Voting battles of 2022 take shape as GOP crafts bills

A new wave of Republican legislation to reshape the nation’s electoral system is coming in 2022 as the GOP puts forward proposals ranging from a requirement that ballots be hand-counted in New Hampshire to the creation of a law enforcement unit in Florida to investigate allegations of voting fraud.

The Republican drive, motivated in part by a widespread denial of former President Donald Trump’s defeat last year, includes both voting restrictions and measures that could sow public confusion or undermine confidence in fair elections, and will significantly raise the stakes of the 2022 midterms.

After passing 33 laws of voting limits in 19 states this year, Republicans in at least five states — Florida, Tennessee, South Carolina, Oklahoma and New Hampshire — have filed bills before the next legislative sessions have even started that seek to restrict voting in some way, including by limiting mail voting. In more than 20 states, more than 245 similar bills put forward this year could be carried into 2022, according to Voting Rights Lab.

In many places, Democrats will be largely powerless to push back at the state level, where they remain overmatched in Republican-controlled legislatures. GOP state lawmakers across the country have enacted wide-ranging cutbacks to voting access this year and have used aggressive gerrymandering to lock in the party’s statehouse power for the next decade.

Both parties are preparing to use the issue of voting to energize their bases. Democratic leaders, especially Stacey Abrams, the newly announced candidate for governor of Georgia, promise to put the issue front and center.

But the left remains short of options.

“What we are facing now is a very real and acute case of democratic subversion,” Abrams said in an interview.

Republicans say the bills are needed to preserve what they call election integrity, although electoral fraud remains exceedingly rare in U.S. elections.