Missouri House Bill 1878 will have the drop-box banditos cursing in the streets. The legislation, designed to ensure secure elections, would not only require a photo ID to vote and further secure absentee voting, but it also bans ballot drop boxes.
No absentee ballot shall be delivered through a drop box and no election authority shall establish or use a drop box for the purpose of collecting absentee ballots.
The changes were passed in the House in March and just passed the State Senate this week and would also prohibit ballot harvesting and limit voter registration by third parties while prohibiting payment for such services.
Notwithstanding section 115.284, no individual, group, or party shall solicit a voter into obtaining an absentee ballot application. Absentee ballot applications shall not have the information pre-filled prior to it being provided to a voter. Nothing in this section shall be interpreted to prohibit a state or local election authority from assisting an individual voter.
And not only have all the exceptions related to Mail-in Ballots and COVID been struck from state election law, the new changes prohibit an end-around by exercises of executive or administrative authority.
Mail-in ballots shall not be authorized by any executive or administrative order and no authorization for the use of mail-in ballots shall be inferred from any general law. This section shall not preclude the use of absentee ballots authorized under this chapter. Any expansion of the use of mail-in ballots subsequent to the effective date of this act shall require the repeal of this section by explicit reference thereto.
Neither the Governor nor the Secretary of State can make changes. Only the State Legislature can change election law.
Trying to vote without proof of Identity has also been addressed with provisional ballots and a very lengthy process to discourage the practice, but anyone who needs a non-drivers license ID to vote will continue to get that identification at no cost to themselves. In other words, it is not a hardship to vote without ID or to obtain proof of identity for voting purposes, but the security of elections has been shored up in the process.
To summarize, no ballot harvesting or registration harvesting. It will be illegal to pay people to register voters. No vote by mail or ballot drop boxes while absentee ballot measures have been tweaked to improve proof of identity and chain of custody. And yes, there’s more, but that’s good enough for our purposes.
The State has taken a giant leap forward to protect Missouri voters and their votes from being diluted by potential acts of fraud. Other states should look at the changes and consider them in their states.
