OKLAHOMA EXTENDS EARLY VOTING ONE DAY

Republican-controlled legislature bucks national trend of tightening election rules

On Election Day last year, state Rep. Jon Echols was mortified to see a 3 1⁄2-hour line to vote in his district, which stretches from the edge of Oklahoma City’s urban core into suburban neighborhoods that give way to wide stretches of rural land.

A nation like the U.S. — with “real, free and fair elections,” Echols said — shouldn’t make people wait so long to participate in democracy.

“We should all be humiliated that we had that,” Echols said.

What Echols — the majority floor leader of the Republican-controlled Oklahoma House — did after that Election Day revelation stands in sharp contrast to what the GOP has done in many other states: He helped make it slightly easier to vote in deepred Oklahoma.

Gov. Kevin Stitt, a Republican, signed legislation this past week that adds a day to in-person early voting in the state and an extra hour to Saturday early voting, and it also makes changes to ensure mail-in ballots are received in time to be counted. The move comes as voting has become a top issue among Republicans — but in the other direction. Gop-controlled states from Arkansas to Florida have passed laws making it harder to vote, ranging from adding scrutiny to signatures on mail ballots to limiting the time frame drop boxes can be used, moves fueled by former President Donald Trump’s false insistence that he lost his re-election bid because of fraud.

In Oklahoma, where Republicans feel little threat from Democrats, the party is acknowledging that easing access to the ballot may increase turnout.

While restrictions in Georgia led Major League Baseball to move the All-star Game, and Texas’ proposed legislation has sparked protests in the streets and from major corporations like American Airlines, Oklahoma’s modest changes drew little controversy. They came in a state worried about its perennially low turnout rate — only 55 percent of the eligible population voted in last year’s presidential election, the lowest in the country, according to Electproject.org, which tracks turnout since the country’s founding. Nationally, more than two-thirds of voters cast ballots.

Oklahoma’s entire delegation in the U.S. House — all Republicans — heeded Trump’s call about fake election fraud and voted against certifying the Electoral College votes on Jan. 6, and two dozen Republican state lawmakers urged them in a letter to do so. But the bill to expand early voting sailed through the House and Senate with just a handful of opposing votes.

Chad Alexander, a GOP strategist and former chair of the Oklahoma Republican Party, said he thinks part of the reason the measure faced little opposition is that one extra day of early voting isn’t likely to slow the Republican dominance in the deep-red state.

“We haven’t had a Democrat carry a single county in a presidential race in five election cycles,” Alexander said. “Every statewide elected official is a Republican, and they were elected in an off-year for Republicans.

“Oklahoma is very red, and I don’t think this change disproportionately affects either party,” he said.

Even with an extra day for Oklahomans to cast in-person, absentee ballots, Oklahoma’s 4 1⁄2 days of early voting are among the fewest in the nation. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, early voting periods across the country range from four days to 45 days, with the average length being 19 days.