Updated: a day ago
Take Back Action Fund will attend Tuesday’s Wisconsin Senate Committee on Elections, Election Process Reform and Ethics Hearing regarding Senate Bill 250 (click for live stream).
TBAF is thrilled Committee Members will hear from one of the top conservative election clerks in the country, Josh Daniels (pictured below in his election building with TBAF President John Pudner), who is the Clerk/Auditor at Utah County, the home of Brigham Young University.
TBAF President John Pudner (Right) and County Clerk Josh Daniels (Left) reviewing sample ballots
Daniels worked for conservatives as a Congressional campaign manager, field rep, and then ran policy for Utah’s free market think tank, Libertas Institute. Beginning in his previous position as Chief Deputy Clerk/Auditor, Daniels worked with his predecessor Amelia Powers Gardner for other true political innovations, including a comprehensive cleanup of voter rolls and state-of-the-art signature matches to prevent voter fraud in mail-in ballots.
After Daniels led him on tours of the mail-in facility in the summer of 2020, Pudner regularly cited Utah as the standard of how secure mail-in voting should be done, contrasting it with neighboring Nevada, whose system mails ballots directly to huge lists of inactive voters.
After this New York Times story quoting Pudner, the Times ran a correction:
An earlier version of this article misstated Nevada's process on mail ballots. It has sent out mail ballots for the primary, not just applications for the ballots.
The original story included this paragraph: “For his part, Mr. Trump has been concerned by reports on Fox News about potential fraud in Nevada’s vote-by-mail primary, and reports that thousands of ballots were being sent to inactive voters, aides said. They said Mr. Trump is not opposed to absentee ballots, but believes that vote-by-mail has been abused to hurt Republican candidates.”
Utah continues to lead the way with election innovations, having run instant runoff elections in a couple dozen localities, and Daniels testified about Utah’s experience at the hearing, regarding the possibility of including such a system in Wisconsin Congressional races, as part of the Final-Five proposal.
TBAF supports this proposal for Final-Five Voting in Wisconsin, noting that the system eliminates spoiler candidates’ potential to split the conservative (or liberal) vote to elect progressive candidates without a majority of the vote. Further, the system stands in contrast to New York City’s use of “ranked choice voting” in the democratic mayoral primary election, that forced voters to attempt to rank 13 candidates in a cumbersome system that took days to complete and didn’t give any voice to republicans or independents in NYC.
For more on TBORA's efforts on Final Five, please click here.
Pictured below, former Clerk/Auditor Powers with Daniels and Pudner
Like many who testified on Tuesday, Daniels is a veteran. He served as a Marine.
Daniels testifying on Tuesday.