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After a record turnout in the 2020 presidential election, Republicans in some states are already signaling that they will take steps that will make voting more difficult in the years to come.
The Republican efforts come after an election in which nearly 160 million people voted, the highest in a presidential election in more than a century. About half of voters voted by mail, a large increase from 2016, while about a further quarter voted in person before election day.
The GOP backlash underscores how ready the party is to quickly and severely cut access to the ballot amid signs of a changing electorate. The unsubstantiated accusations of fraud that Donald Trump and other allies continue to make about the election have offered election officials a rationale for the measures to be taken.
“There will be states where it is very clear that the existing power structure is concerned about their constituents. And part of their job security plan is to make it harder for their constituents to participate, ”said Myrna Pérez, director of the Voting Rights and Elections program at the Brennan Center for Justice.
Two states that appear to be at the center of the push are Georgia and Texas, where Republicans are already pushing for measures to curtail postal voting and other ballot access. The two states, traditionally seen as Republican strongholds, are increasingly seen as politically competitive due to demographic shifts, with the electorate becoming much more diverse. In Georgia, there has been significant growth among eligible black, Hispanic and Asian voters over the past two decades, while Texas has seen an increase in its Latin American population.
“I’m not at all surprised to see what’s going on in Texas and Georgia which I think are about to experience a big change,” Pérez said. “There are dinosaurs who won’t stay in power for much longer trying to suppress votes.”
In Georgia, a state where a record number of voters have voted by mail, Republicans who control the state legislature have said they want to enact a series of new restrictions focused on postal voting. They said they wanted to require voters to submit a copy of their ID along with their ballot in the mail and eliminate the ballot boxes. While Georgia currently allows anyone to vote by mail, Republicans have said they intend to work on a new law that would only allow voters to vote by mail if they have an excuse. Newt Gingrich, the Georgian Conservative and former Speaker of the United States House, complained earlier this month that Republicans were helping Democrats by facilitating the vote.
The Republican push to eliminate mail-in voting without excuse comes just 15 years after the party adopted the practice and passed state law removing the excuse requirement to vote by mail. In previous elections, Republicans across the state have used the practice more widely than Democrats, said Charles Bullock, professor of political science at the University of Georgia.
“Now they are clearly operating on the premise that ‘less votes we win’,” he said. “Making postal voting more difficult, assuming we don’t all stay locked in our homes because of the pandemic, could hurt Republicans more than Democrats. It’s kind of a knee-jerk reaction to an election they narrowly lost.
Helen Butler, executive director of the Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda, a civil rights group that works to expand voter access, asked why Republicans were suddenly interested in restricting access to mail voting. “I’m just going to be honest, more white people used postal voting than people of color, because they didn’t trust the process – now that we’ve trusted them in the process, now they want to come in and change the process. rules, ”she told The Guardian earlier this month.
In Texas, which already has some of the strictest voting rules in the country, lawmakers have pre-tabled several bills with new restrictions. A bill would prevent state officials from sending candidates to vote by mail. The move comes after Harris County election officials attempted to send nominations to the county’s 2.4 million registered voters.
“There will be differently the same efforts, as we saw in the election, to fight against what the local election administrators are doing to try to innovate to try to make the vote more convenient and more secure,” he said. said Anthony Gutierrez, executive director of Common Because Texas, a government watchdog group. “Texas is always at the forefront of finding new ways to suppress the vote.”
Another measure would require state officials to investigate anyone who casts a ballot swearing not to have acceptable photo ID (which is currently permitted by Texas law). The same bill would require the state to regularly compare its voters’ lists with data from the Department of Homeland Security to try to find registered non-citizens, a process that has proven inaccurate in the past. In 2019, Texas officials said they had found nearly 100,000 non-citizens on its electoral rolls, but were forced to withdraw the charge once the data was found to be inaccurate.
This is not the first time that lawmakers have decided to cut access to the vote after a sharp increase in the turnout, Pérez said. After the 2008 presidential election, Republicans took control of state legislatures in 2010 and were more likely to pass voting restrictions in places where there were high minority populations or high turnout among voters. minority voters. “People are not threatened on participation levels until they reach a certain threshold where they can actually disrupt the power structure,” she said.
Keith Bentele, a professor at the University of Arizona’s Southwest Institute for Research on Women who has studied efforts to restrict access to the vote, said it was “extremely likely” that Republicans – who will always exercise enormous power over state legislatures – would enact new voting restrictions.
“Given the extraordinarily intense amplification of the electoral fraud myth by President Trump and his allies that is currently unfolding, it would seem odd that state lawmakers fail to follow through on legislation to address these alleged problems (and in almost all intangible cases) of electoral integrity, “he wrote in an email.
Pérez wondered what kind of message it would send to the American public to see politicians restricting access to the vote so quickly after so many people had used it for the first time.
“How does the American people feel that they have to see our politicians so interested. So brazen in their attempts to make it harder for people to vote? She said. “It’s just going to tell a really ugly story about America.”
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