When some Republicans objected to the certification of certain states’ electoral votes on Jan. 6, there were two especially strong arguments against them. One was that the Trump team’s legal efforts had run their course, which, having availed him of nothing, established the end of the line.
Even more compelling was the argument that went something like this: Refusing to certify electoral votes tramples on states’ constitutional rights to conduct their own elections. It amounts to their federalization.
The recently House-passed For the People Act, which attempts its own congressional takeover of elections, deserves opposition on exactly those grounds as well.
Among other things, it would mandate that states establish automatic registration for individuals to vote in federal elections, trumping any state laws to the contrary. It would also expand voting by mail for federal elections by preventing states from creating conditions for the use of a mail ballot, including any requirement for identification.
The bill also requires counties to deploy absentee ballot drop boxes for those ballots and would require them to be available for voters to drop off their ballots beginning at a minimum of 45 days out from an election date.
Drop boxes became an issue in more than one state during the lead-up to the 2020 election. In Pennsylvania, for example, the state’s Supreme Court decided that the state’s election code allows counties the discretion to put out drop boxes, even where the statute in question has no language pertaining to drop boxes or the provision of alternative procedures for receiving absentee ballots.
Democrats have seen the court and are raising it. Under this bill, every county in the United States will have to offer drop boxes for mail ballots for federal elections, whether they like it or not, and many states won’t like it. At this rate, Democrats wouldn’t find it a particularly large jump to try making the chief elections officer in a given state be a federal employee rather than a popularly elected state official.
There are some 253 bills in state legislatures that the Brennan Center for Justice says would “restrict voting access” through things such as ID requirements and purges of dead and no-longer-resident voters. The bills’ sponsors would surely counter that they are motivated rather by ensuring secure and fair elections.
To be transparent, if the predicate for these bills is that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, it is a faulty one. But state Republicans supported things like ID requirements long before 2020, and on other issues, such as maintaining conditions for no-excuse absentee voting, there are practical arguments that have nothing to do with suppressing votes that states should be able to decide for themselves.
For example, the Georgia Senate just voted to eliminate no-excuse absentee voting, even though the Republican governor, lieutenant governor, and House speaker oppose the measure.
Georgia Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and other election officials in Georgia support the elimination. “Until COVID-19, absentee ballot voters were mostly those who needed to cast absentee ballots,” Raffensperger said in a statement. “For the sake of our resource-stretched and overwhelmed elections officials, we need to reform our absentee ballot system.”
These are issues for Georgia’s elected officials to resolve, not the federal government.
Know that the Democrats’ strategy here, as it always is in politics, is to establish a novel justification for sweeping action. “We have a raw exercise of political power going on where people are making it harder to vote, and you just can’t let that happen in a democracy because of some old rules in the Senate,” Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar said in a recent interview, in which she expressed support for abolishing the filibuster to get this bill through the Senate.
To the point, Democrats did not need Republicans’ post-2020 election reform push to justify the federalization of elections. The House passed the For the People Act in 2019, too.
In fairness, the newest edition of the bill does offer some relief from federal overreach over the last. The 2019 version required that all ballots used in an election for federal office be printed on recycled paper. This version only requires that they be printed on American paper.
