New laws restrict voter access, disenfranchise thousands in swing states | The Excerpt
On a special episode (first released on August 14, 2024) of The Excerpt podcast: In response to former President Donald Trump’s lies about a stolen election in 2020, many state legislatures implemented new laws restricting voter access to curtail the non-existent fraud. Will this make it harder for registered Americans who are legally allowed to vote to cast their ballots in November? USA TODAY Democracy Reporter Erin Mansfield and her colleagues have spent the last five months digging into legislation and rule changes across the country. She joins The Excerpt to share her team's reporting on how these moves will impact voters.
Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
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Dana Taylor:
Hello and welcome to The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Wednesday, August 14th 2024 and this is a special episode of The Excerpt. In response to former President Donald Trump's lies about a stolen election in 2020, many state legislatures implemented new laws restricting voter access to curtail the non-existent fraud. Will this make it harder for registered Americans who are legally allowed to vote to cast their ballots in November? USA Today democracy reporter Erin Mansfield and her colleagues have spent the past five months digging into legislation and rule changes across the country. And she is reporting with us now. Thanks for being on The Excerpt, Erin.
Erin Mansfield:
Thank you for having me.
Dana Taylor:
You reported on some sweeping changes that have taken place in Iowa, so let's begin there. Who sponsored this legislation and what was in it?
Erin Mansfield:
Yeah. So Iowa's a state that Barack Obama run twice and then so did Donald Trump. And what happened actually just a few months after the 2020 election, Republicans in the legislature spearheaded a very sweeping bill. It had a lot of different parts in it. It had stuff on absentee voting, on early in-person voting, on how late polls are open on election day, on how much time you can take off from work on election day to go vote. It was really sweeping, the Conservative Heritage Foundation to credit for it, Republicans in the legislature said, "No, not so fast. We did this ourselves." And then it was signed by a Republican governor. And this is a trend that we're seeing across the country. Voting restrictions tend to be spearheaded on the right, things making it easier tend to be spearheaded on the left. There are always exceptions to the rule, but that is the general trend.
Dana Taylor:
And how many voters will be affected by those changes?
Erin Mansfield:
Well, in Iowa, there are 2.2 million people registered to vote according to the latest data. But we're talking about people in more than half the states will have some kind of restriction on their voting. The Brennan Center for Justice tracked 28 states. We looked at five specific areas. We looked at 26. Somewhere around half of Americans, depending on where they live, especially if they're in a red state, is going to have some kind of new restriction as opposed to when they were voting back in 2020.
Dana Taylor:
An absentee voting deadline changes in North Carolina are expected to impact Democratic voters disproportionately. How might those changes affect election outcomes?
Erin Mansfield:
So North Carolina is a swing state. It's one of the six or so states that every journalist, every political observer is watching. The path to the White House does run through North Carolina. And then of course there are competitive congressional districts. So those are the races that we'll be watching. North Carolina was another one of those states that passed a pretty sweeping law. It also has a new voter ID law in place, that is the result of a court decision. But in terms of the absentee ballots, what's happening there is they moved up the deadline for returning the absentee ballot. An advocacy group found that about 1,100 people's ballots were discarded because of this in the most recent primary.
Dana Taylor:
New changes to absentee drop boxes in Florida may adversely affect the elderly and disabled communities. What new restrictions are in place there and have other states adopted similar changes?
Erin Mansfield:
In Florida, what they do is their law is requiring more monitoring by election staffers. So in effect, because there's only so much time in a day that you can get someone to actually staff and watch your drop box, it's shortened it so that you're not really going to be able to drop your absentee ballot off at a drop box during regular normal business hours, let's say. In Ohio, they said that each county can only have one drop box. So that means that a county of a million people has as many drop boxes as a county with a much smaller population. And it might not be anywhere near where you live. We saw a lot of states implement these kinds of restrictions.
Dana Taylor:
Now, let's pivot to Arizona, Erin. There's a legal fight there over whether thousands might have to now show proof of citizenship before being allowed to vote in state elections. To be clear, has there been any evidence of voting fraud in Arizona in 2020 or since? And how many people might be prevented from voting because of this ID requirement?
Erin Mansfield:
There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud really anywhere in the country. There are always going to be examples where people dig, dig, dig, dig, and maybe they find that administrative error. Or maybe they do find a case or two of voter fraud. The Conservative Heritage Foundation keeps an entire tally of them. But as a percentage of votes cast, there's no evidence that an election was spoiled because of, "Voter fraud." It's extremely rare. But what's happened is that after the 2020 election when Donald Trump lost, he and a lot of his allies said, "Well, the only way this could have happened was through malfeasance." So a lot of that caught on. Now in Arizona, Arizona has always been at the pinnacle of really trying to crack down on immigration. They're a border state. So what they're doing is they're requiring people to show proof of citizenship in order to register to vote. And that's tied up in the courts.
It's not quite a trend yet to see different states requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote. In the House, Republican speaker Mike Johnson in Congress at the national level, he pushed through a bill with a very similar requirement. It's not going to pass into law. The Senate is probably not going to vote it through and Joe Biden would veto it and frankly, any Democratic president would veto it. It's based on the idea that under federal law, it is illegal to vote if you are a non-citizen. There are only a couple of exceptions where you have these liberal towns in California and Vermont that say, "Well, let's let Green Card holders vote in their city council elections so that they can be involved."
Dana Taylor:
There are 15 states with new voter ID laws in place. How will those affect voters on election day?
Erin Mansfield:
So a voter ID law is a law where you're registered to vote, you're pretty sure you're eligible to vote, you show up, and then maybe you don't have your driver's license or your driver's license expired a couple weeks ago and you haven't gotten a chance to go to the DMV. And those are really important because people actually show up to vote, they're not people who didn't feel like showing up to vote. They show up and they get told, "No, your vote's not going to count." Very often what they're doing is they're filling out these provisional ballots, they're paper ballots, they're set aside. And a poll worker will say, "Hey, come back within the certain time period, come back and fix the issue. And when that happens, then your vote counts." A lot of people aren't fixing the issue.
Since Ohio passed theirs and it went into law in early 2023, we saw 8,000 people's provisional thrown out because of a lack of proper ID. But these are by and large, aside from absentee ballots, voter ID is the other very big one. We saw states like Georgia say that in order to turn in your absentee ballot or to apply for an absentee ballot, you might have to put something on like the last four digits of your Social or a photocopy of your driver's license. Which becomes a new obstacle because how many people have access to a copy machine?
Most of these states, when they pass these laws, they provide a pathway to get a free non-driver ID card specifically for voting. They're not highly utilized. A lot of people will just give up or they won't be able to get to the DMV because they don't drive in the first place. So there are options to get around this, but we spoke to people and it is pretty widely considered a hassle. And if you're for these laws, you might say, "Well, that's a good hassle." You want people to have to work and care about their vote. And if you're against these laws, you want to make it easier to vote and ID laws don't do that.
Dana Taylor:
There's a new law in Georgia, SB 189, that critics say will make voter intimidation easier. In a nutshell, what's allowed under this new law?
Erin Mansfield:
So what Georgia did right after the 2020 election was they allowed average people to file complaints with their county elections office saying, "Hey, John Smith shouldn't be on this voter roll. You should check it out." There used to be limits on it and now there's not. And what they did in this newer law that was signed earlier this year is they codified in law how you can be taken off the voter roll. The Secretary of State's Office, when I interviewed them several months ago, said, this was about making it more clear. This was about protecting the voters. But most people really see this as a way to make it easier to kick people off the voter rolls. There is a huge movement, especially on the right, especially among folks who still question the outcome of the 2020 election. Which let's just be clear, was settled, there was no widespread fraud. Joe Biden won.
But there are still people who are out there who are running post office data sets with the voter registration data set and saying, "Hey, I don't think this person should be there," sending massive amounts of voter challenges out to their county. And a lot of people against it will say, "Wow, what a lot of administrative burden to put on your county elections office." Proponents would say, "Why wouldn't you want to clean your data? Why wouldn't you want better voting rolls?" And that's a huge point of friction. Throughout the country, there is friction about voter rolls. It's normal for dead people to be on voter rolls, they don't call up and say, "Hey, I died." It's normal for people who move to still be on voter rolls. When you call up and you change your address and you do all these things, maybe you get your new TV Guide sent to you, back in the day.
You very rarely call up the elections office and say, "Hey, I moved." So there are people who shouldn't be on voter rolls. It's an actual thing that's happening, but the process is designed so that people are not wrongfully taken off. Because it's designed to think that, "Hey, it's better for someone's name to be on a voter roll in a state where they're never going to go vote and we'll take it off in about 10 years," than for someone to show up, say, "Hey, I registered to vote six months ago," and not be able to cast their ballot. And so there's a really big friction on voting rolls.
Dana Taylor:
According to the National Conference of Legislatures, only three states, Alabama, Mississippi and New Hampshire, do not offer early voting. A significant decrease from the 36 states that did not have an early voting option in the year 2000. So there have been strides made in increasing access to voting. But you spoke to Iowans and others who say it's been a hassle to vote in person.
Erin Mansfield:
Yeah. Some people really just prefer to vote absentee. We saw that in 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic when people didn't really want to leave their homes. And so when I spoke to folks in Iowa who talked about it being a hassle, they had tried to vote absentee, they sent in their application a few days late and so they found out the only option was going in person. In one case, I spoke to a couple in their 90s where the gentleman told me that he had just given up his driver's license. So he went back to the ballot and thought, hey, do I really need to do this? And they decided not to vote. So that's a transportation issue. And that's common whether you're older and aren't driving, whether you don't have a lot of money, share a car, something like that.
In terms of people who do end up voting, who I spoke to, I spoke to a 35-year-old in Cedar Rapids who talked about, "I drive 40 minutes to work, I have to drive 40 minutes home, then I have to let my dog out, then I have to bring the dog back in and then go rush to the polling place." Which some people might say, not necessarily the end of the world, but in no way the easiest way for that particular person to vote. So there are really folks who are concerned about it being harder to vote. And it's something that some people give up on if the election is not competitive enough, if they don't feel like their vote is going to matter that much.
Dana Taylor:
Erin, thank you so much for joining me on The Excerpt.
Erin Mansfield:
Thank you for having me.
Dana Taylor:
Thanks to our senior producer Shannon Rae Green for production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to [email protected]. Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: New laws restrict voter access in swing states | The Excerpt