President Trump’s barrage of losses in court cases trying to undermine the election has not stopped Republicans from turning to battles they might be able to win — attempts to limit or undermine the future use of the vote-by-mail ballots that so infuriated Mr. Trump.
Absentee ballots constituted nearly half the votes cast in the 2020 election, and the experiment in mass voting by mail has been viewed by election experts as a remarkable success, one that was less prone to errors than expected and had almost no documented fraud. But that has not stopped Republican critics eager to follow the president’s lead.
This week in Georgia, as the president rages against the election he lost and the members of his party who oversaw it there, Republican state senators promised to make getting and casting mail ballots far more difficult.
The Georgia state senators pledged on Tuesday to eliminate no-excuse absentee voting, require a photo ID to obtain a ballot, outlaw drop boxes and scrap a court agreement to quickly tell voters about signature problems on ballots so that they could be fixed….
And Georgia has company. In Pennsylvania, Republicans preparing for the legislative session that convenes on Jan. 11 are seeking co-sponsors for bills to stiffen identification requirements for mail ballots, tighten standards for signature matching and, in one case, to repeal the law that allows anyone to vote absentee without an excuse.
Michigan Republicans have signaled that they want to review a 2018 ballot initiative approved by two-thirds of voters that authorized no-excuse absentee balloting as well as same-day registration and straight-ticket voting….
“The campaign to delegitimize and overturn the election has become a convenient justification for those who want to restrict access to voting,” said Wendy R. Weiser, who directs the democracy program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. “Even those who acknowledge that the president lost the election are using the same kinds of allegations to roll back voting rights.”