Here’s the interesting thing that happened when the Pennsylvania Senate voted on fraud prevention and election integrity bills.
Ballot drop boxes and private funding of elections would be banned in Pennsylvania under legislation that passed the Senate on Wednesday.
The ballot drop box ban passed the chamber on a 29-20 party-line vote.
The measure barring the use private money to pay for election operations passed by a bipartisan 37-12 vote, with eight Democrats joining their GOP counterparts and independent colleague in supporting the bill.
Both measures now go to the state House of Representatives for consideration.
Dems love the idea of drop boxes. They describe it as an equity measure. In practice, it allows their activists and political machines to engage in modern day ballot box stuffing.
Considering that the biggest beneficiaries of drop boxes among Dems are lefties and minority political machine candidates, you would think that some Dems would dissent, but none did.
When it came to banning Zuckerbucks, or private funding of elections, a whole bunch of Dems broke ranks.
37-12 is quite the breakdown.
Sen. Lisa Baker, R-Luzerne County, who sponsored the bill banning private funding of elections, said her legislation states what was already thought to be a fact: Government should pay for elections.
It did in Pennsylvania until 2020 when an outside group that included Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg contributed $22.5 million to fund election operations in certain counties.
“If we do not shut off this valve now, each side will figure out ways to get their funders to step in to engineers ways to get more of their votes cast,” Baker said. “It is not a good look.”
Her legislation requires that the source of funding to run elections be limited to money derived from taxes, fees and other sources of public revenue.
This is a common sense argument, but the startling thing is that quite so many Dems find Zuckerbucks enough of a threat that they joined in.
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