Vote-By-Mail

“We should have standardize rules and that’s what this bill is doing,” said Stephen Spaulding, senior counsel for public policy at the advocacy group Common Cause. “This hopefully would tamp down on all of that chaotic litigation by getting these rules settled and setting a national standard.

“It’s sort of baffling considering that besides the president, Republicans won up and down the ticket and had record turnout as well,” said Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections at Common Cause. “These are states with Republican election officials and Republican legislatures because these policies have been used by Republican voters that elected those individuals.”

“Republican lawmakers in a variety of states are using the president's lies as justification for making voting harder and suppressing the vote,” Sylvia Albert, the director of voting and elections at the nonpartisan voting rights group Common Cause, told ABC News. “Obviously we saw record turnout everywhere and part of that was because access to the ballot was expanded. And obviously nothing is perfect. We would want improvements and improvements should be made, with consultation with election officials and election security experts and advocates in the community, but that's not what we're seeing. What we're seeing is legislatures adopting the president's lies about there being problems with the election,” Albert added, referring to unsubstantiated claims about voting machines changing votes, fraudulent signature matching processes and other baseless claims promoted by the president.

“There are definitely going to be those same efforts, like we saw during the election, to combat what local election administrators are doing to try and innovate to try and make voting more convenient and safer,” said Anthony Gutierrez, the executive director of Common Cause Texas, a government watchdog group. “Texas is always on the cutting edge of finding new ways to suppress the vote.”

“What we’re seeing in a number of states are clear attempts to either roll back expansions of access to the ballot or add more suppressive measures,” said Sylvia Albert, who runs the voting and elections program at Common Cause.  “What’s happening here is legislatures using propaganda to make changes to election law. Changes to election law should be made very deliberately in concert with election officials in the states, with election experts, with nonpartisan advocacy groups, with security experts,” Albert said. “They are using the president’s rhetoric and all of the undermining of the election as an excuse, and I say excuse because there are no facts to back up what they are saying.”

The Secretary of State doesn’t have a firm certification deadline, “so we have plenty of time,” explains Almeida of Common Cause Pennsylvania. “This is just logistically complicated… and sometimes [it] stretches on past the deadline.” It’s not unprecedented to have a handful of counties missing the Nov. 23 deadline, she says, and none are large enough that their results would flip the outcome. Almeida says it’s also currently unclear if counties involved in pending litigation can certify results, but only Allegheny and Philadelphia County are in that position. Those suits concern a handful of votes that wouldn’t impact Biden’s decisive margin of over 80,000, she adds.