{"id":27271,"date":"2020-08-03T17:05:15","date_gmt":"2020-08-04T00:05:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=27271"},"modified":"2020-08-03T17:05:15","modified_gmt":"2020-08-04T00:05:15","slug":"new-bill-to-boost-elections","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=27271","title":{"rendered":"NEW BILL TO BOOST ELECTIONS"},"content":{"rendered":"

A group of House Republicans on Monday introduced legislation that would appropriate $400 million to states to address election challenges stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0Emergency Assistance for Safe Elections (EASE) Act would designate $200 million to assist with sanitizing in-person polling stations and purchasing personal protective equipment, while a further $100 million would go towards recruiting and training new poll workers, following a nationwide shortage of workers due to the pandemic.<\/p>\n

The final $100 million would be appropriated for states to maintain the accuracy of their voter registration lists.<\/p>\n

Other provisions in the bill include measures to increase the cybersecurity of the elections process, including establishing an election cyber assistance unit at the Election Assistance Commission, and updating voluntary voting system guidelines established by the Help America Vote Act to cover next-generation voting technology, such as e-pollbooks.<\/p>\n

Rep.\u00a0Rodney Davis<\/a>\u00a0(R-Ill.), the ranking member of the House Administration Committee and the lead sponsor of the bill, said in a statement that it was \u201ccritical\u201d the bill is included in the next COVID-19 relief package to help states struggling with new election challenges.<\/p>\n

\u201cMost states are faced with running essentially two kinds of elections this fall: in-person and expanded mail-in voting, which means added costs to get it right,\u201d Davis said. \u201cWhen states failed to do this in recent primaries, the risk of disenfranchising voters increased significantly.\u201d<\/p>\n

Davis emphasized that \u201ccontinuing to engage with local election officials and provide oversight of states will be necessary to protect the right to vote in the November election.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A group of House Republicans on...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-u-s-a"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27271"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27271\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27272,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27271\/revisions\/27272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}