We need to understand that states control elections and low Democratic voter turnout in non-presidential elections leads to Republicans controlling elections. As Trump said if everybody votes "you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

Elwood Dixon and me tried to educate Black voters on the importance of voting in off year elections, the elections for state and local candidates. Those elections decide on who gets to vote in presidential elections. 

The usual answer I got from Black voters is “I vote for the president.” 

The reason to vote is making your communities voice heard. Don’t let Republicans take your voice away. Vote in all elections. 

"In The Keystone State

In Pennsylvania last week, county election officials from across the commonwealth told lawmakers on Tuesday that they’re burnt out and beleaguered after rolling out a new vote-by-mail program during the contentious 2020 race, the Capital-Star previously reported.

The local officials said they felt defeated by vagaries and tight deadlines in the law the General Assembly passed in 2019, which they spent much of the last year asking lawmakers to amend.

Now, with barely two months to go until the May primary race, they’re preparing to hold another election under conditions that they say are less than ideal.

“The stress level in our profession is at a breaking point,” Lawrence County Election Director Ed Allison said Tuesday, when he testified alongside four other county election officials at a hearing held by the Senate Election Integrity Commission. Senate Republican leaders convened the committee this year to study election policies and recommend changes to Pennsylvania’s election code.

Nearly two dozen election directors departed their jobs in 2020, when the new vote-by-mail law required them to complete new administrative tasks under deadlines that left little room for error.

The seismic change to Pennsylvania’s election system became more difficult when COVID-19 hit last March, and the state promoted mail-in ballots as a safe alternative to in-person voting. County election bureaus had to mail out more than 1.5 million mail-in ballots in the May 2020 primary and 3 million in November’s General Election.

One Pennsylvania lawmaker,  Rep. Jim Gregory, R-Blair, has called for the repeal of no-excuse mail-in ballots in a memo sent to his colleagues Tuesday.

That expansion of voting rights was approved in fall 2019 in a compromise between Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf and the Republican-controlled General Assembly. Known as Act 77, it was approved by all but two Republicans. Gregory was among those who voted for it.

The Impact on Voters of Color

For voters of color, many of these Republican-led measures that would cut voting hours or add burdensome steps to casting an absentee ballot feel like an attempt by White lawmakers to retain power in a rapidly diversifying nation.

That feeling resonates for Black activists in Georgia, where Black voters accounted for nearly half of the growth in the state’s voter population between 2000 and 2019, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of census data. (The Pew Charitable Trusts funds the center and Stateline.)

Republican-sponsored bills in Georgia would reduce absentee voting periods, eliminate mobile voting units and increase voter ID requirements for absentee ballots. Another bill would allow poll watchers at tabulation areas.

“They’re giving people this stamp of approval and saying you can challenge as many people as you want,” said Andrea Young, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia, of the poll watchers. “It’s a vestige of Jim Crow.”

In Iowa, Republican lawmakers passed a bill that reduced early voting by nine days to 20 and cut Election Day hours by an hour to 8 p.m. The measure, which Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds signed earlier this month, also criminalizes ballot collection by people outside of a household, immediate family or caregiver.

The League of United Latin American Citizens, a Latino rights group, is now suing the Hawkeye State to repeal the law, which it says would hurt people with multiple jobs. Iowa is also an English-only state, meaning all ballots are solely written in English. Latino advocates worry that their work assisting non-English speakers with their ballot would now be illegal.

“Hopefully in a courtroom, it will be clear that this has nothing to do with voter security,” said Joe Henry, the group’s Iowa political director. “It’s voter restriction. It’s voter suppression. It’s racism. It’s targeting new voters.”

His organization, which during the pandemic has been fighting for the safety of the thousands of workers in Iowa’s meatpacking plants, is going to have to shift a lot of its attention to educating Latino voters about these new law changes, he said.

In a news release, Reynolds said it was her duty to “protect the integrity of every election,” and give Iowans more confidence in their vote.

The Ongoing Fight

Bills that would expand ballot access still vastly outnumber those that would restrict access for voters. According to the Brennan Center, lawmakers in 43 states introduced more than 700 bills that would widen access by allowing absentee voting without a state-approved excuse, adding same-day voter registration and streamlining the ballot-counting process.

The Vermont Senate, for example, passed legislation that would allow the state to mail ballots to all voters in general elections. Meanwhile, the Illinois House passed a bill that would increase the number of ballot drop boxes.

Many of these bills, written mostly by Democratic lawmakers, attempt to build off an election that was more reliant on voting by mail. During the pandemic, voting by mail was seen by election experts as a safe, convenient way to cast a ballot. It’s also a method of voting that does not benefit one party over another, several studies show.

It is frustrating that, after such a successful election with record turnout, some states would want to roll back access to the ballot, said Patti Brigham, president of the League of Women Voters of Florida, a voter education nonprofit. It is especially troubling that this “voter suppression” is built off fabrications by Trump and his allies in the aftermath of an unsuccessful election, she said.

“Unfortunately, that kind of rhetoric has consequences, and those consequences are that many voters believed it,” said Brigham. “This is obviously opportunistic to continue to play to those who believe there was massive voter fraud in 2020, which we know was completely untrue.”

Many Republicans still hold onto that belief and want to add what they see as commonsense protections to the election system. To some conservatives, these measures also are important to bring consistency to election procedures that varied during the pandemic, when local election officials tried to find ways to expand voting by mail without definitive state guidance.

MORE AT:

Pennsylvania Capital-Star

Across the nation, and in Pa., Republican wave of voting restrictions swells | Analysis

March 28, 2021

By Matt Vasilogambros

Even corporations that sell products to ordinary people like Coca-Cola are fighting Republican voting restrictions: 

From Time Magazine:

Companies Condemn Georgia's Restrictive Voting Law Amid Pressure Campaign From Advocates

 

Don't allow Republicans to undo the Civil Rights legislation.