State bills seeking tighter rules on voting

AUSTIN, Texas — Republican lawmakers in statehouses across the country are moving swiftly to attack some of the voting methods that last year fueled the highest turnout for a presidential election in 50 years.

Although most legislative sessions are just getting underway, the Brennan Center for Justice, a public policy institute, has already tallied more than 100 bills in 28 states meant to restrict voting access. More than a third of those proposals are aimed at limiting mail-in voting, while other bills seek to strengthen voter ID requirements and registration processes, as well as allow for more aggressive means to remove people from voter rolls.

“Unfortunately, we are seeing some politicians who want to manipulate the rules of the game so that some people can participate and some can’t,” said Myrna Pérez, director of the voting rights and elections program at the Brennan Center.

The proposals are advancing not only in Texas and other traditional red states but also in such places as Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania that supported Donald Trump four years ago only to flip for Joe Biden in November.

A bill to eliminate noexcuse mail voting has been introduced in Pennsylvania, though the proposal would need approval from Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat.

Many Republicans have said the new bills are meant to shore up public confidence after Mr. Trump and his GOP allies — including scores of the same legislators now promoting the voting restrictions — criticized the election as fraudulent without any evidence.

Those fraud claims were turned away by dozens of courts and were made even as a group of election officials — including representatives of the federal government’s cybersecurity agency — deemed the 2020 presidential election “the most secure in American history.” Mr. Trump’s former attorney general, William Barr, also said he saw no evidence of widespread fraud.

In last year’s presidential election, nearly 70% of all ballots cast nationwide came before Election Day, with an estimated 108 million people casting their votes through the mail, at early in-person sites or by dropping off absentee ballots. The surge came after states expanded access to mail-in and early voting, with a few states sending absentee ballots to all registered voters in response to the pandemic.

In Texas, the nation’s largest Republican-controlled state, the 2020 election was considered a resounding success by almost any measure. Millions took advantage of early in-person voting to shatter the state’s turnout record, and there were no reports of widespread system meltdowns, voter disenfranchisement or fraud.

But some GOP lawmakers there are seeking new criminal offenses to deter voter fraud, even though actual fraud is exceedingly rare.