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Voting

'Dangerous for democracy': Why these GOP state legislatures want to restrict voting rights

Candy Woodall
USA TODAY NETWORK

More than 60 judges across the country rejected or ruled against legal arguments made by former President Donald Trump as he tried to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Though Trump’s court cases have ended, the fight continues in state legislatures where Republicans are rewriting campaign laws, in part, to try to fulfill his political wishes.

In one of his first lawsuits in Pennsylvania — a battleground state that ultimately sent President Joe Biden to the White House —Trump said he wanted to get rid of ballot drop boxes and mail-in voting.

A voter drops a mail-in ballot into a box outside the Erie County Courthouse on June 2.

Now, the Pennsylvania Legislature, and others across the country with Republican majorities in the state House and Senate, are introducing bills that ban or severely reduce the number of ballot drop boxes.

And some states that previously passed mail-in voting with bipartisan support are moving to end the option.

Prep for the polls: See who is running for president and compare where they stand on key issues in our Voter Guide

It’s a highly polarized debate that multiple political science experts have described as “voting wars” that are “dangerous for democracy.”

Democrats compare the new bills to Jim Crow-era legislation that disenfranchise Black voters. They say Republicans want to rewrite the voting rules to make it harder for Black voters to cast ballots because they were a powerful voting bloc in electing Biden and the two Georgia Democrats who flipped the U.S. Senate.

Arizona Senate Minority Leader Rebecca Rios, a Democrat from Phoenix, called her state’s bills “sore loser legislation.”

“We should want as many people that are eligible to vote to vote. We should remove obstacles instead of placing obstacles. But I get it. If you’re not winning at the game, what do you do? You change the rules. And that’s literally all these bills do,” Rios told the state Senate recently.

More:After November election losses — and wins — Republicans in Arizona seek significant changes in voting

But Republicans say the proposed changes to voting laws are driven by a matter of necessary housekeeping and easing the minds of their constituents who have lost faith in the integrity of the election.

Pennsylvania Rep. Michael Puskaric, a Republican from Allegheny County, has moved to repeal mail-in voting, which was passed with unanimous Republican support in October 2019.

But the law became a problem for the party after Trump told Pennsylvanians during every 2020 campaign stop that mail-in voting was fraudulent – something his campaign could not prove in any of its court cases.

Still, it was a claim numerous Trump supporters believed in Pennsylvania and across the country.

Puskaric and other Republicans say their offices have been inundated with calls and emails from constituents who are concerned about election integrity.

From March to December 2020, Pennsylvania legislators collected at least $726,877 from taxpayers in per diem payments, in addition to being among the highest paid in the country. House Democrats received the most. The House chamber at the state Capitol in Harrisburg is shown in this undated photo.

Republicans may feel obligated to do something for those constituents, but election law experts say the solution is not going to be found in restricting voting rights.

Many states are considering making a change from requiring signature verification to asking voters to include a copy of their driver's license or another state ID with their mail-in ballots. Critics say that adds administrative hurdles for voters and does little to increase voter confidence.

The best way for state lawmakers to remove doubt about election integrity is to tell the truth that their states’ elections were managed successfully without voter fraud that affected the outcome of the election, said Eliza Sweren-Becker, voting rights and election counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School.

“State lawmakers introducing legislation to respond to election integrity concerns from voters are the very same lawmakers who undermined confidence by perpetuating the big lie that the election was fraudulent or stolen,” she said.

“The best thing to restore confidence is to stop lying about what happened last year.”

More:Democrats and Republicans are battling over voting rights in Congress and at statehouses. Which side will win?

States of concern over voting

Arizona statehouse

The Brennan Center has compiled a list of 43 states and more than 250 bills that aim to restrict voting access.

Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania — three key battleground states — have introduced the most bills to restrict voting, with 22 in both Arizona and Georgia and 15 in Pennsylvania. 

The states that concern Sweren-Becker the most are those with “a Republican trifecta,” where the GOP holds majority power in a state House, Senate and the governor’s seat.

That includes Arizona, Florida and Georgia, which are battleground states with U.S. Senate races in 2022.

Texas is also showing a “real concerted effort to limit access to voting,” Sweren-Becker said, and has a gubernatorial race in 2022.

After Harris County made changes at the local level to increase voter turnout in Houston and southeast Texas, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott made a push to prevent that from happening again.

Harris County, which is controlled by Democrats and is the most populated county in Texas, tried to send vote-by-mail applications to all 2.4 million registered voters and wanted drive-thru voting in the 2020 election.

“Whether it's the unauthorized expansion of mail-in ballots or the unauthorized expansion of drive-thru voting, we must pass laws to prevent election officials from jeopardizing the election process,” Abbott said this week. 

Texas voting laws are already among the most stringent in the country, and lawmakers are answering Abbott's call to make them even stricter.

Analysts say Arizona, where Republicans have lost both U.S. Senate seats in recent elections, is also introducing some of the most limiting measures in the country.

For example, there are calls for requiring mail-in ballots to be returned by hand delivery, and another bill wants mail-in ballots to be sent by the Thursday before Election Day.

“That’s the earliest date in the country,” Sweren-Becker said.

These efforts are “dangerous for democracy,” according to David Kimball, political science professor at the University of Missouri–St. Louis.

“When you lose an election, the democratic response is to figure out why voters didn’t choose you and work to do better and appeal to voters,” he said. “The undemocratic response is to change the rules so the rules skew in your favor.”

More:Latino civil rights group sues over Iowa's new election law, which cuts early and Election Day voting

A fight over voting in the South

The Florida House meets on the first day of the 2021 Legislative Session at the Capitol Tuesday, March 2, 2021.

Florida Republicans, who control both chambers and the governor's seat, want to remove ballot drop boxes and place new hurdles on mail-in voting, despite opposition from local elections supervisors and advocacy groups.

Supervisors say there were no instances of security problems involving the drop boxes and all were monitored at their various locations.

But Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, has called for a wide-ranging overhaul of the state’s election laws. The revamping in the current legislation also includes making voters refile mail-in ballot requests every election year.

DeSantis has a personal stake in the outcome: He’s up for reelection next year.

But if Republicans are trying to change the rules in their favor, that perception might be skewed, analysts said.

Before 2020, mail-in balloting was perceived to benefit Republicans, Kimball said.

In the 1980s, when President Ronald Reagan signed the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, there was a perception that absentee voting benefited Republicans, according to Derek Muller, a professor at the University of Iowa College of Law and an expert in election law.

Now, he said, the perception is that it’s more helpful to Democrats.

“There’s no question that the narratives about absentee voting have changed dramatically in the last few years, and I think that’s what’s coming to a head in some of these laws right now,” he said.

Muller said he’s also concerned that the consensus over ideas like offering some form of absentee voting seems to be deteriorating as “every sort of nut and bolt of the election system has become a partisan war.”

“I think we’re at an unfortunate point where when Democrats win elections Republicans are convinced that it must have been fraudulent and when Republicans win elections Democrats are convinced it was because of voter suppression,” Muller said.

“And if that’s a sort of zero-sum game between the two sides, I think it’s a really unfortunate place to be.”

More:Calls mount for Republican Rep. Scott Perry to resign for reported role in effort to overturn Georgia election

More:"The system is rigged." How Trump and the Pa. GOP convinced voters election fraud was real

Facing vetoes 

Michigan State House of Representative Chamber in the State Capitol building in Lansing, Wednesday, Jan. 29, 2020.

Republican legislatures in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan are introducing bills to restrict voting access, but they have Democratic governors who would likely veto that legislation

That hasn't stopped the fights in those states. 

In Michigan, House Republicans who introduced election reform bills say they are following the state auditor's recommendations to reduce the risk of ineligible individuals voting in the state’s elections.

But efforts to confirm the eligibility of registered voters drew sharp rebuke from Democratic lawmakers. 

Rep. Matt Hall, R-Calhoun County, said that with “such a large portion of the voter list in question… it jeopardizes trust and integrity. And people lose confidence in the free and fair elections that are a pillar of our democracy.” 

Democratic lawmakers accused their Republican colleagues of crafting legislation based on misinformation about the security of Michigan's election. 

“These bills are nothing more than a smear campaign designed to instill mistrust in our elections and harm our Democratic institutions,” said House Democratic Leader Donna Lasinski, D-Washtenaw County.

Democratic lawmakers also said the measures would erect new barriers to voting and would lead to the removal of lawfully registered voters from the rolls.

More:Republican lawmakers seek to overhaul voting in Wisconsin, including new rules for absentee ballots

Legal challenges are underway

Most states that have crafted voting reform bills haven’t passed them into laws, but Iowa stands out.

A state that has long been a changemaker in presidential primaries became one of the first states in the country this year to restrict absentee voting when Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds signed a law shortening the state’s early voting period from 29 days to 20 days. 

Iowa’s new law is already facing legal challenges, and Sweren-Becker thinks legal cases could be filed in other states, such as Georgia.

Bills that would restrict voting access have passed both chambers in Georgia, and the legislation would repeal no-excuse absentee voting and cut down on Sunday voting. Critics argue the later targets Black churches.

Absentee voting is credited with helping Biden win the state by 12,000 votes. 

Something that has the best chance of passing in Georgia is debated in many states across the country: voter ID.

Georgia already has strict voter ID laws at the polls, and now there’s a move to require verification on mail-in ballots by attaching a photo ID or driver’s license number.

“There’s pretty overwhelming support for that – about 74% of voters in the state support it,” said Trey Hood, a pollster and professor at the University of Georgia. “More than three out of five Black respondents supported that measure.”

“Something will probably pass on voter ID. Some of the more limiting measures will probably fall by the wayside,” he said.

And restricting voting access doesn’t just make it harder for Black people or voters who lean toward Democrats, Sweren-Becker said.

“It makes it harder for lots of different groups,” she said.

“Rural voters might live far away from a post ffice or polling place and find it more convenient to use a drop box. Prior to 2020, mail-in voting was used by Republicans and Democrats alike.”

And in 2020, mail-in voting was a gamechanger for a voting demographic that finally had an opportunity to cast ballots without barriers, and it helped voters cast their ballots during the COVID-19 pandemic.

More:Failing to convince Gov. Kemp to flip election, Trump vows to 'win back the White House' at Georgia rally

Voting rights for the disabled

Voting-rights advocates protest inside the Georgia Capitol against Senate Majority Leader Mike Dugan’s (R-Carrollton) elections bill before its passage in the Georgia Senate on March 8, 2021.

Mail-in voting made a huge difference for people with disabilities, and bills abolishing it could hinder access for tens of millions of voters across the country, according to Lisa Schur and Doug Kruse, professors in the Rutgers University School of Management and Labor Relations.

They have both been studying the effects of voting legislation on people with disabilities.

People with disabilities faced far fewer difficulties with voting in 2020 because of mail-in voting, with 75% utilizing that option, which was also helpful for them during the pandemic, they said.

As of September 2020, more than 38 million people were eligible to vote, and fewer of those voters found it difficult to vote.

In 2012, 30% of disabled people said they faced difficulty at their polling places. That dropped to 18% last year because of mail-in voting.

A Government Accountability Office study determined 83% of polling places across the country had at least one impediment for people with disabilities in the 2016 election. For example, some polling places had heavy doors that open out, making it difficult to use for someone in a wheelchair.

Other bills of concern for voters with disabilities include those that create stricter voter ID laws.

“Many of them don’t drive. If more states require that, that can be a problem,” Schur said.

More:Wisconsin Republicans are considering the counting of absentee ballots before Election Day. Here's why their efforts may fail.

Why this year is different

State Rep. Barry Fleming, R-Harlem, pitches his bill on March 1 proposing broad changes to Georgia’s voting system, particularly for absentee voting.

This is not the first year that Republicans and Democrats have fought about election reform. It’s been going on for decades.

But this year is different, analysts say.

“Unfortunately the efforts to suppress voting rights have a long and storied and ugly history,” Sweren-Becker said. “What sets this year apart is the sheer volume of bills that limit voting access.

"It dwarfs previous years.”

Something else that sets this year apart is the precursor for these changes – a lie that the election was fraudulent, with the outcome and America’s democratic foundation called into question.

Trump complained about mail-in voting early in 2020 and never stopped. Despite all the suspicions, the 2020 election still had a record turnout.

That’s why Barry Burden, political science professor and director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin, isn’t convinced voting reform bills in battleground states is about restoring voter confidence.

“They were confident. They participated at extremely high rates,” he said.

While there are pushes to expand voting rights in states controlled by Democrats, such as Massachusetts, New York and Oregon, most of the activity is in battleground states.

“Having most of the effort in battlegrounds makes it look disingenuous,” Burden said. “It looks like it’s more about controlling the outcome of an election than housekeeping.”

And while lawmakers focus on that, they are neglecting other issues that are important to voters, such as education, taxes and criminal justice, he said.

“It’s sort of a sad fact that the election itself is one of the top issues in the next election," Burden said, "and it’s likely to stay that way because of these voting wars.” 

More:If approved, Republican voting legislation would face a wave of lawsuits in Wisconsin

Includes reporting by USA TODAY NETWORK reporters Andrew Oxford, Clara Hendrickson, Stephen Gruber-Miller, Patrick Marley and the Florida Capital Bureau.

Candy Woodall is a reporter for the USA TODAY Network Pennsylvania Capital Bureau. She can be reached at 717-480-1783 or on Twitter at @candynotcandace.

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