Conservatives have tried to rig the vote for themselves forever. The have cheating characters.
Feb. 5, 2021, 6:16 PM EST
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.
“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.
•••••
Some states are also attempting to rethink how Electoral College votes are allocated in the presidential contest.
In Wisconsin and Mississippi, Republicans have proposed distributing electors proportionately, based on the results of individual congressional districts instead of a winner-takes-all statewide allocation. It’s a system only Maine and Nebraska use, but that too could change: Republicans in the Nebraska Legislature have proposed giving all their electors to the statewide winner, after Biden won one of the state’s electoral votes.
Lawmakers in Oklahoma and Arizona have proposed cutting voters out of the process, giving themselves power to allocate the state electors to a candidate. Arizona would give legislators the power to override the secretary of state's certification of the vote, appointing electors to a candidate of their own choosing. Oklahoma would give legislators the power to appoint electors unless there is a federal law requiring voter ID and auditable paper ballots, in which case the power would be returned to voters. That bill was sent to committee this week.
Meanwhile, 11 states have introduced proposals to join an interstate compact that would undermine the traditional Electoral College structure. If enough states join, participating states agree to allocate electors to whoever wins the popular vote nationwide.
•••••
No comments:
Post a Comment