Senator Cropsey’s statement is as follows:
I would hope that we would turn down this amendment. I think that when you take a look at this amendment as a tie-bar amendment, tie-barring, you know, no-reason absenteeism voting to a judicial election thing where there is very clearly a miscarriage of justice, I think, is allowing a person to run for judge. These two are just I wouldn’t say two totally incompatible, but two very different issues.
As far as the idea that, oh, there is no fraud in absentee voting, all we have to do is look at Detroit a couple of elections ago, where you saw the monitor found evidence of Detroit absentee voter fraud. The FBI went to court over the Detroit ballots. Is anybody going to tell me that the absentee voting in the city of Detroit has been perfectly clear that there has been no fraud involved in that? I just find that—I was going to say laughable, but unbelievable.
Certainly, we have had just a major recount in one of our other states on a U.S. Senate seat. It has been very close. Parties are very concerned that there was fraud, frankly, in the tallying of the votes there.
When we start talking about the security of our elections, about fraud, and then try to turn a blind eye to it and say, you know what, we are even going to allow more of this. I think we have to be very, very careful. To tie-bar that legislation to this legislation, there is no reason that absentee voting is going to take a lot of work because there are many of us who are very concerned about the fraud that seems to go along with a lot of the absentee voting. We do not want to see fraud in our elections.
So I would hope that we would turn down this tie-bar amendment. If we are going to go to no-reason absentee voting, then have that stand on its own merit because these issues need to be discussed fully and fairly.