Election Reform and Its 2022 Impact
Demonstrators protesting Georgia’s House Bill 531 this past March outside of Atlanta’s State Capitol building. Source: Megan Varner/Getty Images
The historic voter turnout of the 2020 election has resulted in sweeping election reforms across the nation. While measures were put in place to make voting safer and easier during the COVID-19 pandemic, many legislators are intent on keeping these accessibility measures in place. This poses a threat to politicians who stand to lose their positions of power by giving more people the ability to vote.
Specifically, 361 restrictive bills have been introduced in 47 states and 55 restrictive bills have already been passed in 24 states. Those bills have two main focuses: restricting absentee ballots and ramping up voter ID laws. On the other side, 843 expansive bills have been filed in a different set of 47 states that expand rights. These are to ease voting restrictions and expanding voting access. Many bills have also been filed recently to expand voter rights for people with felony convictions.
The most notorious restrictive bill came from Georgia, where Republicans narrowly lost both Senate seats in a contested race and Biden won by just under 12,000 votes. This law will “curtail ballot access for voters in booming urban and suburban counties, home to many Democrats ... makes it a crime to offer water to voters waiting in lines, which tend to be longer in densely populated communities,” according to a New York Times summary of the bill.
The impact of the passage of this bill includes financial boycotts, including the MLB All-Star game leaving Atlanta for Denver and public condemnation from prominent corporations like JPMorgan Chase, Google, and Microsoft.
Other states passing controversial laws include the election overhaul in Iowa, where early voting days and time to request absentee ballots were cut. States like Arkansas, Florida, Texas, and Missouri have also passed or proposed bills that would enforce voter ID laws. This means if someone does not have a valid photo ID, or they do not have a photo ID that is listed in a strict list of acceptable documents, they areturned away from the polls. This is deemed unconstitutional in many local and federal courts, as 11% of the population does not have a photo ID.
The rationale of these laws from Republican legislators is to protect election integrity, but the pushback from Democrats has been that election fraud impacts elections so little, that passing these laws does not combat fraud, but rather prevents key populations from voting. A large part of the narrative that elections are not secure comes from former President Donald Trump as he continues to lament that he actually won the 2020 presidential election.
The reality is that voter fraud is a particularly uncommon issue. Even more absurd is the fact that states passing restrictive bills ran smooth elections. These restrictions, if passed, would heavily increase the burden of voting regardless of one’s political party.
“We have to recognize early on in this next election cycle that this is now the defining feature of the Republican Party, in competitive states and uncompetitive states,” said Marc Elias, a prominent Democratic elections lawyer. “In red states and blue states. They don’t run on economic issues or even social issues. They run on shrinking the vote.”
Democratic congressional members passed a bill on March 3rd, 2021 to make the COVID-19 voting guidelines and other widespread voting access measures a federal, permanent mainstay of American elections. It has yet to be determined how this bill will fare in the Senate, but, if passed, it would override the restrictive state bills being passed.