Despite a Supreme Court decision this week to delay early voting in Ohio, an increasing number of states nationwide are embracing initiatives to allow voters to cast ballots before election day.
“The trend is still to increase early voting … there is a lot of positive momentum,” said Wendy Weiser, director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University Law School.
“Regardless of what happens in Ohio, we’re still going to see a steady march forward on early voting across the country.”
Thirty-three states and the District of Columbia have early voting laws. Three of those states — Illinois, Maryland, and Massachusetts — have new laws on the books for 2014. And Missouri and Connecticut voters will consider November ballot measures to create early voting periods.
Early voting has had setbacks, such as the Supreme Court’s vote Monday to grant a request from Ohio Republican officials. A federal judge initially blocked the law, which would delay the start of early voting in the state by one week, but the high court’s five conservative-leaning justices disagreed and voted to grant Ohio’s request.
The order will remain in effect until the court acts on an appeal by state officials. But because the court won’t hear the appeal until well after Oct. 7, the new start day for early voting in Ohio, Monday’s decision will stand through this year’s election season.
A North Carolina law that curtailed early voting faces similar challenges. Weiser, whose employer has filed an amicus brief on behalf of the challenges, said she doesn’t expect the Supreme Court to weigh in on the issue before the November elections.
Seven other states have passed laws cutting back on early voting days and hours.
Still, gains in early voting in recent years, which accounted for about one-third of all ballots cast in the 2012 presidential election, aren’t expected to decline in November, experts say.
Early voting opponents, almost exclusively Republicans, have complained that efforts to open polling stations early are a costly strain to cash-strapped states. But their critics say the true intent and impact of laws that curb early voting is to make voting more difficult for Democratic-leaning demographic groups, including ethnic minorities, students, voters with disabilities and the elderly.
Democrats fumed over the high court’s decision to shrink Ohio’s early voting window.
“We must be blunt: efforts to restrict early voting have no objective but to deny vulnerable communities the opportunity to be heard in our elections,” said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. “The Supreme Court’s decision helps partisan special interests disenfranchise struggling families and hard-working Ohioans.”
Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz added that “this fight is an example of the GOP’s hypocrisy on voting rights.”
“We will continue to fight for more opportunities for people to exercise their right to vote while Republicans continue to stand in their way,” she said.
Pushback against early voting, even in Republican-controlled states, has waned significantly since the 2010 elections, Weiser said.
“I would be surprised to find somebody saying why they think early voting is bad. Nobody is actually going speak against early voting,” she said. “There still is a lot of consensus around this being the way forward.”
Not all Republicans oppose early voting, as Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., called GOP attempts to fight the initiative a “dumb idea.”
“My position is I want more people to vote, not less,” Paul, a potential 2016 presidential candidate, told the Associated Press in a Tuesday article.
