OPINION:
The Supreme Court’s decision in Watson v. Republican National Committee is not bad — it is awful. It is an open invitation to election fraud.
The court’s activist majority ruled that mail-in ballots, which in some states can be counted days or even weeks after Election Day, are valid in determining the outcome of an election.
Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett, joined by all three of the court’s liberal associate justices, authored the majority opinion — a ruling that rarely fails to disappoint conservatives.
When she was nominated by President Trump, court watchers thought: Here was an authentic constitutionalist. Instead, the justice we got shifts with the prevailing breeze. At times, she seems to go out of her way to prove she has no judicial philosophy at all.
Mail-in ballots have become an attack on election integrity. A case in point is the first round of voting in the Los Angeles mayoral election. On election night, the winners, who would advance to the general election, seemed to be clear: incumbent Mayor Karen Bass, who fiddled while the Palisades fire raged, and reality television star Spencer Pratt.
The third candidate, far-left Los Angeles City Council member Nithya Raman, even conceded defeat.
Then, thousands of ballots postmarked on Election Day were miraculously found lying around polling places and, presto chango, Mr. Pratt, the commonsense conservative, failed to make the runoff.
So, on Nov. 3, Los Angeles voters will have a choice between a leftist and an uber-leftist. That is what they call progress in California.
Mail-in voting, which was once limited to those who could not make it to the polls on Election Day (active-duty military, the seriously ill and those traveling), has become a great way for corrupt politicians to steal elections.
Yet there is a saving grace in the ruling, which is based not on constitutional law but rather on the majority’s misinterpretation of federal statutory election law. Congress can correct the statutory interpretation underlying the ruling with a majority vote.
This should provide a big impetus for the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, which would require proof of citizenship to register and vote and would limit mail-in voting.
The SAVE Act passed the House but is languishing in the Senate, where Republicans have a slim majority. In the run-up to a crucial midterm election that could determine the country’s fate for the next two years, the Senate must act now on the SAVE Act.
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