by Justine Brooke Murray
Former Trump spokesperson Hogan Gidley praised seven states for protecting election integrity in an interview with the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Seven states are being praised by the America First Policy Institute’s (AFPI) Center For Election Integrity (CEI) in a new report for recent legislative efforts to prevent voter fraud. Hogan Gidley, director of the CEI, explained the importance of the report during an interview with the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“You want elections to be free, fair and honest – and people on the right and the left have been complaining about the outcomes of elections for decades in this country,” Gidley told the DCNF. “People are always concerned with the outcomes of these elections because the faith, trust and confidence in the election process has been eroded for years in this country.”
CEI developed a color-coded, interactive, online map to rate states across three key areas of voter protection measures that make it harder to cheat. They include requiring photo identification to vote, prohibiting ballot harvesting and returning ballots to election officials by Election Day.
“Eighty-five percent of people in this country want voters to prove they are who they say they are with a photo identification when they cast a ballot. Not voter identification. Photo identification,” said Gidley. “So voting with an electric bill or a water bill is unacceptable to most voters because they know, try to use an electric bill to get on a plane. You can’t do it.”
The report singled out Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Utah. CEI said the states have adopted into law a variety of election integrity measures that “now better protect every single legally cast vote and every legal voter.”
“The U.S. Constitution gives the right and responsibility to the state legislatures to decide the time, manner and place of how they conduct elections,” Gidley said. “So what works in Montana may not work in Massachusetts, may not work in Mississippi, may not work in Maine.”
CEI also rates the states on whether they have banned private money from being illegally used to influence public elections – something commonly referred to as “Zuckerbucks.” That nickname references an estimated $420 million Mark Zuckerberg of Meta (Facebook) allegedly poured into the 2020 election.
Yellow colored states have some voter protection laws in place and green colored states have voter protection laws in place under the CEI key. There is an additional notation of black lines in some states that indicate where laws were on the books but were not followed in the 2020 election.
“The states that are marked as red are the states that really offer no voter protection whatsoever, no or very little voter protection whosoever and I think that’s a problem not for the state itself but for the rest of the country too,” Gidley said.
CEI’s report highlighted a few states where governors vetoed significant election integrity measures passed by their legislature. For Example, Pennsylvania’s governor vetoed a bill promoting comprehensive election reform, including voting machine evaluation and auditing, mail in ballot regulation and increasing penalties for fraud.
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Justine Brooke Murray is a reporter at Daily Caller News Foundation.
Photo “Hogan Gidley” by J. Hogan Gidley. Background Photo “Election Day” by Phil Roeder. CC BY 2.0.
