GOP seeks voters’ help to restrict voting
Republicans hope to toughen election laws via ballot measures in Democratic-led states.
In at least four states where Democrats control the governor’s office, the legislature or both — California, Massachusetts, Michigan and Pennsylvania — the GOP is pursuing statewide ballot initiatives or veto-proof proposals to enact voter ID restrictions and other changes to election laws.
In Nebraska, the party controls the governor’s office and has a majority in the single-house Legislature, but is pushing a ballot measure for a voter ID law because it has been unable to get enough lawmakers on board.
Republicans say they are pursuing the changes in the name of election integrity, and repeat slogans like “Easier to vote, harder to cheat.”
Democrats dismiss the efforts as the GOP following former President Trump’s false claims that widespread fraud cost him the 2020 election. They say Republicans have tried to whip up distrust in elections for political gain and are passing restrictions designed to keep Democratic-leaning citizens from registering or casting ballots.
“It’s depressing that this is the way that [the Trump] wing of the Republican Party thinks they have to win, instead of trying to win on issues or beliefs,” said Gus Bickford, chair of the Massachusetts Democratic Party. “They just want to suppress the vote.”
A common thread among the Republican proposals is toughening voter identification requirements, both for in-person and mail voting.
In Michigan and Pennsylvania, Republicans are trying to get around Democratic governors and their veto pens. Wisconsin Republicans say they also are considering such a strategy.
In both houses of the legislatures in California and Massachusetts, Republicans are a minority, and the road to gain voter approval of measures is uphill.
In GOP-controlled Nebraska, the hang-up is an officially nonpartisan Legislature where more-liberal lawmakers can derail bills that enjoy broad conservative support.
The leader of the California effort, Carl DeMaio of Reform California, said his organization is pursuing a ballot initiative because Democratic lawmakers will never take up his group’s proposals.
“That would mean they’re validating Donald Trump, and they have so much hatred for Donald Trump that they don’t even want to acknowledge that there’s even a problem here,” DeMaio said.
Trump’s false claims of a stolen election have been debunked by his own Justice Department and scores of recounts, and courts up to the U.S. Supreme Court have swept aside his assertions. The government’s own cybersecurity agency declared the 2020 presidential election the most secure in U.S. history.
No state legislature has produced evidence of widespread election fraud. Even so, Trump allies are going state to state, pushing partisan reviews of last year’s presidential election, and at least 10 Republican-controlled states have enacted laws this year that toughen voter ID or signature requirements or pare back opportunities to register to vote or cast a ballot.
Despite the former president’s baseless election fraud claims, DeMaio said Trump’s message is resonating with people who have had doubts about the election system based on their own experiences, such as getting duplicate ballots mailed to them at home.
Yet voter fraud is exceedingly rare, and local election offices typically catch it when it’s attempted.
Democrats say that voter ID laws would do nothing to prevent the little fraud that exists — but that the laws would force the elderly, poor and disabled to go to unnecessary lengths to get proper government-issued identification cards.
Putting election measures to a statewide vote is nothing new.
In recent years, for example, voters in California and Florida restored felons’ right to vote. In 2018, Michigan voters approved a constitutional amendment allowing people to register on election day and request absentee ballots without citing a reason.
The difference this year is that the GOP is using the process in an attempt to enact restrictions it couldn’t pass otherwise. In California, Massachusetts and Nebraska, Republicans are trying to gather enough signatures to get their proposals on ballots in next year’s general election.
In Michigan, Republicans are using an unusual provision in the state constitution to seek enough petition signatures so the GOP-controlled Legislature can pass a veto-proof voter ID bill.
Among other things, the Michigan initiative would prohibit sending mail-in ballot applications to people who have not requested them. Backers of the provision say that widely mailed applications sowed confusion and mistrust in 2020.
“Democratic leadership is out of step with their voters,” said Jamie Roe, a Republican campaign consultant and strategist with the Secure MI Vote initiative.
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat who has vetoed recent GOP voter bills, told reporters this month that there wasn’t one scintilla of evidence of widespread voting fraud in last year’s election, and that Republicans were simply unhappy that Trump lost.
“Our elections work. You don’t like the outcome? Well, then you run in the next election and try to win and earn people’s votes — not cut out a segment of people that cast their ballot as Americans and have a right to do that,” Whitmer said.
In Pennsylvania, where citizen initiatives have no direct access to the ballot, the earliest the Republican-controlled Legislature could put its election changes on the ballot — using a proposed constitutional amendment — is 2023.
The state’s proposals are among several that would go beyond changes to voter ID. The measure would require election results to be audited by Pennsylvania’s auditor general and require paper ballots to bear a watermark and be open to “public inspection” after an election is certified.
The legislation’s sponsor, Republican state Rep. Jeff Wheeland, said it would “give back to the voters surety” that their elections are safe and secure.
Another Pennsylvania Republican, Rep. Eric Nelson, said the measure would let voters “address what many feel is a frenzy of mistrust in our current election system.”
Democratic Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta, referring to Trump’s loss in Pennsylvania, said the measure was coming up only “because some are disappointed in the result of the election.”
Under the proposed initiative in California, counties would be required to do more to clean up voter registration rolls, evaluate wait times for in-person voting in every election, and show how they would fix “unreasonably long” waits.
In Nebraska, groups including Black Votes Matter and the League of Women Voters have joined forces to oppose the Republican-backed ballot initiative.
John Cartier, director of voting rights for the group Civic Nebraska, said the GOP initiative would violate the state’s constitutional protections for voting access. He said there had never been a single conviction for voter impersonation fraud in Nebraska history.
Besides, he said, states such as Arizona and Georgia already have tough voter ID laws, “and people don’t really trust the system there.”
“So passage of a voter ID law doesn’t do anything for trust,” he said. “If anything, it hurts it.”
