Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell squashed two bills intended to ensure voting security, just one day after former special counsel Robert Mueller warned that Russians were attempting to sabotage the 2020 presidential elections, Newsweek reported in 2019. The Kentucky Republican claimed at the time that he wouldn’t allow a vote on the bills because they were “so partisan,” but, according to the news outlet, earlier that year, McConnell received a flurry of donations from four of the top voting machine lobbyists in the country. And yet, McConnell, who was recently reelected, has not been scrutinized over that.
Interestingly, Republicans have been falling in line behind Donald Trump, who is attempting to claim that he’s all about election integrity to cling to power. Yet, the donations McConnell received seem highly dubious. It’s almost as if they’re hypocrites or something.
“Clearly, this request is not a serious effort to make a law. Clearly, something so partisan that it only received one single solitary Republican vote in the House is not going to travel through the Senate by unanimous consent,” said McConnell on the Senate floor last year.
Sludge reported:
In 2016, Russian hackers targeted voting systems in 21 states and, according to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report, breached systems in Illinois and two counties in Florida, gaining access to information on millions of registered voters. In his report, Mueller described the Russian government’s interference in the 2016 elections as “sweeping and systematic.”
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A bipartisan group of Congress members submitted legislation to shore up election security at the time. Still, McConnell reportedly told his colleagues that he would not allow the Senate to vote on election security legislation during that session.
According to what Sludge reported at the time, Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck lobbyist David Cohen, who has worked on behalf of Dominion Voting Systems this year, donated $2,000 to McConnel. Brian Wild, who works with Cohen and has also lobbied Dominion, gave McConnell $1,000. And there were others, too.
In a twist of irony, Dominion has been the recent target by social media users who falsely interpreted a clerk’s error in a small, Republican-leaning Michigan county as vote-rigging because it wrongly favored Joe Biden before being fixed, the Associated Press reports.
It was just a week later that a deluge of false claims poured in, saying that Democrats have deep ties to Dominion Voting Systems. But maybe they should talk to Mitch about the donations he’s received from Dominion lobbyists, instead. Also, this country needs paper ballots. You can’t rig an election if there’s a paper trail. It’s just that simple. The problem is with McConnell blocking legislation that would have implemented that.
Featured image via Gage Skidmore/Flickr, under Creative Commons license 2.0
