Republicans push voter integrity reform

 Politico:

Republican legislators across the country are preparing a slew of new voting restrictions in the wake of former President Donald Trump’s defeat.

Georgia will be the focal point of the GOP push to change state election laws, after Democrats narrowly took both Senate seats there and President Joe Biden carried the state by an even smaller margin. But state Republicans in deep-red states and battlegrounds alike are citing Trump’s meritless claims of voter fraud in 2020 — and the declining trust in election integrity Trump helped drive — as an excuse to tighten access to the polls.

Some Republican officials have been blunt about their motivations: They don’t believe they can win unless the rules change. “They don’t have to change all of them, but they’ve got to change the major parts of them so that we at least have a shot at winning,” Alice O’Lenick, a Republican on the Gwinnett County, Ga., board of elections in suburban Atlanta, told the Gwinnett Daily Post last week. She has since resisted calls to resign.

The chair of the Texas Republican Party has called on the legislature there to make “election integrity” the top legislative priority in 2021, calling, among other things, for a reduction in the number of days of early voting. Jason Miller, a top Trump adviser, told the conservative site Just The News that Trump plans to remain involved in "voting integrity" efforts, keeping the issue at the top of Republicans' minds. And VoteRiders, a nonprofit group that helps prospective voters get an ID if they need one to cast a ballot, said it is expecting a serious push for new voter ID laws in at least five states, while North Carolina could potentially implement new voter ID policies that have been held up in court.

Voter ID laws are usually very popular among the general public — a 2018 Pew Research poll found that three-quarters of Americans surveyed supported laws requiring voters to present a photo ID — but activists say they are problematic for several disparate groups of voters.

“They are students and other young people, they’re communities of color, they’re older adults who are no longer driving, people with low income, people with disabilities,” said Kathleen Unger, the founder of VoteRiders. VoteRiders estimated that up to 25 million voting-age Americans lacked a government-issued photo ID.
...

It is racist nonsense to suggest that blacks and Hispanics or older people are unable to get a voter ID.  They already are using ID for numerous transactions.  If there are any people who do not have ID's they can easily get one before voting.  There needs to be changes to the law that facilitated vote fraud, particularly with mail-in ballots without signature matches.

The suggestion that Trump's claims are meritless is without evidence since none of the court cases considered the claims on the merits.  They dismissed them mainly on procedural grounds.  For example in Pennsylvania and Georgia the voting rules were changed with unconstitutional means.  I think the GOP's biggest mnistake was not challenging these unconstitutional changes before the election.

There are still millions of voters who think the election was stolen and they are not going to be swayed by media outlets calling the claims meritless until there is an ajudication of their claims on the merits.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Bin Laden's concern about Zarqawi's remains