CITY OKS SWEEPING SCOOTER LIMITS
No riding on sidewalks, strict parking rules look to rein in complaints
San Diego cracked down on electric scooters Tuesday with sweeping new rules that prohibit sidewalk usage, demand scooters be parked in city-painted corrals and require operators to handle complaints about their scooters within one hour.
City officials also plan to shrink the number of scooter companies operating in San Diego to four next month under a new permitting model that will make operators more accountable to the city for self-enforcement.
City Council members unanimously approved the new rules, which they called a compromise between responding to vocal complaints about scooters while still allowing the devices to become a popular new way to get around.
“We all have seen too many abuses by individuals using the scooters under the old framework — underage riders, multiple riders on a scooter, scooters dumped anywhere and everywhere,” Councilmember Joe LaCava said.
Councilmember Stephen Whitburn also praised the new rules as a step in the right direction, but he warned that San Diego may need to consider an outright ban if scooter companies and riders don’t obey them.
“I have heard from elderly residents in my district who were afraid to go for a walk for fear they would be hit on the sidewalk by a scooter,”
Whitburn said. “I have heard from people who have broken bones when they have tripped over a scooter left on a sidewalk.”
City officials expressed optimism that the new rules and more responsible management by scooter companies would make a ban unnecessary.
In addition, Deputy City Attorney Cassandra Mougin said it could be legally treacherous for the city to enact a ban when state law allows scooters. “That’s something we’d need to really dig into and evaluate
absentee ballots. Georgia also made it illegal for anyone other than elections workers to give food or water to voters standing in line and prevents local governments from accepting money from private entities for election administration.
It may take days or weeks for the final turnout numbers to surface, but there was a push on for early in-person voting. Early mail voting dropped dramatically over 2020, the Post said. Election officials cautioned against overinterpreting that. They said Georgia had never been a big vote-by-mail state before the pandemic, which led to an official effort to encourage voting by mail in 2020.
Politico pointed out that Georgia has automatic
voter registration, while many other states don’t, including Democratic stronghold Minnesota. However, Georgia’s automatic registration system had been out of commission for more than a year until it was corrected last month. When it was fixed, registration skyrocketed, according to The Atlanta JournalConstitution.
Along with the new restrictions, Georgia has some expansive voting rules. There’s a provision that requires 17 days of early voting, which includes two Saturdays. Politico says that’s more than Massachusetts (11 days) and New York (nine days), and more than would be guaranteed under the federal voting rights legislation supported by Biden (14 days). However, Georgia does not require early voting places to be open beyond 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.,
while New York and the proposed federal law have expanded hours.
The Post said Georgia Republicans, under pressure from business groups, actually shaved off some of the harsher components of the draft election law, including limits on voting by mail and greater restrictions on voting on weekends. Georgia voters, like those in California and other states, don’t need a reason to vote by mail but they now face more identification requirements.
California, which goes out of its way to make voting easier, sends mail ballots out to all active registered voters.
Mail ballots are limited in Texas. To qualify for one, people must be 65 years or older, disabled or sick, out of town on Election Day and during the early voting period, expected to give
birth three weeks before or after Election Day, or in jail but otherwise eligible to vote.
More than 24,000 mail ballots were thrown out in the March primary, according to The Texas Tribune. That’s 12.4 percent of all mail ballots cast. The rejection rates were much higher in some of the state’s most populous counties.
The U.S. Election Assistance Commission found less than 2 percent of mail-in ballots were rejected statewide in the 2018 midterm election, according to the Tribune. In 2020, it was less than 1 percent.
Nearly 14,300 of the rejected ballots belonged to voters in the Democratic primary, and more than 10,300 were cast by voters in the Republican primary. Given restrictions on who can vote by mail, a large number of those voided
ballots likely were cast by senior citizens.
Many of the mail ballots were rejected because voters didn’t provide ID information when they were submitted, the Tribune said.
A spokesperson for the Texas secretary of state told The Washington Post the problem may have been a poorly designed ballot envelope and a lack of adequate voter education, both of which the official said the state planned to address.
“All of these voters successfully received a mail-in ballot using ID information for the application, which means for the most part the rejections are because the voter simply forgot to include the ID information on the carrier envelope,” according to the spokesperson.
Hopefully, changes will rectify the situation going forward. But consider this: About one in eight Texans trying to vote by mail — who were registered and already provided proper identification once — were disenfranchised because of additional ID requirements.
That had nothing to do with fraud.