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\n

House Democrats\u2019 top election leader has a message for states ahead of the midterms: count faster.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are, I think, nicely trying to encourage people to do their balloting as quickly as possible, and that means hiring additional staff so that it doesn’t call into question results,\u201d Rep. Joe Morelle of New York, the top Democrat on the House Administration Committee, said in a Thursday interview with Blue Light News.<\/p>\n

The advice is just one part of Morelle\u2019s efforts to secure the midterm elections. He said Democrats have wargamed over 150 scenarios of how the Trump administration could attempt to interfere or complicate the November elections and its certification. He is encouraging states to have a \u201cdegree of urgency\u201d when counting ballots to stave off Republican-led conspiracy theories about the reasons for delays.<\/p>\n

Morelle said he is leaning on states to staff up on election officials to facilitate speedy ballot counting while emphasizing the process should still be \u201cdone properly,\u201d \u201cfairly\u201d and that \u201cwe don’t want people with cast ballots not to have their ballots counted.\u201d He is going to Los Angeles next week to deliver that message and meet with election security experts and election administrators \u2014 though he did not specify whom he is meeting with or where.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are trying to gently encourage people to staff up,\u201d he said. Morelle added that if Democrats take the House majority, they\u2019d \u201cpush for more resources for local and state administrators so they can hire additional capacity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Morelle has other big plans in the majority, including cracking down on dark money in politics, protecting voting rights and most notably, working on a bipartisan voter identification bill.<\/p>\n

Asked whether he could accept some form of voter identification as part of a larger bipartisan elections package, Morelle said, \u201cI’m personally not opposed to some form of voter ID,\u201d adding that he has opposed multiple Republican-led proposals to tighten up identification requirements.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don’t know where my colleagues on the Democrat side will be, but I think voters think, \u2018Okay, you show your ID for just tons of things. Is it really that much of a burden?\u2019\u201d he said. \u201cAnd if it is, we’ll get state issued IDs or federally issued IDs to people who can\u2019t afford it. So I do think that there’s hope for a bipartisan way forward, and I’ll be anxious to work with colleagues to do it.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

House Democrats\u2019 top election leader has a message for states ahead of the midterms: count faster. \u201cWe are, I think, nicely trying to encourage people to do their balloting as quickly as possible, and that means hiring additional staff so that it doesn’t call into question results,\u201d Rep. Joe Morelle of New York, the top […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27030","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-congress"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27030","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27030"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27030\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27030"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27030"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27030"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}