Vote-By-Mail

“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 have,” she said. “But as an election, voter access bill, it is not successful.” While Kentucky’s compromise — expanding voting access while enacting some more restrictive policies in the name of election security — could serve as a model for other Republican-controlled states, it is more likely to be a blip in a year of G.O.P.-led pushes for voting restrictions.

Aaron Scherb, director of legislative affairs for Common Cause, and Jason Snead, executive director of the Honest Elections Project, talked about state election laws and recent changes to Georgia’s voting laws.

However, critics like Stephen Spaulding with the watchdog group Common Cause, call it voter suppression. “In the wake of that record turn-out, we are seeing a backlash in some states that are looking to really curtail that access to the ballot box,” said Spaulding. In Washington, there’s a dueling effort by Congressional Democrats intended to expand voter access. The “For the People Act”, or H.R.1, is a sweeping reform bill that could put an end to those state voting restrictions. “It sets a national uniform standard,” said Spaulding. “So, no matter what zip code you live in, you will have access to those basic standards like two weeks of early voting, vote by mail if you want to do it, and automatic voter registration.”

“It’s not that something bad didn’t happen when we worried something bad would happen. It’s that we did all this hard work to stop the bad thing from happening,” said Sylvia Albert with Common Cause, one of several groups assisting voters who encountered problems with mail ballots.

A month after Common Cause Georgia called on Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to refer to the federal DOJ his investigation of President Donald Trump’s January 2nd phone call with Raffensperger, Common Cause has filed its own complaint with the DOJ. The complaint, filed today, urges the DOJ to investigate whether Trump, Senator Lindsey Graham, Rudolph W. Giuliani and others violated multiple federal laws by attempting to overturn presidential election results in Georgia via the hour-long Jan. 2 phone call to Raffensperger and other events and communications with Georgia officials.

"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 foresight into what the impact could be," Aunna Dennis, executive director of Common Cause Georgia, told Newsweek. "Right now, we see that Republicans are trying to find a solution to a problem that literally does not exist here."