It’s hard to believe anyone would even think of passing such a law or that it would be constitutional. But considering that it’s against the law to give water to immigrants who are dying of thirst in the desert, I’m fairly sure it is. Which is sick.
Meanwhile, it turns out that the GOP’s major talking point about the election — that mail-in voting cost them the election — actually turns out not to have been particularly relevant:
Mail-in voting did not significantly increase turnout nor did it benefit Democrats in the 2020 election, a new study has found, undermining the talking point, advanced by Donald Trump and others, that mail-in ballots cost him the election.
States that required an excuse to vote by mail saw increases in turnout similar to those that did not, the researchers from Stanford found. In Texas, where only voters ages 65 and up can vote by mail without an excuse, Democratic turnout did not “substantially increase” relative to Republican turnout.
“Despite the extraordinary circumstances of the 2020 election, vote-by-mail’s effect on turnout and on partisan outcomes is very muted,” the researchers wrote. “Voter interest appears to be far more important in driving turnout.”
Those findings challenge the conventional wisdom that has emerged after Joe Biden’s victory in November. Republicans have repeatedly pointed to the decision to expand vote by mail – a choice driven largely by the Covid-19 pandemic – as a major reason Trump lost the election. They have filed a flood of bills in statehouses seeking to restrict voting, several of which take aim at mail-in voting specifically. In Georgia, for example, there are proposals to require voters to provide identification information as well as an excuse when they vote absentee, which would end the no-excuse policy Republicans adopted there in 2005.
The Stanford findings also come amid an effort by Democrats in Congress to push nationwide changes that would require states to offer no-excuse balloting nationwide. Republicans staunchly opposed that effort, saying it is part of a broader set of reforms to help Democrats’ political prospects.
What this means is that making it easier to vote should not be a partisan issue, even for the wingnuts who want to suppress the vote, because cutting off mail-in voting will end up hurting their own voters too.
Of course, they are just trying to make voting so hard that only rich white people can do it but they really should think twice. A lot of rich white people are sick of their craziness too these days.