See How The GOP Is Trying To Restrict Your Voting Rights

As the 55th anniversary of Bloody Sunday approaches, Republicans are pushing harder than ever to restrict voting access, pushing forward over 250 bills across 43 states in an effort to do so. MSNBC's Ari Melber reports on House Democrats' efforts to combat this and enhance voting rights with a new bill. (This interview is from MSNBC’s “The Beat with Ari Melber, a news show covering politics, law and culture airing nightly at 6pm ET on MSNBC.

You can't stop us Ron. It's not your business.

So, Why are you in favor of restricting or making it harder to vote?

In PA we never had mail-in voting. You could only do an absentee ballot under limited conditions. We're only going back to what we always had Ron.

So, you are admitting that Republicans in PA can't win elections, if they open up and make it easier for the people of PA to VOTE there. Steve, are you in favor of “Voter suppression because that is what you are working to do, "Voter Suppression".

Steve, Why would you want to Suppress The Vote, The Voice of The people?

We're working for voter verification Ron. When I voted this year, as always, I gave the election officials my name, which they looked up in their books, which I then signed my name to. That's how we secured our elections in the past, until in 2020 we threw caution to the wind and paid for it with a rigged election and a failed run, and now a monstrous legacy of two trillion in debt for our progeny.

Steve, I have a little to say on this subject. As you already stated In the U.S., showing up in person to cast one’s ballot on Election Day has always been the standard way of exercising that fundamental right, which I agree is just one way to VOTE.

why haven't you mention a process of voting that people in The United States of America over the centuries, voting by mail has become an attractive alternative for many—thanks in large part to the influence of wartime necessity.

Even the scattered examples of absentee voting (the terms are often used interchangeably) that can be traced to the colonial era tend to fit the pattern: In 17th-century Massachusetts, men could vote from home if their homes were “vulnerable to Indian attack,” according to historian Alex Keyssar’s book The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States, and the votes of some Continental Army soldiers were presented in writing “as if the men were present themselves” in Hollis, N.H., in 1775 during the American Revolution.

Now STOP acting like you are brand new to this subject.

Now let us move on, “In the early 20th century, we’re becoming a much more mobile country,” says John C. Fortier, author of Absentee and Early Voting and director of governmental studies at the Bipartisan Policy Center. “States will make exceptions for certain types of people, such as railroad workers, or people who are sick. There is a movement—not nationally, we do everything differently state by state—but of states adopting some form of voting for selected populations who met certain criteria.”

As TIME reported in its recent roundup of state laws for voting by mail in 2020, five states were already holding entirely mail-in elections before the pandemic—Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington and Utah. Twenty-nine states and Washington D.C. allowed “no excuse” mail-in absentee voting, and 16 states allowed voters to cast a ballot by mail if they had an excuse. In the 2016 presidential election, about 1 in 4 voters cast their votes via ballots mailed to them. Despite claims of vote fraud when voting is conducted outside of polling places, only 0.00006% of the 250 million votes by mailed ballots nationwide were fraudulent, according to MIT political scientists who analyzed numbers from the Heritage Foundation’s Election Fraud Database.

In addition, scholars at Stanford University’s Democracy and Polarization Lab analyzing 1996-2018 data in three of these universal vote-by-mail states (California, Utah and Washington) didn’t find vote-by-mail advantaged one political party over another—contrary to President Trump’s claim that Republicans would never win an election again if vote-by-mail programs expanded—and only found a “modest increase in overall average turnout rates.”

Vote-by-mail programs, as Fortier puts it, are “generally not pulling more people into the voting place, except for making it more convenient for those who vote anyway.”

During a period of time full of uncertainties, election officials say American voters can count on vote-by-mail programs being “safe and secure.” What’s also certain is that the 2020 Election is another milestone in the centuries-long history of voting by mail.

STEVE, HERE'S MORE PROOF: Voting by Mail Dates Back to America’s Earliest Years. Here’s How It’s Changed Over the Years https://time.com/5892357/voting-by-mail-hi...

Enjoy this Knowledge, "THIS PART OF THE BIG LIE EXPOSED!!!"

Come to think about it Steve, wasn't it Republicans who made these changes to make it easier for all of Pennsylvania's voters, regardless to party?

The only votes that was question was votes from Black and Brown voting Wards. Steve, why are you in favor in stopping my vote from counting?

I just need to know that you are who you say you are and that you only vote once. It's not about colored voters Ron, it's about urban voters. Why do urban voters need to vote by mail? All you have to do is walk a couple blocks to the local precinct.

Steve, wasn't it The Republicans who made these changes to make it easier for "ALL" of Pennsylvania's voters, regardless to party?

The law was passed by the PA legislature Ron, Republicans and Democrats, in an omnibus bill. You do know the practice of putting something in an omnibus bill to get what you want, don't you Ron? The PA legislature didn't anticipate the pandemic and now we are going to change course. That's our prerogative.

This year marked the first time that voters could cast a no-excuse mail-in ballot. With the coronavirus pandemic, more than 3 million mail-in or absentee ballots came in.

Steve, did you know this? The state Supreme Court had ruled that the ballots that arrived during the three-day extension could be counted. Republicans appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which did not block it, but Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito ordered that they be kept separate. Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar had told counties to do so even before the judge ordered it.

Do you understand TRUMP is not coming back as President of The United States of America unless the people says so by the power of THE VOTE?

TRUMP has been FIRED and now you will see him in The New York Courts and also you can find TRUMP in the George's jail house dressed in orange for his actions.

YOU are the one who's obsessed with Trump Ron. WE are working to change our voting laws to prevent any recurrence of the corruption we experienced in the 2020 election.