Republicans introduce a torrent of new laws to restrict voting

Source

ON FEBRUARY 18TH Barry Fleming, a Republican state representative from Georgia, introduced a bill to the newly created Special Committee on Election Integrity that, if passed, would limit both early and in-person voting in future elections. Among other restrictions, the bill would eliminate early voting on Sunday, when black churches organise “souls to the polls” events to mobilise congregants. The bill would also oblige voters to show photo identification when casting their ballots, a requirement that political scientists have found disproportionately reduces turnout among minority and young voters.

Mr Fleming’s bill is by no means the only new proposal ostensibly aimed at curbing fraud but in fact intended to make voting harder, especially for non-white and younger citizens, who tend to vote for Democrats. After losing control of Congress and the White House, Republicans seeking to tilt the scales in their favour have found plenty of tools at their disposal. A new report by the Brennan Centre for Justice, a think-tank at New York University, finds that Republican lawmakers across 45 states have proposed at least 253 new laws to make voting harder, up from roughly 35 such proposals at the beginning of February last year. For their part, Democrats have introduced 704 new bills to expand access to the polls. This month last year they had sent only 188 to statehouse clerks.

The proposed bills obstruct voting by, among other things, narrowing who is allowed to cast mail-in ballots, restricting the window of time voters have to request and submit their ballots, and eliminating automatic and election-day voter registration. Republicans have introduced the most bills in Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona—the battleground states that delivered President Joe Biden his electoral-college victory in November. It is probably no coincidence that these states have also seen the most election-fraud claims from the ex-president, Donald Trump, and his allies. (None of them has been substantiated.)

One of the perverse features of America’s political system is that legislators enjoy nearly unrestricted ability to change the laws governing their own elections, and that state legislatures can thus affect the outcome of a presidential election. For decades after the civil war, southern whites used poll taxes, dishonestly conducted “literacy” tests and intimidation to disenfranchise black voters; gerrymandering has long been used by lawmakers in the majority party to stop the minority from gaining power; and today Republicans are going to great lengths to make voting harder for mostly Democratic-leaning groups. They have argued that the moves are necessary to restore faith in the election system—which was damaged, of course, by the lies they and Mr Trump spread about the election being “stolen”. Given the near-absence of voter fraud in American elections, it is hard to imagine such proposals are truly about anything but power.