail or online" would be deemed valid up to and even including Election Day.
Most do not have an issue with allowing legal citizens to vote, assuming they can prove their identity and are registered to vote in the area that they actually live in.
The issue with nationwide vote-by-mail is that it could potentially allow millions of inactive and possibly illegal votes to occur, which could have a huge effect on the outcome of the election.
Democrats have been pushing for vote-by-mail for a long time, and now they are trying to exploit the pandemic to make another push for this.
This could be a disaster, according to at least one expert.
Government Accountability Institute research director Eric Eggers says the Democrats' plan for nationwide mail-in voting would send ballots to 24 million inaccurate and flawed voter registrations.
Eggers said nationwide mail-in voting would be wide open to fraud and abuse.
"The concern I have if we're trying to mandate national mail-in elections — which by the way was part of the language that Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats inserted in the first version of the most recent stimulus package — would be that we have such massive problems with voter rolls in this country. So, now, are we going to be mailing ballots to people that authentically don't exist and or are ineligible voters?"Eggers said mail-in voting ensures voters associated with those flawed voter registrations would get the chance to vote in the 2020 presidential election.
Comment: One would think in a national election all 50 states would need to agree on one means of voting - decided by the people. That a single governor has the power to change the circumstances for his state in a national election, the caliber of a presidential election no less, is ludicrous. The first domino has fallen. It doesn't require much to see where this is going... 'We, the people' may have already lost.