The most extreme voting restrictions proposed by the GOP

Beyond the matter of how much these bills actually address the perceived problems, though, is how many of them are extreme. And some proposals are quite extreme — in ways that go beyond what the vast majority of or all states do.

The bills that have gone forward in Georgia and Iowa would, in most ways, move those states in line with how many other states conduct their elections. Whether the restrictions are warranted or in line with GOP claims about why they’re passing them is one question, but they’re generally not outside the mainstream of American politics.

But many other proposals are. Below are some that are the most extreme or clearly aimed at partisan benefit:

(It bears emphasizing at the top that these are proposals, and legislatures may not press forward with them. But some are, and we’re still in the early days of a clear GOP effort to add restrictions across many states.)

After the 2020 election, former president Donald Trump and Republicans cried foul that Pennsylvania would accept absentee ballots received after Election Day, if they were postmarked by then. But new proposals don’t just seek to change the rules for when ballots can be received; they would also move the postmark deadline into unprecedented territory.

In both Arizona and Iowa, proposals would require not just that absentee ballots be received by Election Day — as most states require — but that they actually be postmarked several days before.

A bill in Arizona would require the absentee ballots to be postmarked by the Thursday before the election, while a bill in Iowa would require them to be mailed at least 10 days before the election.

Iowa is already among the few states that required absentee ballots to be sent before Election Day, but only four states did so as of last year, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures — Alabama, Iowa, North Dakota and Utah. And none of them required this earlier than the day before Election Day, as the bills in both Arizona and Iowa would do.

Many states do require witnesses for absentee ballots, but the vast majority of them allow for the witness to be someone other than an official notary or election official. According to NCSL, as of last year only two states required the latter: Missouri and Oklahoma. And only Oklahoma required a notary.

(Separately, a bill in Oklahoma proposes an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would prohibit absentee ballots from being delivered without applications being notarized or signed by two witnesses — a standard most states don’t have.)

Absentee ballots are often referred to interchangeably as “mail-in votes.” But a bill in Arizona seeks to eliminate the “mail-in” portion of that, prohibiting them from being returned by mail at all. It would require them to be dropped off “only by delivering it by hand to a designated voting location.”

Several bills in other states, it bears noting, would also restrict the number of locations in which ballots could be dropped off or seek to outlaw ballot drop boxes outright.

That’s particularly significant given the importance of “Souls to the Polls,” an initiative by Black churches to get voters to cast early ballots on Sundays. Other bills have sought to shorten the early-voting window in certain ways, but given the prominence of “Souls to the Polls” in Georgia, it lends credence to the idea that this is about reducing the influence of Black voters rather than combating fraud.

Furthering that argument: The same bill seeks to prevent early voters from being bused to polling places, except in emergencies, and would ban distributing food and drink to people in long voting lines, as is often the case in urban areas.

Some of the new proposals take this process into new territory, though. Multiple bills in Mississippi would require voter rolls to be compared to other databases to supposedly identify noncitizens. And a bill in New Hampshire would allow elections officials to remove registered voters based upon data from other states — something that the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s law school says would be in violation of federal court decisions.

Other proposals don’t deal directly with voting, but rather how those votes translate into a state’s electoral votes. But several of them appear to be transparently aimed at increasing the GOP’s share.

A bill in Nebraska would switch the state from allocating electoral votes by congressional district — it’s one of only two states to do so, along with Maine — to making them winner-take-all for whoever wins a majority of votes in the state. Again, this is in line with how the vast majority of states do things, but it’s also notable that it comes shortly after President Biden became just the second Democrat to pick off an electoral vote in the state, after Barack Obama in 2008. Both won an Omaha-based district.

Another bill in Oklahoma — in keeping with its supporters’ pressure to pass constitutional amendments — would allow the state legislature to select its presidential electors if there isn’t a federal law requiring voter ID and paper ballots to verify election results.

And a third bill in Arizona would allow the state legislature to revoke the certification of presidential electors by majority vote — something certain Republicans argued state legislatures should do in light of the bogus fraud claims — regardless of how the state votes.