the Democrat ticket by an average of 2.3 points compared to 2016 just enough to carry the key states for President Biden. In effect, billions of dollars in private funds turned supposedly non-partisan county election offices into Democrat turn- out machines. While the debate rages on about the existence and extent of voter fraud in 2020, the undeniable reality is that the changes to election procedures were a major part of what allowed Joe Biden, a candidate of question- able cognitive ability who hardly left his basement throughout the entire campaign, to accumulate more votes than anyone in American history. More importantly for the upcom- ing election, while many of these changes to election laws were billed as a “one-time exception” for the COVID-19 pandemic, that has hardly been the case. As we saw in 2022, universal mail-in voting is now the norm in many places. INCREMENTAL PROGRESS There have, to be sure, been some positive developments on the elec- tion integrity front since 2022 and AMAC Action has been highly engaged in these efforts. 23 states now have a photo ID requirement for voting, including the swing states of Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan, and Wisconsin. continued on page 28
TROUBLING DEVELOPMENTS The COVID-19 pandemic paved the way for the most tumultuous election cycle in modern American history in 2020. In total, 69.4 percent of voters cast their ballot either by mail or before Election Day a nearly 30 percent jump from 2016. This expo- nential increase in mail-in ballots gave Democrats a massive structural advantage, minimized oversight, and made the system more susceptible to foul play. In most elections, Democrat Election Day enthusiasm trails that of Republi- cans, and for years, Democrat leaders had advocated for a mail-in system to help mitigate this disadvantage. In many cases, expanding mail-in voting also enabled ballots to be submit- ted without someone verifying the voter’s identity. To make matters worse, few security measures were instituted to prevent partisan campaign operatives from collecting and turning in multiple ballots a practice known as “ballot harvesting.” Election operatives could deposit these ballots in drop boxes, many of which were so unsecure that some even went missing entirely. Although some states have laws against ballot harvesting, the prac- tice was allowed to continue almost completely unchecked nationwide in 2020 and to a lesser but still concern- ing extent in 2022.
Ostensibly to slow the spread of the pandemic, many states also made sweeping changes to their election laws, many of which were of dubious legality at best and flat-out illegal at worst. As just one example of these last-min- ute changes to election law, in Penn- sylvania, the state supreme court, without any action from the legisla- ture, granted a three-day extension for mail-in ballots meaning that ballots received up to 72 hours after polls closed on Election Day were still counted. Eighteen other states like- wise accepted mail-in ballots after Election Day. 2020 also saw the widespread use of private election grants, known colloquially as “Zuckerbucks” after Facebook founder Mark Zucker- berg. In the months leading up to the election, groups bankrolled by Zuckerberg funneled a reported $400 million to local election offices with the stated purpose of help- ing them safely conduct elections during the pandemic. His operation paid progressive activists to work at nonpartisan county election offices, where some evidence suggests they implemented changes and mobilized voters in a way that favored Demo- crat candidates. As post-election analyses have revealed, the vast majority of Zuck- erbucks went to precincts that saw unusually high levels of support for Joe Biden. The counties that received Zuckerberg’s money shifted toward
Volume 18 Issue 2 • 27
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