ABC News: State legislatures to start 2021 with focus on election procedures

ABC News: State legislatures to start 2021 with focus on election procedures

“Republican lawmakers in a variety of states are using the president's lies as justification for making voting harder and suppressing the vote,” Sylvia Albert, the director of voting and elections at the nonpartisan voting rights group Common Cause, told ABC News. “Obviously we saw record turnout everywhere and part of that was because access to the ballot was expanded. And obviously nothing is perfect. We would want improvements and improvements should be made, with consultation with election officials and election security experts and advocates in the community, but that's not what we're seeing. What we're seeing is legislatures adopting the president's lies about there being problems with the election,” Albert added, referring to unsubstantiated claims about voting machines changing votes, fraudulent signature matching processes and other baseless claims promoted by the president.

Some of those votes can be attributed to expanded access to absentee voting that Americans in almost every state were given due to concerns about the coronavirus. In 45 states plus the District of Columbia, provisions, some temporary and some permanent, allowed voting by mail without an excuse and other changes were also made to make voting easier.

And while Republicans had plenty to celebrate other than the presidential race in November, in battleground states like Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Arizona and Texas, Republican state lawmakers are taking the baseless claims of fraud and lack of election integrity often promoted by the president and repeated by their constituents, into the 2021 session as arguments for changing election law.

“Republican lawmakers in a variety of states are using the president’s lies as justification for making voting harder and suppressing the vote,” Sylvia Albert, the director of voting and elections at the nonpartisan voting rights group Common Cause, told ABC News.

“Obviously we saw record turnout everywhere and part of that was because access to the ballot was expanded. And obviously nothing is perfect. We would want improvements and improvements should be made, with consultation with election officials and election security experts and advocates in the community, but that’s not what we’re seeing. What we’re seeing is legislatures adopting the president’s lies about there being problems with the election,” Albert added, referring to unsubstantiated claims about voting machines changing votes, fraudulent signature matching processes and other baseless claims promoted by the president. …

While data suggests that Republicans don’t necessarily lose when there’s greater voter turnout, that doesn’t mean that some in the GOP don’t think that, Common Cause’s Albert said.

“… There is this preconceived notion that the more people that turn out, the more likely Democrats are to win,” she said. “We didn’t see that happen this year, but there is still kind of that underlying preconceived notion that really informs the political machinery of the Republican Party trying to stop more people from being able to vote.” …

This year Gov. Greg Abbott extended the early voting period by a week due to the coronavirus, but voters were not able to access some of the expanded vote-by-mail provisions that other states implemented. Texas was one of the many states pre-pandemic where voters needed an excuse to vote absentee, and it did not adapt its law in 2020 to allow coronavirus to count as one of those excuses.

“It’s hard to get worse in Texas, in terms of a bad law,” Albert said of Texas’ stances on absentee voting and drop boxes. “But they are also looking at passing legislation to bar election officials from sending absentee voter applications unless specifically requested by the voter.” …

In Arizona, where the majority of voters used the mail-in ballot process to vote this year, leaders of the state GOP are calling for “common-sense” election reform, although no specific legislation has been introduced or previewed yet. Arizona has a robust vote-by-mail system, which has been in place since the early 90s, with a feature that allows voters to sign up for a “permanent early voting list,” which automatically sends voters an absentee ballot in the mail for every election. The state broke turnout records this year, according to Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, with more than 80% of registered Arizonans casting ballots.

Albert said these methods, although used in Arizona for many years, were somewhat new to many Americans, and that expansion at the ballot box is under threat.

“What they’re doing is they’re seeing people turned out and tried to use different ways to vote and now they are saying, ‘OK, well we want to make sure you can’t use those ways to vote.’”

Albert also said she has been hearing from some red states that implemented sunset provisions for expanded absentee voting in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic and are trying to keep those changes in place, but only under one condition.

“It seems to be as long as it’s not a state where Republicans think Democrats might be able to use it, then it’s OK” she said.