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This USA Today piece highlights Republican efforts to tighten mail vote practices.
I’m quoted in the piece explaining a dynamic that I think extends well beyond mail-in voting. Most restrictions on voting practices – and particularly restrictions that may seem counterintuitive to eligible voters unfamiliar with the process, like failing to count mail ballots that are cast on Election Day but arrive in the mail afterward – are more likely to affect infrequent voters than regular voters.
I suspect that many policymakers and some litigants may be making knee-jerk assumptions about who infrequent voters are more likely to support. I don’t know if conventional wisdom about infrequent voters’ preferences ever truly reflected those preferences. But I know that former President Trump has been particularly credited with reshaping the modern Republican party by energizing infrequent voters. And so I suspect that unnecessary restrictions on voting practices may well have a notable impact on infrequently-voting Trump supporters this cycle.
States Newsroom with a states’-eye view on the federal efforts. Despite 17 charges to date, and hefty sentences in some of those cases, the wheels of justice necessarily turn slowly. And election officials are also not thrilled about the sea of “lawful-but-awful” complaints that don’t rise to the level of a threat subject to federal prosecution.
Rob Richie‘s in the Washington Post this morning talking pollworker recruiting and participatory budgeting and, yes, ranked choice voting.
Good thing about that pollworker recruiting shoutout, too, because it’s a challenge this year.
This NYT piece profiles the dynamics of a primary for a South Carolina House race, in a district without a major-party opponent.
EU parliamentary elections took place yesterday, with some significant wins by “far-right” parties — sufficiently significant in France to drive President Macron to dissolve the parliament and call a snap national election. (Counterpart: in Hungary, Prime Minister Orbán’s party earned a plurality of EU parliament seats, but actually slipped from its prior level of support.)
Meanwhile, Mexican elections show the country heading in the opposite direction.