Republicans advance more than 100 bills that would restrict voting in wake of Trump's defeat
By Jane C. Timm
State Republicans have in recent weeks advanced a spate of proposals that would restrict access to the ballot box, a move voting rights experts warned was coming after President Joe Biden's win.
State lawmakers are considering more than 100 laws that would make it harder to vote, according to an analysis conducted by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. This number represents almost triple the number of similarly restrictive bills under consideration this time last year, according to the analysis.
These bills, in the works in 28 states, primarily seek to limit mail-in voting access, add voter ID requirements and make it harder to get on or stay on the voter rolls, according to the Brennan Center. There are nearly 2,000 bills moving through state legislatures aimed at addressing election-related issues overall, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Mail-in voting proved key to Biden's victory, as more Democrats than Republicans embraced the method rather than congregating at the polls as an uncontrolled pandemic raged. Experts have attributed this split to then-President Donald Trump's unrelenting effort to sow doubt in the integrity of the 2020 race with false claims that vote-by-mail is inherently fraudulent, and appeals to his supporters to vote in person.
Now, Republicans have zeroed in on mail-in voting for new restrictions and rollbacks, in some cases targeting laws the GOP had championed years before the pandemic.
Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel told Fox News recently that rolling back pandemic election changes like expanded mail-in voting was “absolutely an important effort” for the party. She added that the RNC would be “taking a very heavy role in” efforts to clean up voter rolls. Trump falsely claimed there were thousands of dead people who voted in Georgia and while roll maintenance is a normal part of elections, experts warn that the voter roll purges that some Republicans have advocated for in the past are too aggressive, removing eligible voters from the books.
Conservative advocates of these laws say they’ll make elections more secure. There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud in American elections, while there is a large body of evidence that American elections are secure from both hacking and fraud. Still, Republicans have for years warned of voter fraud, despite the lack of evidence for it, something voting rights experts say primed a significant number of Republican voters in 2020 to believe Trump's lie about a stolen election.
“People are planting the seeds, laying the groundwork, and then saying, ‘Look, people are fearing exactly what I told them to fear’ even though there’s no evidence or basis for that,” said Eliza Sweren-Becker, an attorney at the Brennan Center who worked on the analysis of the state legislative proposals.
There’s an even more prolific effort to expand voting access, with more than 400 bills in 35 states proposing the expansion of access to the vote.
But with Republicans controlling the majority of state legislatures in the U.S., voting rights advocates say they are on high alert for new laws that will make it harder for voters to cast their ballots in future elections.
Sweren-Becker said she’s particularly concerned about Georgia, Arizona and Texas, states that have been trending blue in part due to a quickly diversifying electorate. Georgia and Arizona flipped blue this past presidential election, backing Biden over Trump; those wins were fueled in part by major demographic shifts over the last few years, paired with significant organizing and voter education efforts by Democrats and grassroots groups.
Suppressive laws “always have a greater burden on voters of color,” she said. “It’s impossible to disentangle these efforts to restrict voting access with efforts to keep Black and brown voters from the ballot box.”
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Friday, February 5th 2021 at 9:31PM
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