mary bartkowski

Hello Representative Levin, I'd like to introduce you to an organization called the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs. NDI is one of the four core institutes of the National Endowment for Democracy, established by Congress in 1983. It is the Democratic Party's official international arm. Its board members include Stacey Abrams, Donna Brazile, and Michael McFaul. Its previous chair was Madeleine Albright, who served until her death in 2022. Also on the board: Eric Kessler, founder of Arabella Advisors, the largest dark money network in Democratic politics. NDI reported $181.5 million in revenue in fiscal year 2023, nearly all in government grants. NDI's mission, for four decades, has been to tell countries around the world how to run democratic elections. And what NDI consistently tells them, across dozens of countries, is that voter identification is a fundamental pillar of election integrity, and that proving citizenship is a basic prerequisite for participation. Here is what NDI has demanded of other countries: NDI's foundational guide, Building Confidence in the Voter Registration Process (2001), describes voter ID systems as standard democratic infrastructure. It states that voter registries should contain "voters' photographs and even their fingerprints" and that registered voters should be issued "a voter or other ID card that serves as proof of their right to vote." NDI explains that "issuing ID cards, either national or voting, requires a second point of contact between election officials and voters, which introduces an additional safeguard into the system." (pp. 10–11, 15) NDI's 2015 study of voter registration across the Middle East and North Africa goes further, laying out that voters must "prove their identity, essentially demonstrating that they are who they say they are" and must "affirm their citizenship and age." (p. 11) That same 2001 guide identifies married name changes as a routine voter roll maintenance challenge: "Election officials must update information about people who have moved or who have married and changed their surname." NDI also notes that voter lists "may omit information about changes of address or name for those eligible people who have recently moved or married." NDI's recommendation is not to eliminate voter ID. It is to maintain clean, continuously updated voter rolls that accommodate name changes within the system. In its 2009 Bangladesh report, NDI praised the country's new photo-voter list and national ID card system, noting that the ID cards gave "a sense of empowerment and belonging to the disadvantaged and marginalized people of the country, particularly women." Read that again. NDI itself called voter identification empowering for WOMEN! In every case, NDI's position was identical: marriage-related name changes are a solvable administrative problem. The solution is better record-keeping and updated systems. Not fewer safeguards. Not the elimination of voter ID. Your party's own international arm has already solved the problem you bring up. The answer is: maintain the rolls. Update the records. Issue the IDs. Accommodate name changes within the system, don't use them as a reason to have no system at all. The exact opposite of what you push here - refusing to clean voter rolls. By NDI’s own standards, by the standards of your own international soft power branch, YOUR position is the anti-feminist position. The SAVE America Act asks Americans to do less than what NDI demands of Nicaragua, less than what NDI praises in Morocco, and far less than the biometric fingerprint-and-facial-recognition system NDI supervised in Nigeria. Eighty-four percent of Americans support photo ID to vote. Two-thirds of Democrats support it. Jimmy Carter's own 2005 bipartisan commission recommended it. You voted no. Your party's international arm, funded with taxpayer money, chaired by your party's former Senate leader (Tom Daschle), staffed by your party's most prominent voting-rights advocate, says yes. For everyone else. NDI's guides are publicly available on their website. You might consider reading them before you spout mindless drivel to protect your own grift.

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