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"Now, on the very first day of a new Congress, Republicans have put ethics, accountability, and transparency on the chopping block."

At a time when the freedom to vote remains under attack, Congress will provide a down payment in the omnibus spending bill to provide additional resources for election officials across the country who face a variety of threats and obstacles in helping Americans make their voices heard at the ballot box. This $75 million that Congress is allocating is only a fraction of the investment that will be required to protect our elections and the will of voters from threats both foreign and domestic.

The inclusion of the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act in the omnibus spending package is a vital first step in protecting the votes and voices of all Americans. Enacting these reforms to ensure that the will of the voters will be respected and followed is particularly important in light of Donald Trump’s announcement that he is again running for the White House and his public call to terminate the U.S. Constitution in order to overturn the 2020 election and declare himself president. We know from the January 6th Select Committee that Trump knows he lost that election, but he continues to repeat his Big Lie despite the fact that his own appointees at the Department of Homeland Security declared that the 2020 election was “the most secure in U.S. history.”  

The American people deserve to see Donald Trump’s tax returns. Every other modern American President and every other major party nominee has disclosed their returns prior to Donald Trump. In light of numerous federal and state investigations of the former president’s finances, and convictions of multiple Trump Organization employees, the documents likely contain important information relevant to the public trust and must be made public.  

No American is above the law. That includes former Presidents and their advisors. Donald Trump and those who aided and abetted his attempted coup remain a clear and present danger to our democracy. The members of the nonpartisan January 6th Select Committee deserve the nation’s thanks for investigating and publicly exposing the months-long plot waged by Trump and his associates, that appears to have amounted to a criminal conspiracy to overturn the will of the people and subvert the results of the 2020 election so that he could remain in power.

Today, the University of California Berkeley Center For Security in Politics issued a statement reporting on the conclusions of a Working Group convened with funding from Tusk Philanthropies to develop standards that would ensure internet voting can be secure and private. The Working Group concluded that it could not issue such standards, stating “the current cybersecurity environment and state of technology make it infeasible for the Working Group to draft responsible standards to support the use of internet ballot return in U.S. public elections at this time.”