(Dec. 16) A new election integrity scorecard produced by the Heritage Foundation serves, probably unintentionally, to poke the eyes both of the liberal establishment and of former President Donald Trump.
Good. Both deserve it.
Heritage’s scorecard rates each state on 12 aspects of election integrity and security such as “maintaining the accuracy of a state’s voter registration list,” “access of election observers to ensure transparency,” and “voter assistance procedures.” The think tank’s methodology was extensive and transparent, with ample opportunity for state officials to provide evidence that would correct any errors they thought they saw in Heritage’s initial assessments.
The reason the scorecard makes both Trump and the liberal establishment look bad is that the state that rates first in the nation for election integrity is Georgia. Yes, that Georgia: the one that Trump falsely claimed allowed Joe Biden to steal its electoral votes from him, and the one that the media, major corporations, and the rest of the professional Left castigated for its election law updates earlier this year.
Trump has made a fetish for nearly a year of making Republican Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp the scapegoat for Trump’s loss of the state to Biden. Despite not even a sliver of evidence that there was vote fraud and human error extensive enough in the Peach State to have taken a “rightful” victory from Trump, the former president has quite viciously castigated Kemp all year for supposedly being “weak” on voter security. Moreover, Trump recruited former Sen. David Perdue, a Republican who just months ago vowed not to challenge Kemp in 2022, to mount a primary campaign against Kemp after all.
Yet Heritage, the gold standard for conservative constitutionalism and for ballot security, adjudges Kemp and his colleague to be doing the best job on that front in the entire country. Trump and Perdue should be ashamed for peddling not just nonsense, but outright lies, about Kemp’s solid record.
If anything, though, Heritage’s report is an even bigger rebuke to the Left and its corporate allies…. [The full column is at this link.]
