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Voters make their choices at Havelock United Methodist Church during the 2024 Election on Nov. 5, 2024, in Lincoln, Neb. (Mac Johnson/Nebraska News Service)
For the love of Mike and everyone else, give it a rest. Please. To wit: The Nebraska Legislature is entertaining yet another piece of legislation based on the underlying myth that our elections are fraught with fraud, subterfuge and bogeymen. This time it’s Legislative Resolution 283, a proposed constitutional amendment that would prohibit non-citizens from voting.
This just in: We already prohibit that.
Never mind that seven state senators and Secretary of State Bob Evnen have signed onto LR 283, citing “ambiguity” in the state constitution’s section where voter qualifications are outlined. As far as I can tell, we’re considering a legislative debate that will come down to the difference between “every” and “only.” See the current language for yourself here and the proposed change here.
Aside from the hair splitting, lack of evidence and redundancy, a further consequence is waiting to drop like the proverbial other shoe. LR 283 is built to confuse. Offering (or adopting) a measure to limit voting in elections to citizens only assumes we lack such a prohibition? Pro tip: We don’t.
Nebraskans must meet five requirements to register to vote in Nebraska, according to the website of the aforementioned secretary of state. The first one listed is “Be a United States Citizen.” The others include being 18, living in Nebraska, having served your time if a felon and having not been found mentally incompetent.
Liars on the first requirement — or any of the five — are ferreted out when the information is cross-referenced with other databases. This is why voter fraud in Nebraska, and nationwide, is infinitesimal.
Nevertheless, the crooked election mythology continues to be a thing. Last week in Georgia, FBI agents raided the Fulton County election warehouse where they took ballots from the 2020 presidential election, apparently hoping to prove the Peach State vote for the White House was stolen.
Never mind that five years, countless court cases and a number of investigations came up with nothing, zero, bupkis. In addition to taking the ballots, the feds also contaminated the files and muddied the chain of custody.
Worse, they took Fulton County’s voter rolls. Nebraska’s secretary of state, with the blessing of the state’s Attorney General Mike Hilgers, is poised to send our voter data to the Department of Justice on Feb. 12 unless ongoing litigation to stop the release prevails beforehand.
Why the DOJ needs any of our voter registration data, information the state collects because elections are the purview of the states, continues to elude me. The feds already have voters’ SSNs, and some other personal details might be appropriate for ERIC, the Electronic Registration Information Center, a handy database states share that helps keep voter rolls accurate.
But shipping off voter details to the DOJ without guarantees of privacy is troubling. Georgia’s U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff called the FBI seizure in Fulton County a “seismic event” and a “shot across the bow at the midterm elections.” None of which sounds good, whether the voter data is snatched from the safety of state offices as it happened in Georgia or offered with little or no knowledge of just what the DOJ will do with the information as appears likely to happen in Nebraska and a number of other states.
Voter rolls and the next election gained prominence in the Minneapolis’ deadly last month. As Minnesotans took to the streets to protest the killing of their neighbors, the U.S. attorney general said the quiet part out loud when she sent a letter the Minnesota’s governor, promising a lull in the ongoing invasion of ICE and CBP forces in the Twin Cities — ostensibly to conduct federal immigration enforcement — if he turned over the state’s voter registration data.
There it was. After all the lies about domestic terrorists and paid protestors; after the dissolution of the First, Second and Fourth Amendments; after all the pettiness of the personal attacks on the shooting victims, local and state officials and ethnic groups; and after all the remarkable courage Minnesotans showed standing up for their neighbors, her letter appears to underscore another motive for all those masked agents, armed to the teeth, and apparently willing to beat Minneapolis into some sort of submission … voter data.
Which brings us back to Nebraska and its Legislature, which might waste time in a 60-day session on a potentially confusing, wholly unnecessary and redundant proposed constitutional amendment based on a myth.
Please. Make it stop.
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