New GOP efforts to make it harder to vote

[cow451]

Anybody else smell a lawsuit?

The plan is working!

 

[essentialsaltes]

Anybody else smell a lawsuit?

Then we can see Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act thrown out by the Supreme Court.

 

[essentialsaltes]

Trump backers push election change that would make counting slower, costlier and less accurate
Ditching machine tabulators and replacing them with people counting votes by hand has become a new fixation on the right.

Legislators in at least six states this year have introduced proposals to prohibit the use of ballot tabulating machines. Local jurisdictions in Nevada, New Hampshire and elsewhere have also been considering similar measures. The proposals stem from baseless conspiracy theories stoked by former President Donald Trump since the 2020 election, in which he and others contended that election machines around the country were hacked and votes were flipped.

More than 90 percent of registered voters live in jurisdictions where in-person voters use a paper ballot of some form, but hand counting of ballots is extremely rare.

Election officials say there is a very good reason for that.

Many of those jurisdictions that hand count ballots have small numbers of voters — hundreds, not thousands. Moving to hand counting in midsize jurisdictions like Nevada’s Nye County, let alone a megacounty like Maricopa County, Ariz., where more than 2 million people cast ballots in the 2020 election, would spike the cost of elections, drastically extend the amount of time it takes to get results and make final tallies potentially less accurate.

 

[essentialsaltes]

Wisconsin Elections Commissioner stands by voting comments​

Spindell, who is white, says in the email that Republicans “can be especially proud of the City of Milwaukee (80.2% Dem Vote) casting 37,000 less votes than cast in the 2018 election with the major reduction happening in the overwhelming Black and Hispanic areas.”

--

Note, he's not saying that Milwaukee voters switched from D to R, just that fewer people in Milwaukee voted at all (especially in the black and brown parts of town). This is what has him beaming with pride.

 

[Desk trauma]

They keep saying the quiet part loudly.

 

[tz620q]

Wisconsin Elections Commissioner stands by voting comments​

Spindell, who is white, says in the email that Republicans “can be especially proud of the City of Milwaukee (80.2% Dem Vote) casting 37,000 less votes than cast in the 2018 election with the major reduction happening in the overwhelming Black and Hispanic areas.”

--

Note, he's not saying that Milwaukee voters switched from D to R, just that fewer people in Milwaukee voted at all (especially in the black and brown parts of town). This is what has him beaming with pride.

Milwaukee population in 2018 - 591,961
Milwaukee population in 2021 - 569,330
So it seems that if this trend continued through 2022, there would have been about a 37,000 person reduction in population. Maybe this bias-challenged individual should realize there are other reasons for a reduction in voting than some great exodus from the Democratic party.

 

[essentialsaltes]

GOP states press voter photo ID rules, with unclear effects​

The free state photo IDs the law provides won’t be available until April 7, the law’s effective date, despite military and overseas voting already having begun and early, in-person voting set to start April 4.

 

[essentialsaltes]

Democrats scramble to reach voters after Florida cancels mail-in ballot requests​

More than a million mail-in ballot requests were canceled in three counties in January. Democrats say they're working to stem the effects of the change.

The mass cancellations were to comply with a 2021 election law that added new restrictions to mail-in voting. The legislation — which was celebrated by Gov. Ron DeSantis and slammed by voting rights advocates as discriminatory — cut the duration of mail-in ballot requests in half from four years to two. It also required that existing requests for mail ballots be canceled at the end of 2022, forcing election workers to cancel millions of requests and start their lists of vote-by-mail voters from scratch.

Miami-Dade County received 438,000 mail ballot requests at the end of last year [which were all cancelled by the new law]; by July 1, its mail ballot list had more than 92,000 voters.

Democrats in the state say the change disproportionately affects their voters, who have embraced mail-in voting more than Republicans since 2020, when then-President Donald Trump falsely claimed mail-in voting was rife with fraud. [In the past] Florida Republicans had long bested Democrats in the state with mail-in voters, but in recent years Democrats invested in promoting mail-in voting.

 

[FredVB]

The parties have a common history and many approaches in common, while having those who vote keep thinking the parties are just at contrary purposes, when really it is a difference in which individuals are put in power that will still work at those same things they have in common. And we are led to think we keep needing them. God would have us know it is God we really need, and to live accordingly.

 

[mark46]

Democrats scramble to reach voters after Florida cancels mail-in ballot requests​

Democrats in the state say the change disproportionately affects their voters, who have embraced mail-in voting more than Republicans since 2020, when then-President Donald Trump falsely claimed mail-in voting was rife with fraud. [In the past] Florida Republicans had long bested Democrats in the state with mail-in voters, but in recent years Democrats invested in promoting mail-in voting.

That's a short period of time.

For decades, mail-in voting favored Republicans.

It is not at all clear that limiting mail-in voting will help Republicans. The elderly and the military are usually the largest proportion of mail-in voting.

The Democrat will concentrate on voting booth voting, early and on the day. They have a much better chance of bringing their folks to the polls than do Republicans.
======
Of course, FL is now a solidly Republican state for many reasons, including the Democrat stand on immigration issues.

 

[FredVB]

It does seem that the Republican party is so connected with the support there is for Trump, now. What is curious to consider is how well the party will do whenever Trump is gone. It might be declining.

 

[FireDragon76]

It does seem that the Republican party is so connected with the support there is for Trump, now. What is curious to consider is how well the party will do whenever Trump is gone. It might be declining.

That was what was predicted some time in the early 2000's. Trump brought a certain charisma or style that attracted alot of what used to be called "low information voters" to the Republican party. Alot of these types of people, if they voted at all, were swing voters.

 

[FredVB]

That was what was predicted some time in the early 2000's. Trump brought a certain charisma or style that attracted alot of what used to be called "low information voters" to the Republican party. Alot of these types of people, if they voted at all, were swing voters.

There is still a shift, persisting currently, with decline of core voters of the Republican party.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/16/politics/demographic-changes-voters-fault-lines/index.html

 

[essentialsaltes]

The GOP Is Pushing to Depress Student Voting​

Almost a quarter million voters turned out in Dane, home of University of Wisconsin, for a spring special election — [more than Milwaukee]. A staggering 82 percent of Dane voters cast ballots to elevate liberal Judge Janet Protasiewicz to the state Supreme Court.

Coming on the heels of the 2022 midterms — when Wisconsin led the nation in youth turnout in the country — the GOP judicial candidate’s April humiliation stunned the party. Former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker put it plainly: “Young people are the issue.”

[Surely the GOP will reflect on why its policies do not appeal to young voters and seek to engage them with conservative ideas geared toward the concerns of the youth!]

Across the country this year, targeted efforts to disenfranchise student voters have ramped up as election after election proved just how critical the bloc is to guarantee Democratic victories. With encouragement from influential GOP operatives, those efforts — which met with middling success in ‘23 — are poised to escalate in 2024.

[Oh well!]

Hess points to GOP efforts over the past several years to make it harder to register, eliminate drop boxes, shorten early voting, increase residency requirements, and reduce polling locations — mostly in Madison and Milwaukee.

Months after their April routing, party functionaries at the Wisconsin GOP’s convention mulled a resolution demanding college students to vote absentee in their hometowns

In New Hampshire, House Republicans introduced a bill that would have prohibited any college students who pay out-of-state tuition from voting

The same month, a GOP lawmaker in Texas introduced a bill that would ban polling places at colleges and universities.

In Idaho ... a law set to go into effect Jan. 1, which bans the use of student IDs to register to vote or cast a ballot, is being challenged in lawsuits

 

[Hans Blaster]

The GOP Is Pushing to Depress Student Voting​

Almost a quarter million voters turned out in Dane, home of University of Wisconsin, for a spring special election — [more than Milwaukee]. A staggering 82 percent of Dane voters cast ballots to elevate liberal Judge Janet Protasiewicz to the state Supreme Court.

Coming on the heels of the 2022 midterms — when Wisconsin led the nation in youth turnout in the country — the GOP judicial candidate’s April humiliation stunned the party. Former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker put it plainly: “Young people are the issue.”

[Surely the GOP will reflect on why its policies do not appeal to young voters and seek to engage them with conservative ideas geared toward the concerns of the youth!]

Across the country this year, targeted efforts to disenfranchise student voters have ramped up as election after election proved just how critical the bloc is to guarantee Democratic victories. With encouragement from influential GOP operatives, those efforts — which met with middling success in ‘23 — are poised to escalate in 2024.

[Oh well!]

Hess points to GOP efforts over the past several years to make it harder to register, eliminate drop boxes, shorten early voting, increase residency requirements, and reduce polling locations — mostly in Madison and Milwaukee.

Months after their April routing, party functionaries at the Wisconsin GOP’s convention mulled a resolution demanding college students to vote absentee in their hometowns

In New Hampshire, House Republicans introduced a bill that would have prohibited any college students who pay out-of-state tuition from voting

The same month, a GOP lawmaker in Texas introduced a bill that would ban polling places at colleges and universities.

In Idaho ... a law set to go into effect Jan. 1, which bans the use of student IDs to register to vote or cast a ballot, is being challenged in lawsuits

Voting true absentee is a pain. (I guess that's the point, isn't it.) I did it in grad school as an out of state student. Students can always register to vote in their home towns if they so choose, but they go to college for 4 or 5 years and are part of the community where the college is. For the student voters it likely matters more to them who the mayor and city council are in their college towns than in their home towns (and if it isn't there is always the absentee ballot). Instate students don't affect the results of statewide election (president, governor, senator, etc.). State reps will notice the votes in campus precincts, but not the handful of absentee student votes in back-home districts.