Tag: absentee voting

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This Republican governor is bucking the trend and expanding voting rights

It’s not exactly a secret that Republican-controlled legislatures and governors have gone all-in on voter suppression as their means to retain power. However, one Republican governor is an exception to the rule.

Governor Phil Scott just recently signed into law a bill that expands voting rights in the state of Vermont. According to Axios:

The new Vermont law requires the state to send mail-in ballots to all registered voters and give voters the option to fix or “cure” a ballot if it’s submitted incorrectly and considered defective. The law will also allow municipalities to send mail-in ballots for local races.

In a statement, Scott said that he believes “making sure voting is easy and accessible, and increasing voter participation, is important.”

The governor actually wants the legislature to go even further than the bill provides. He is asking state lawmakers to expand its provisions to include primaries and local elections. (The bill allows but does not require municipalities to send mail-in ballots for local elections.)

A former Republican stronghold

You may be surprised to hear that the state with Bernie Sanders representing it in the Senate has a Republican governor, but Vermont was actually a Republican stronghold not very long ago. In fact, Vermont voted Republican in every presidential election from 1968 through 1988. Its transition began in 1992 when Bill Clinton was the first Democrat to carry the state since LBJ. That election proved to be a turning point. No Republican presidential candidate has won the state ever since.

Just as the “Solid South” turned from solidly Democratic to solidly Republican, New England has moved in the opposite direction. Vermont is now one of the most Democratic states in the country at the presidential level – although it still elects moderate Republicans as governor. Prior to electing Bernie Sanders, Vermont sent Jim Jeffords to the Senate, a Republican-turned-independent who caucused with Democrats.

Moderate Republicans are nearly extinct

Phil Scott is less of a template and more of a dying breed. As governor, he supported Donald Trump’s impeachment. The only other Republican governor to publicly back impeachment – Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker – is another moderate Republican from New England.

Essentially, Scott and Baker represent entirely different parties from the national GOP – one that is rooted in the party’s past.

The prototypical governor in the Republican Party today looks more like Florida’s Ron DeSantis, Georgia’s Brian Kemp, and Texas’ Greg Abbott. All three either back voter suppression bills or already signed them into law.

Rather than fight an all-but-assured losing internal battle over the soul of the Republican Party – a battle that Trumpists have won decisively – maybe it’s time for moderate Republicans like Phil Scott and Charlie Baker to lead a new conservative party that actually supports democracy?

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Texas AG says Trump would have lost state if not for voter suppression

In another example of Republicans saying the quiet part out loud, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said in an interview that Joe Biden would have won the Lone Star state if not for voter suppression.

Last fall, Harris County – the largest county in Texas and home to Houston – wanted to mail absentee ballot applications to all of the county’s registered voters. Throughout the country, absentee voting was popular during the COVID-19 pandemic. Several counties and states took the initiative to make the process of mail voting easier.

Texas Republicans would have none of that, though, as the formerly reliably red state transitions to a purple hue. Paxton’s office sued Harris County, and the conservatives on the Texas Supreme Court killed the plan.

According to Newsweek:

“If we’d lost Harris County—Trump won by 620,000 votes in Texas. Harris County mail-in ballots that they wanted to send out were 2.5 million, those were all illegal and we were able to stop every one of them,” Paxton told former Trump adviser Steve Bannon during the latter’s War Room podcast on Friday.

“Had we not done that, we would have been in the very same situation—we would’ve been on Election Day, I was watching on election night and I knew, when I saw what was happening in these other states, that that would’ve been Texas. We would’ve been in the same boat. We would’ve been one of those battleground states that they were counting votes in Harris County for three days and Donald Trump would’ve lost the election,” the Republican official said.

So here we have an elected statewide official bragging on a podcast with an avowed white nationalist that he overruled a local elected official and successfully rigged an election, denying Harris County voters an opportunity to simply receive a mail-in ballot application.

Paxton, by the way, was indicted on securities fraud. Former aides to the Texas AG have accused him of “violating federal and/or state law including prohibitions related to improper influence, abuse of office, bribery and other potential criminal offenses.” Amazingly, he continues to serve as the top law enforcement officer in the state of Texas.

Meanwhile, even as state-level Republicans rush to pass as many voter suppression bills as possible across the country, Senate Democrats (namely Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema) are dragging their feet on a national voting rights law that would protect our democracy.

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Arizona GOP curbs mail voting in latest voter suppression push

Arizona Governor Doug Ducey signed a law today that limits the distribution of mail ballots using a popular early voting list.

According to the New York Times:

The legislation will remove voters from the state’s Permanent Early Voting List, which automatically sends some people ballots for each election, if they do not cast a ballot at least once every two years.

The vote-by-mail system is widely popular in Arizona, used by Republicans, Democrats and independents. The overwhelming majority of voters in the state cast their ballots by mail, with nearly 90 percent doing so last year amid the coronavirus pandemic, and nearly 75 percent of all voters are on the early voting list. Under the new law, the list will be called the Active Early Voting List.

The State Senate voted along party lines to approve the bill, and Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican, surprised many observers by signing the legislation just hours later.

The bill may be only the first in a series of voting restrictions to be enacted in Arizona; another making its way through the Legislature would require voters on the early voting list to verify their signatures with an additional form of identification.

It’s estimated that 100,000 to 200,000 voters could get purged from the early voting list as a result of the new law. That will likely impact the state’s minority population the most, particularly the state’s Latinos.

Over the past decade, Arizona has transformed into a critical swing state. President Biden won the state in 2020, the first Democrat to do so since Bill Clinton. Democrats also hold both of the state’s Senate seats, which they have won in the past two election cycles.

As recently as 2018, both seats were Republican. But as suburban voters fled the GOP in recent years – and Trump essentially forced former senator Jeff Flake into retirement – Arizona has become a prime battleground.

However, Biden only won the state by 10,457. So if the estimate of voters being removed from the early voting list is even remotely accurate, it could easily prove decisive in upcoming elections.

As for the governor, you may recall that Trump pressured Ducey to refuse to certify Joe Biden as the state’s winner last year. At the time, Trump said that Ducey “betrayed the people of Arizona.”

Although Ducey ultimately did his job and certified the election results, his failure to veto this bill harms Arizona’s voters and undermines democracy at a time when his party continues to perpetuate the Big Lie and push voter suppression bills nationwide.

Image Credit: Gage Skidmore, Flickr