Have the Republicans over-reached on these voting restrictions, possible hurting their own voters? It sure looks like they might have, which makes sense since a whole lot of the rules they changed benefited their own constituents.
Greg Sargent notes that they are belatedly becoming aware of it — and it’s too late:
Such a moment comes courtesy of this great new report by Amy Gardner of The Post, about the new voter suppression bill in Florida that Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis is expected to sign. The bill would make it harder to vote by mail in numerous ways, adding curbs on the use of drop boxes and requiring voters to reapply for absentee ballots with each two-year election cycle.
Some Florida Republicans now fear this could unintentionally make it harder for Republican voters to cast ballots. They worry about the provision requiring reapplication for mail ballots every two years — rather than every four years, as previous law had it — fearing it will confuse voters who expect ballots to be sent to them automatically during midterm elections.
This could have a pronounced impact on seniors and members of the military, Republicans fear. Both are GOP-aligned constituencies, and both rely heavily on vote-by-mail.
It turns out some Republicans wanted to address this problem in a surprising way:One former state party official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to relay private conversations said some Republicans briefly discussed whether lawmakers could exempt those two groups from the provision requiring voters to request mail ballots every election cycle. “Key lawmakers said, ‘You can’t do that,’ ” the former official said. “It would raise equal protection problems.”Now, the damage is done, he added. “Now, you’ll have military personnel who might not think they have to request a ballot who won’t get it. And we’ve got senior voters who have health concerns or just don’t want to go out. They might not know the law has changed, and they might not get a ballot, because they’re not engaged.”
This Republican source says Republicans were so worried that this key provision would dampen participation that they talked about getting lawmakers to exempt two of their key constituencies from it, and to selectively apply it to other voters. It wouldn’t pass legal muster and didn’t go anywhere.
That’s quite a glimpse into the mind-set of Republicans supposedly motivated by a pious desire to restore election integrity!
As it is, the new provisions would heavily target African American and newly registered voters, according to University of Florida political scientist Daniel A. Smith, whose calculations show that those demographics disproportionately relied on vote-by-mail in 2020.
However, Smith’s research shows Republican voters also relied to an unexpected degree on vote-by-mail — hence these new GOP fears. As Smith notes: “The GOP leadership has discounted any collateral damage, calculating that the benefit to the party outweighs any harm done to its party faithful.”
I had always understood that absentee voting benefited the Republicans and they were always the ones pushing it. Now that the Democrats have been able to get their voters to do it too they don’t like it. But what will that do to the GOP voters who have come to depend on it? I guess we’ll find out.
Honestly, I think the bigger problem is the new move to have partisan “poll watchers” be allowed to harass and intimidate voters and the move to have partisan weirdos count the votes. I don’t know where that’s going but it’s very dangerous.