Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) said in a video obtained by The Hill that while traveling around Oklahoma, he’s been getting questions about the H.R. 1 election reform measure.
Lankford said he heard some citizens say that the bill will enable voter suppression.
“No, it actually has nothing to do with suppressing the vote, I’m a firm believer to make it easy to vote, but hard to cheat. That bill H.R. 1 makes it easy to vote and easy to cheat, and it’s really easy to do fraud,” Lankford said.
Sen. James Lankford: “I’m a firm believer to make it easy to vote, but hard to cheat. That bill H.R. 1 makes it easy to vote and easy to cheat, and it’s really easy to do fraud.” pic.twitter.com/1t0zY32aFy
— The Hill (@thehill) April 9, 2021
The bill would affect multiple aspects of the electoral process and campaign financing.
“It’s going to challenge our elections from here on out, and it changes a lot of our election policies, not for the better, but for the worse,” Lankford said. “So lots of people have had lots of questions about that.”
Former President Donald Trump said last month that the H.R. 1 will be a “disaster” if it passes in the Senate.
“I think it would be a disaster for our country,” Trump told Fox News.
“It would be very unfair that Democrats should use COVID in order to do things that they can’t believe they got away with, what they did, and they didn’t get their legislatures to approve, and by the way in the Constitution, you have to do that,” Trump said.
“In the Constitution, it says the state legislatures have to approve changes—they made massive changes early—just before the election in some cases, and they made massive changes that—not even mentioning all of the other things and all of the dishonesty in the election—the state legislatures did not approve these changes. Therefore, they’re not allowed.”
H.R. 1, also called the For the People Act, passed the Democratic-controlled House on a largely party-line vote of 220–210 on March 3. All Republicans voted against the bill, joined by Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the only Democrat who voted against the measure.
Thompson told The Epoch Times that his opposition was driven by constituents who were against the redistricting portion of the bill as well as the section on public finances.
The proposal would need 60 votes to overcome a GOP filibuster in the Senate.
Mimi Nguyen Ly and Tom Ozimek contributed to this report.
