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While Republicans in Georgia are having a backlash over new sweeping election restrictions, activists in other states are escalating efforts to combat similar restrictions in other states.
Texas and Arizona have emerged as two of the next big battlegrounds for voting rights. Texas Republicans passed laws last week that would, among other things, restrict early voting hours, prohibit voting through, and allow partisan poll workers to track voters in the election. In Arizona, Republicans are conducting a presidential race ballot review while promoting legislation that would make it more difficult to vote by mail.
According to a record by the Brennan Center for Justice, lawmakers introduced 361 bills to restrict access to the ballot in any way. Fifty-five of these bills are advancing legislation.
After companies like Delta and Coca-Cola were criticized for waiting too long to speak out against Georgian legislation, proponents were encouraged by the companies’ swift condemnation of the Texan move. Texas-based American Airlines said Thursday it was “strongly against” Texas law. Microsoft and Dell have also spoken out against the measures. Major League Baseball announced Friday that it would be moving the All-Star game out of Atlanta in response to Georgia’s sweeping new law.
Joe Straus, the former Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives, also spoke out against the measures on Thursday and tweeted that companies had “good reasons” to oppose the bill. “Texas shouldn’t be going the same way Georgia is. It’s bad for business and especially bad for our citizens, ”he said.
Anthony Gutierrez, the executive director of the Texas chapter of Common Cause, a government monitoring group, said these statements were significant and could help sway lawmakers, including Dade Phelan, the Texas House spokesman. Gutierrez has been involved in voting disputes for more than a decade and said he could not recall another case where there was widespread opposition to the now existing bills.
“A lot of us think Texas is the next Georgia, but I think the big difference is that all of these celebrity voices come in much earlier,” he said.
A voter shows his ID to a Harris County election clerk before voting in Houston, Texas on July 14, 2020. Photo: David J Phillip / AP
Attention to Texas, one of the lowest ranked states for voter turnout in 2020, escalated this week after lawmakers tabled a measure apparently aimed at preventing local officials in urban areas from taking creative measures to expand the area To seize electoral access. The law not only blocks drive-through and 24-hour voting, two popular options offered in 2020 in Harris County, home of Houston, but also prevents officials from sending postal ballot requests to voters. In addition, the bill places new requirements on those who help voters and gives local election officials less flexibility in assigning voting equipment.
The measures would clearly empower the observers of partisan polls. One measure enables election observers to track voters in elections if they “reasonably believe” that they are receiving illegal support. Another provision makes it difficult for local constituency officials to remove election observers during voting.
“It’s a big deal because Texas has a lot of incidents of election observers who misbehave and need to be disturbed for good reason,” Gutierrez said.
For me, Texas has the most troubling bill I’ve ever seen. David Becker
“This is a violation of privacy, a violation of voting secrecy, it could potentially be very intimidating,” said David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, who works with Republican and Democratic election officials around the country. “For me, Texas has the most troubling bill I’ve ever seen.”
In Arizona, a state that Joe Biden won by just over 10,000 votes in 2020, activists are also pushing for a range of anti-voting measures. A priority is a bill that makes changes to a list that voters can join to automatically receive a postal ballot paper each time they vote. About 75% of Arizona voters are on the list, according to the Associated Press (AP), but lawmakers want to allow the state to remove voters from the list if they fail to vote in the mail in at least two consecutive elections. Around 200,000 voters who did not vote by mail in 2018 or 2020 would be removed from the list, according to the AP.
“This is a really important part of our electoral system. It’s been around for more than a decade. People trust it, they love to use it, ”said Emily Kirkland, Progress Arizona executive director, who opposed many of the proposed changes. “This year, Republicans in the state parliament are attacking it, obviously fueled by all the conspiracy theories we saw during and after the elections.”
Proponents are also concerned about another bill requiring voters to include either their driver’s license or voter registration number along with their birthday when returning a postal ballot (Arizona currently uses signature matching to verify the identity of inbound voters). Those requirements would cause trouble for many Native American voters, said Torey Dolan, an Indian Legal Clinic scholar at Arizona State University.
Dolan said it can be difficult to find a voter registration number online, noting that the bill currently does not allow the use of tribal ID cards as a form of identification. She found that many indigenous elders were not born in hospitals and have delayed birth certificates and therefore have approximate birthdays.
“Arizona electoral law was not equally accessible to Native American people prior to this cycle,” she said. “The more barriers rise, the larger this access gap becomes.”
On November 4, 2020, officials at the Maricopa County Recorder office in Phoenix, Arizona will count the ballots. Photo: Matt York / AP
Legislative aside, Arizona Republicans are also working harder to fuel uncertainty about the results of the 2020 election. The Republican-controlled Senate is conducting a recount and review of 2.1 million ballots in the most populous county, Maricopa, months after the state confirmed the election. The county has already completed an inspection of its voting equipment which found that the ballot papers were counted correctly.
One of the four firms the Senate has hired to lead the review is headed by Doug Logan, who has publicly stated that there was widespread electoral fraud in 2020 and other conspiracy theories about the elections, according to the Arizona Mirror have put forward.
“Can you imagine the outcry if Democrats in Pennsylvania, Michigan or Wisconsin decided in 2016 in a Senate to start a ballot review from an already certified election six months after an election, and the people did? already in office? “Said Becker.
“And then you hired the advisor, someone from another state, who publicly argued that Hillary won the election and the election was fraudulent? It’s a reflection of what’s happening in Arizona right now. “
