Former Vice President Mike Pence will be remembered for refusing to agree with former President Trump’s insistence that he had the constitutional authority to send suspect Electoral College votes back to state legislatures for review.
But he is in agreement that there were serious voting irregularities in the 2020 election, and for that he drew a “fact-check” from a CNN host.
It didn’t turn out so well for the host, however, reports PJ Media’s Tyler O’Neil.
In an op-ed in The Daily Signal, Pence warned that the Democrats’ For the People Act would only exacerbate serious concerns about election integrity.
Before critiquing Pence’s article, “CNN Newsroom” host Brianna Keilar on Wednesday played footage of Capitol rioters on Jan. 6 chanting “Hang Mike Pence!”
“And now, nearly two months later, Pence is still out there pushing the Big Lie,” she claimed, referring to Trump’s insistence that he was the true winner of the 2020 election.
“In a new op-ed, the former vice president says the election was ‘marked by significant voting irregularities and numerous instances of officials setting aside state election law’ and that he is concerned ‘about the integrity of the 2020 election,'” she said.
Keilar said that’s “patently false.”
“Proved false by Trump’s own attorney general, Bill Barr, and Trump’s former FBI director, Chris Wray, just yesterday when he said that there were no irregularities on a scale that would have changed the outcome of the 2020 election,” she said.
However, Pence did not claim that Trump won. He said there were significant irregularities and instances of states officials violating election laws.
Keilar brought on CNN Washington reporter Daniel Dale for a “fact-check,” but as O’Neil points out, Dale’s effort to debunk Pence’s claims only proved the former vice president correct.
“There was a significant amount of dishonesty just in the H.R. 1 part of the op-ed,” Dale said. “For example, Pence claimed that this Democratic bill would ban voter ID nationwide. It would not, in fact, do so. What it would do is require states that do have voter ID to allow voters who are not presenting their identification to sign, present a sworn statement attesting to their identity. So Pence can say that requirement weakens states’ voter ID requirements, but it certainly does not ban them.”
While H.R. 1 does not explicitly strike state voter ID laws, it allows voting without an ID, which was Pence’s point.
Dale also contested Pence’s claim that the law will allow illegal immigrants to vote.
“In fact, undocumented immigrants would continue to be prohibited from voting under this bill,” the CNN reporter said. “Nothing changes federal law limiting voting to U.S. citizens.”
But Pence was arguing that automatic voter registration puts illegal immigrants who register for a driver’s license on the voter rolls.
And H.R. 1 exempts from prosecution anyone who was not eligible to vote in elections for federal office who is “automatically registered to vote.”
Dale also took issue with Pence claiming that the bill would require states to accept “every mail-in ballot that arrives up to 10 days after” the election.
“This is highly misleading at best,” Dale insisted. “The bill would require states to accept ballots that were post-marked on or before Election Day and then arrived up to 10 days after the election, but it would not require states to accept ballots that were mailed after Election Day and then arrived up to 10 days later. So you couldn’t mail, six, seven days later, have it arrive on day 10, and have it accepted.”
“That continues to be wrong, false, in its entirety,” he added.
While states would not have to count ballots postmarked after Election Day, Pence’s point was that the extension opens the opportunity for fraud.
In his op-ed, Pence said that to “restore public confidence in our elections, our leaders should uphold the Constitution, reject congressional Democrats’ plan to nationalize our elections, and get about the serious work of state-based reform that will protect the integrity of the vote for every American.”
“Every citizen deserves the freedom to support, oppose, criticize, or promote the candidates and causes they believe in,” he concluded. “And most importantly, the American people must have the utmost confidence that every voice matters, and every vote counts—or democracy cannot survive.”
Via Wnd
