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Republican Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall argues that his Democratic counterparts do not care about election integrity in the same way Republicans do, as they attempt to block measures designed to root out illegal voters they have long claimed do not exist.
Marshall addressed a legal challenge brought by 25 Democratic state attorneys general challenging President Donald Trump’s executive order that included provisions for federal agencies to help states ensure only citizens receive mail-in ballots, and for the U.S. Postal Service to institute practices to make the ballots trackable.
“The left, because they’re concerned about losing at the midterms, want to be able to obstruct this administration’s efforts to ensure the integrity of our elections,” Marshall told Fox News Digital this week, ahead of Thursday’s oral arguments before U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in Boston.
“You have to wonder – when those that are objecting to this – how confident they can be in the security of their elections, as opposed to becoming just a partisan opportunity to ensure the Democrats win and keep conservative voices from being heard, not only in local and state levels of government, but particularly in Washington.”
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Marshall led a letter in July from 13 Republican attorneys general, backing the U.S. Postal Service’s following up on Trump’s March 31 executive order that set up an audit of states’ voter rolls.
“There shouldn’t be a reason why we object to that, but yet Democrats simply don’t want to have fair elections in a way that people can have confidence,” Marshall claimed.
Fox News Digital reached out to the Democratic Attorneys General Association for comment on Marshall’s remarks, but they did not immediately respond.
Democrats, in various arguments to block the audit of voter rolls before the mailing out of absentee ballots, claim that it would lead to “disenfranchisement,” “chaos,” “unconstitutional overreach” and a partisan “power grab.”
Democrats’ concern is that if they refuse to share their voter rolls with the Department of Homeland Security and Social Security Administration to crosscheck the eligibility of legal voters, the USPS can stop the mailing of state’s absentee ballots.
“USPS’s interest in correcting an unsubstantiated problem through likely unconstitutional means is dwarfed by the overwhelming risk of pervasive disenfranchisement of citizens who need access to mail ballots in order to vote,” Talwani, appointed by former President Barack Obama, wrote in her restraining order against the Trump administration.
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“The postal service is not a partisan organization. As the postmaster said, I think most recently, we’re just there to deliver the mail. They’re experts in how it is that this can be configured.”
Marshall stated that the problem of voter fraud is documented, not “unsubstantiated,” as Talwani put it, with evidence in his own state.
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“This is not a solution looking for a problem,” he said. “This is in response to what we know is going on across the country. And this provides a commonsense, straightforward way for states to be able to ensure elections, but most importantly, for the people of this country to have belief that their elections in fact are accurate.”
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“It’s not a shock that Democrats are standing up the ability for us to pass the SAVE [America] Act because they don’t want to allow for there to be assurances of what is already in the law: That somebody here illegally cannot be able to vote,” he added. “But here we have the president being able to make sure that we are allowing for government resources to be used in an appropriate way to simply allow those who are qualified to vote, vote, and those who aren’t, don’t.”
Marshall has little confidence that the Obama-appointed judge in Boston is going to side with the Trump administration and the law.
“I would be remiss if I didn’t say that I would fully expect her to continue with the Democratic Party line,” he said. “The Trump administration has already filed a request with the First Circuit to try to get a stay of that order, but yet we’re going to continue to battle this case along with the administration and look forward to standing beside them when they obtain this victory.”
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Marshall maintains Republicans are not stopping anyone from getting an absentee ballot – they’re just trying to make sure the process is conducted legally and securely.
“Here we have a barcode that allows us to be able to connect it directly with the voter – we have the assurance that that ballot is being cast by the person in fact that receives that ballot,” he said. “Democrats and Republicans alike ought to praise this as a commonsense effort to be able to restore election integrity in this area, but it’s not a shock that Democrats have opposed it.”
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Marhall pointed to the 2005 bipartisan commission chaired by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker that identified mailed absentee ballots as being susceptible to fraud.
“This is about securing elections, not interfering with states’ abilities to conduct elections, and we think that we’ll be able to eliminate many of the issues that we’ve seen, including in Alabama, that have occurred in the past.”
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The restraining order Talwani issued will remain in place for up to one more week while she considers whether to issue a longer-term preliminary injunction blocking the rule. The hearing is Thursday in Boston, but the fight will go on from states on both sides as the midterm mail-in ballot season officially gets underway.
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