For the People Act: Beware when politicians put beautiful sentiments in the title of bills

To the Editor:

For the People Act: One might think that this bill is meant to secure the idea of a government that is of, by, and for the people. Who are these people? Should people who are not citizens of our country be voting? Should lawbreakers in our jails vote for our lawmakers? How about those universal mail-in ballots?

How could we make them less secure — perhaps with no signature verification or voter ID, or not taking those who have died or left the state off the voter rolls, or allowing someone to collect other peoples’ ballots, or having unsupervised ballot boxes. Let’s register everyone who gets a driver’s license or signs up for a government program. No non-citizens there. And pre-register 16-year-olds while they still know everything.

Then there is the great Idea of limiting private donations to campaigns and having our tax dollars go evenly to people we don’t support. This sounds so fair, but HR 1 opens the races wide to cheating that cannot be policed. Lastly, this bill takes away the states’ control of elections, which, because of the diversity and spread out counting, makes tampering with results much more difficult. President Obama pointed out this safeguard when people worried about Russian election interference in 2016.

Beware when politicians put beautiful sentiments in the title of bills. We must read them carefully or at least listen to all points of view. Let your senators and representatives know what you think.

Luann Byrne

Stanhope