Sen. Tim Scott: S.1 is not a voting rights bill, it’s a partisan power grab that will harm faith in elections

As I prepared to give my response to President Biden’s first Joint Address to Congress last month, I reflected on the state of our country and the issues I most wanted to share with the American people. In order to have a productive conversation about where our country is today, and where we’re headed, we must have honest conversations rooted in common sense.

Of the many issues I shared with the country, I knew it was important to call out the dishonest narrative peddled by left-wing politicians and mainstream media on the issue of election reform. As a Black man who has voted in the South all my life, voting rights are personal to me.

As I said in my speech: I support making it easier to vote and harder to cheat. So do my fellow Republicans, and so do voters.

But the Democrats so-called “For the People Act” would actually make it easier to cheat and harder to vote. It is not a voting rights bill. It is a partisan power grab that would destroy confidence in our election system.

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The list of terrible ideas in the Democrat bill is long. Unbelievably, President Joe Biden, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi want to deposit your tax dollars into political campaign accounts. That means your money could be spent on ads for candidates you don’t support, attacking the ones you do.

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Among the most egregious provisions is the push to gut voter ID laws. The prevailing liberal argument that voter ID requirements are unpopular and aimed at suppressing the minority vote is simply not rooted in facts. In a Senate committee hearing last week, Democrats made the case for their proposals by repeating those false claims. But recent polling shows that the majority of Americans are in favor of voter ID requirements, including large majorities of Black people and Hispanics.

That’s because voter ID, along with many other commonsense election laws, give folks confidence that our elections are secure, fair, and accurate. Eliminating these laws also eliminates confidence in the process. History shows that low trust in elections results in depressed turnout.

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It has never been more important to instill greater voter confidence in our elections. Yet, Democrats—aided by liberal media content to echo their talking points—continue to ignore the facts in favor of shameful political maneuvers. Their crusade to overhaul our elections has done nothing to advance the cause of voter trust. In fact, it’s done the opposite.