What the GOP voting restrictions actually do vs. what proponents claim

The latter claim might be even more suspect than the former.

As Republicans across the country forge ahead with creating new voting restrictions, plenty of ink has been spilled about the problem with their expressed justifications. Despite there being no proven widespread voter fraud in 2020, they have regularly cited the widespread belief — mostly among Republicans — that there were problems with voting. Often left out of the argument: This distrust was fomented by a GOP president via wild and baseless claims that his party did little to combat — and often lent credence to. If the perception is a problem, why not do more, you know, to combat that? Rather than pass bills to address a perception problem?

But as bills moving forward in Georgia and Iowa show, the GOP isn’t stopping at addressing the perceived problems. In fact, it’s going quite a bit further — which suggests that this effort isn’t truly so “targeted” and that this isn’t totally about perceptions.

The Iowa bill, for instance, restricts counties to having a single drop box for absentee ballots, makes it a felony for election officials to violate the law and limits who can return an absentee ballot for another person. If there were indeed established problems with mail-in ballots — which there aren’t on any substantial level — these provisions would at least address them.

But the bill also does some other things:

• It closes polls an hour earlier (8 p.m. instead of 9 p.m.).
• It cuts the number of days when people can vote early from 29 to 20.
• It moves up the deadline for counting absentee ballots, requiring that they be received by poll closing time on Election Day, rather than that they merely be postmarked by then.

These changes, it bears emphasizing, don’t bring Iowa out of step with much of the country. Its early-voting period remains longer than in many states. Its poll closing time had been among the latest. And most states require that mail ballots be received by Election Day. But if your justification is to combat perceptions of fraud, it’s not clear how these address that. (Accepting postmarked absentee ballots later doesn’t change how valid they are; it merely extends the counting process.)

Legislation in Georgia goes even further — to the point where high-profile Republicans are actually boycotting it. Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan (R) refused to preside over the state Senate, and four GOP state senators declined to take part Monday as it passed a bill sharply curtailing the state’s current no-excuse absentee voting (a change, it bears noting, that was implemented by Georgia Republicans just 16 years ago).

The bill that eventually passed in the state Senate, which is also opposed by Gov. Brian Kemp (R) and Georgia’s Republican state House speaker, would limit absentee voting to older people, the physically disabled, election workers, military and overseas Georgians, and those who are away from their home during the entire early voting period and Election Day. Even by GOP estimates, it would prevent 5 million of 7.7 million registered voters in Georgia from being able to vote absentee. (Republican state Senate Majority Leader Mike Dugan claimed, despite these numbers, that the bill “is not preventing anyone from voting by mail-in absentee.”)

A separate bill in the state House was arguably less extreme — but also less targeted at perceptions of supposed problems in the 2020 election. The state House version would limit ballot drop boxes to being inside early-voting locations and require an ID for requesting absentee ballots. Again, that’s at least targeted. But the bill would also:

• Require absentee ballots to be requested 11 days before Election Day.
• Ban nonprofits from funding elections.
• Limit the use of buses to transport early voters to emergencies only.
• Ban distributing food and drink to people waiting in line to vote.
• Create new guidelines for early voting that would effectively limit “Souls to the Polls” — an initiative by Black churches to get people to vote early on Sundays — to one Sunday.

The latter measures have come under intense scrutiny, given the disproportionate impact they could have on the state’s fast-growing Black population. That’s a population that helped deliver a narrow victory in the state to President Biden in November and then played a huge role in handing the Senate to Democrats in a pair of runoffs.

Republicans in Georgia, like in Iowa, though, have pitched this as an attempt to restore faith in elections.

“The way we begin to restore confidence in our voting system is by passing this bill,” state Rep. Barry Fleming (R) said last week. “There are many common-sense measures here to begin that process.”

But the measures in both states clearly go quite a bit further than that. Even if you somehow accept that there is a perception problem with the validity of our elections that needs to be addressed via legislation, and you declare your goal to be combating it, perhaps the legislation should actually target those perceived problems? Otherwise, it sure makes it seem like this is exactly what its opponents allege: using a misinformation campaign by your party’s leader as a predicate to game the system.