Jane Timm for NBC News:
State Republicans spent 2021 hunting for the widespread voter fraud that former President Donald Trump told his supporters cost him the election.
They never found it. Still, the year was characterized by a wave of GOP-led voting restrictions fueled by Trump’s lie — and more election changes are on the horizon next year, according to newly released numbers from the Brennan Center for Justice, which tracks voting bills and advocates for federal election legislation.
So far, Republican legislators in four states — Arizona, Missouri, New Hampshire and South Carolina — have prefiled at least 13 bills that the organization says would make it harder to vote. Nine other states will carry over 88 restrictive bills from the last legislative session. Legislators in five states — Florida, Missouri, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Tennessee — have also filed six bills to initiate or allow partisan ballot reviews. Four would initiate such reviews for the 2020 election results, according to the Brennan Center.
“There is a continual drumbeat from the former president that the election was stolen — this is an issue that state legislators feel pressure from Trump from above and from the base from below that’s demanding that steps be taken,” said Rick Hasen, a professor and election law expert at the University of California, Irvine. “So this is an issue that’s going to remain, unfortunately, front and center.”
This year, 19 states, most of them controlled by Republicans, enacted 34 laws that made voting harder, while many blue states expanded access, particularly to mail voting, according to the Brennan Center’s latest tally. The changes touched off bitter legislative battles and brought major corporations off the sidelines under pressure to declare public support for the right to vote.
“What we’ve seen passed this year is more than a third of all the voting restrictions that have passed in the last decade happened this year,” said Wendy Weiser, the vice president of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center, adding that the count doesn’t fully capture the sheer scale of the changes because of multiple provisions stuffed into large omnibus bills.
The new laws will worsen the already significant partisan, geographic and racial divides over access to the ballot box, experts say. ….