GOP lawmakers seek greater control over local elections
Partisan takeovers of election boards. Threats to fine county election officials and overturn results. Even bans on giving water to voters while they stand in line.
In addition to their nationwide efforts to limit access to the ballot, Republican lawmakers in some states are moving to gain greater control over the local mechanics of elections, from voter registration all the way to certifying results.
The bills, which have already become law in Georgia and Iowa, resurrect elements of former President Donald Trump’s extraordinary campaign to subvert his loss, when his backers openly floated the notion of having legislatures override the will of the voters and launched legal challenges against measures that made it easier to vote during the coronavirus pandemic.
“It’s an overreach of power,” said Aunna Dennis, executive director of the Georgia chapter of the voting advocacy group Common Cause. “They’re definitely trying to do an upheaval of our election system.”
In a step widely interpreted as a way to check Georgia’s Democratic strongholds, Republican Gov. Brian Kemp signed a bill Thursday to give the GOP-dominated Legislature greater influence over a state board that regulates elections and empowers it to remove local election officials deemed to be underperforming.
Other states are moving in similar directions.
In Iowa, after left-leaning counties sent voters absentee ballot applications in 2020, a recently signed law would bar election workers from sending the forms out unless requested and threatens to fine officials for violating rules. A South Carolina proposal would give lawmakers new oversight of the members appointed to the currently independent State Election Commission. In Arizona, a Republican proposal that has since died would have allowed the Legislature to overturn election results and appoint its own Electoral College representatives.
The Brennan Center for Justice, a public policy group that supports expanded voter access, tallied more than 250 restrictive proposals in the states, many of them intended to roll back voting methods that were expanded because of the pandemic. That includes early and mail voting options, both of which were popular among voters who sought to avoid virus transmission at crowded polling places.
Republicans have said the bills are meant to shore up public confidence in elections, though members of the GOP have been the leading voices spreading baseless claims that the 2020 election was fraudulent.
Georgia’s new law is among the most consequential for future elections.
The measure will allow the Legislature to select the chair of the state election board and make the elected secretary of state a nonvoting member of the panel, essentially sidelining the chief election officer who was picked by voters. The board could then remove local election officials and replace them.