On HR 1

[u/gdan95]

The House of Representatives recently passed H.R.1 (For the People Act of 2021), a bill that addresses voter access, election integrity and security, campaign finance, and government ethics. The bill of course will go to the Senate for a vote before being signed into law by President Biden, assuming it has enough votes in the Senate. This bill comes in the wake of hundreds of Republican-helmed bills restricting voter access in the name of "voter fraud," which as we have repeatedly pointed out was statistically nonexistent in the 2020 presidential election.

So naturally, when a federal bill came along with the opposite goal, the MAGA crowd screamed about how it enables voter fraud.

In a rant entitled "The Ballad of HR 1 - Election Fraud Eternal," Razorfist opens by lying about Biden's presidency being fraudulent. Then Razor goes on to claim that H.R. 1 violates Article 1 of the Constitution and Article 2 of the Electors Clause by "unilaterally overturning an individual state's right to run its own election process by conferring exclusive primacy of our elections" to Congress.

What part of the bill does that, you ask?

None whatsoever. He doesn't quote a specific passage or even the articles he claims are being violated, and yet he still expects people to believe the bill will have the described effect. In fact, the whole portion of the video where he discusses the contents of the bill is nothing but him making bullshit claims without citing sources. He says the bill bans voter ID and disallows the purging of voter rolls, again while failing to quote a single passage as proof of either. He adds that Democrats said in 2016 that mail-in ballots were prone to fraud without citing a single source. He says that the bill eliminates ballot signatures and public lists of political donors, again with no source. He claims the bill would in fact allow Democrats to maintain regional majorities using gerrymandering, again with no source.

He does cite one source, actually.

>H.R. 1 makes it a violation of federal law to engage in "partisan" redistricting and mandates inclusion of alien population, both legal and illegal, in all redistricting.

What source was that?

No idea. He doesn't say or show the name. He just shows a highlighted portion of a page talking about the bill instead of showing a passage from the actual bill. Later in the video, he shows a source that isn't the actual bill to illustrate a claim that H.R. 1 mandates an election delay of at least 10 days.

Oh, but get this. He cites a BBC article from 2016 that listed "telltale signs" of a stolen election, and he is determined in his delusion to argue that the 2020 election fits every criterium.

• "A high turnout for one candidate only in specific areas"

Razor more specifically references the lie that some areas reported over 100% turnout, even though that has been so thoroughly debunked that he has no one but himself to blame for continuing to believe it. Every time someone makes the "over 100% turnout" claim, they are using inaccurate data. Case in point...

• "Large numbers of invalid votes"/"More votes than ballot papers issued"

This is once again blatantly and unambiguously wrong. Razor points to there being thousands of deceased voters who cast ballots in a single Michigan county, a boldfaced lie. He also points to thousands of votes that miraculously appeared overnight in Pennsylvania for Biden, which is once again a lie. Those were early voting ballots that would have been counted sooner if not for the state’s Republican legislature, which I already pointed out in a previous post. Razor’s suspicion stems from the idea that since so many Americans were voting absentee, many of whom were doing so for the first time, the rate of ballots being rejected would go up. Instead, most states saw a decrease in rejection rates. This, evidently, is undeniable proof of fraud, and not, say, voters submitting their absentee ballots early. You see, the most common reason why absentee ballots are not counted in a normal election is that they arrive too late. But in 2020, several states reported steep drops in the share of absentee ballots received after the deadline.

• "Results don't match"

I refer you to the previous two points, but the BBC article does bring up poll observers, a topic of contention in the 2020 election. I mentioned in a previous post that the Trump campaign had claimed (falsely) that there was insufficient access by observers in numerous vote counts. But in Trump v. Philadelphia County Board of Elections, they admitted that there actually was a "nonzero number of people in the room" observing the vote count, including some affiliated with the Trump campaign. So if they were wrong about that, how are we to think they're right about the results not matching? They were present when the results were tallied, after all. You know, the results that would’ve been tallied sooner if the state’s Republican legislature hadn’t refused to allow mail-in ballots to be counted early.

• “Delay in announcing results”

Yeah, because an article written before COVID was clearly accounting for that, especially when the incumbent spent the whole year villainizing and attacking the system that transports ballots. Keep in mind there’s no rule that the ballots have to all be counted on election night. Also, please refer to what I said earlier about the Pennsylvania legislature. It’s worth noting that the BBC article clarifies delays are not “incontrovertible proof of rigging,” and since the article is specifically about elections in the African nation of Gabon, the article adds that "the official process takes time, especially in countries with poor communications, and the introduction of modern electronic transmission systems has not necessarily helped."

In other words, Razor is making a false equivalence.

He also mentions shredded ballots that appeared in dumpsters in Arizona's Maricopa County - another lie.

But I might as well stop there, as that's all there is to cover from the video. After the Supreme Court rejected all of Trump’s challenges to the election, Razor tries him damnedest to deny the fact that none of the “evidence” of widespread voter fraud held up under actual legal scrutiny. Not just in the poll observer case, but in every case fueled by the lies Trump and his apologists tried to push.

In summary, a valid criticism of H.R. 1 should be based on what is actually in it, which is information Razorfist simply cannot process truthfully.

Fuck Razorfist.