Rep. Good to introduce election legislation making it ‘easy to vote and hard to cheat’

Rep. Bob Good, R.-Va., told Fox News in an exclusive interview he will introduce election reform legislation Thursday designed to make it “easy to vote, and hard to cheat.”

Good, a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, told Fox News that protecting the integrity of U.S. elections is paramount, and the bills Democrats tout as voting rights and election reform are anything but.

Good’s One Citizen One Vote Act would prohibit the federal Election Assistance Commission from allocating funding to any state or municipality that does not require voter identification for both in-person and absentee voting, as well as blocking funds if the jurisdiction allows ballot harvesting — the act of partisan officials collecting other voters’ ballots for submission — allows non-citizens to vote, or sends unsolicited mail-in ballots to residents.

“One citizen, one vote. We want to make it easy to vote and hard to cheat,” Good said. “And we do believe in states’ rights. The Constitution says the states have the authority to regulate and to operate their own elections, but the federal government does provide some funding for elections.”

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“When there was a bipartisan commission years ago that did a study to see, OK, what is this threat for fraud in elections — what they identified was unsolicited mail-balloting, lack of voter ID and non-citizens voting,” Good continued.

Good called a New York City policy allowing legal non-citizens to vote in local elections a “test case” for Democrats to see if they can “get away with” allowing non-citizens to vote in state and municipal elections.

If Democrats are successful in defending the New York policy, it could spread to federal elections, Good predicted.

He also called Democrats’ election legislation like the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and H.R.-1, “Right to Cheat” bills.

“What [the One Citizen One Vote Act] would do would be to ensure that no federal funding goes to jurisdictions that prohibit voter ID, that allow ballot harvesting … [and] those jurisdictions that have mass unsolicited mail balloting, which will allow illegal aliens to vote,” he said.

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Good noted that voter ID laws are supported by over 80% of Americans, adding that election security should be a bipartisan issue among congressional lawmakers as well.

He told Fox News Digital he wasn’t expecting any immediate support from his Democratic colleagues, but that the policy is popular among Republican lawmakers.

“We’re already getting several co-sponsors to sign on,” he said, adding that most Americans don’t know anyone who does not have an ID.

Democrats often seek to “hijack” issues, he claimed, to make the public believe that acquiring a voter ID is “somehow racist or somehow suppressing vote when it’s actually just the opposite.”

Good characterized some of Democrats’ objections to election reform legislation as “the bigotry of low expectations,” including beliefs that it is discriminating against racial minorities to require voters to have an ID.

He noted that outside his office in Washington, D.C., as well as other cities like Philadelphia, Los Angeles and New York, those same Americans need a vaccination card and ID to eat in a restaurant, enter a store or other private building.

Democrats have claimed bills like Good’s are akin to Jim Crow laws, but the lawmaker said such comparisons are the “default” response to any GOP reform efforts.

Democrats view such opposing policies “through a racist lens and to pretend America is either institutionally racist or systemically racist; that we haven’t made the wonderful progress that we have to realize the More Perfect Union; the Founders’ dreams of inalienable rights of every citizen,” Good said.

Americans are becoming numb to those accusations, he predicted, pointing to Republican waves in deep-blue New Jersey and his Commonwealth of Virginia, where Gov. Glenn Youngkin defeated former Gov. Terry McAuliffe in November.

Good predicts a negative reaction from mainstream media once his legislation is introduced.

“The media will of course cast us in a racist lens — they are COVID forever, Jan. 6 forever, and everything-is-racist, so I suspect that our friends on the left in the media will probably try to characterize it as, ‘Hey, we can’t have election integrity or make it easy for folks to vote because of COVID,'” he said.

He said that conversely, the media has celebrated Democrats’ voting legislation.

“[Democrats] have to try to couch the issue in dishonest terms, and unfortunately far too many in the media are willing to comply and follow their lead.”