“The election in 2020 helps give them confidence that they could act quickly in expanding access and not have to go slowly,” Sylvia Albert, the director of the voting rights group Common Cause, said of these states.

She said that Kentucky did not fall into the category of true expansion, because its new law will provide fewer options than the emergency orders of 2020. “This might be a political calculation made by Democrats in the state, so that Republicans don’t go even further in suppressing the vote like other states...

"It is an all-sides attack on voting rights," said Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections for the voter advocacy group Common Cause. "The reality is that there are hundreds of suppressive proposed laws around the country.
"Honestly, it's impossible to even keep track of them," she said, "much less fight back."

Aunna Dennis, executive director of Common Cause Georgia, said ID requirements for obtaining absentee ballots, would harm older voters, those who are low-income, and college students because they are all less likely to have driver's licenses or other forms of required identification, such as passports or a state or federal photo identification card.

Georgia Republicans "are saying that voting should be for the 1% and ... for the privileged," Dennis told CNN.

"If the result in Ohio had been that Biden won, it is extremely difficult for me to imagine that we wouldn't have a dozen bills already in the legislature now," said Mia Lewis of Common Cause Ohio, a nonpartisan democracy watchdog. ...

In Pennsylvania, where a slew of lawsuits filed by Trump and his allies challenging Biden's electoral victory failed to pass muster in the courts, Republicans are now targeting the methods by which judges in the state are elected.

"Our understanding is there is a significant...

And so have national advocacy groups. Common Cause runs weeknight phone banks recruiting backers for the bill, and says it has generated 700,000 text messages supporting it. “It’s been a pretty incredible outpouring of support, because we all know what this moment means,” said Izzy Bronstein, the group’s national campaigns manager.

"We're talking purple states, where legislatures feel a little bit of voter suppression can guarantee them an election," Sylvia Albert, director of the voting and elections program at Common Cause, told Newsweek. "We're talking states with Republican trifectas for the most part, because while there might be some concern over what's happening in Michigan, we feel that the Democratic governor would veto bills that would infringe on people's right to vote." "The challenge that we're seeing is an overhaul of our election system without critical...

“These bills are intentionally, horrifically, anti-voter,” Aunna Dennis, the Georgia president of the good-government group Common Cause, said in a statement. “When the 2022 election comes around, we won’t be able to vote in the ways we have used for the past 15 years—and it will be perfectly clear who’s responsible for rolling back the hands of time and returning Georgia to the Jim Crow era status quo of voter suppression.”

"Those who won the election, who have the majority are going to be faced with a choice: do they protect voting rights or do they protect the filibuster rule?" said Stephen Spaulding, senior counsel for public policy & senior adviser at Common Cause. "I don't think saying, 'Oh, but the filibuster,' is going to cut it." As for what Mr. Biden can do, the Brennan Center for Justice wrote in October 2020 that the president could improve cybersecurity and direct more federal agencies to offer voter registration. Spaulding said that the president...

“It would make it all the harder to stop some of these really dangerous voting laws,” said Stephen Spaulding, a senior counsel for public policy at Common Cause. “It would be an accelerant for further voter suppression.”

“They’re creating a line management problem,” said Aunna Dennis, the executive director of Common Cause Georgia, a voting rights group. In the primary, she noted, “we saw people in line for over six hours. Just imagine if we were losing 108 hours of early voting time, of Sunday voting, access to the drop box, how many of those people are now going to have to wait in line?”