And it allows a voter who might not trust the Postal Service, might be up against a tight deadline to bring in their ballot and know that it's going to be counted if they met the deadline.Īnd so, you know, certain bills have said you need to bring the dropbox inside into an early voting location or into an election office, and that's the only place it can be. It's monitored by video, so it is secure. You know, the utility of a dropbox is that it's a 24/7 voting center. GROSS: What are some of the more unique or extreme or extremely baffling restrictions that you're aware of?ĬORASANITI: Well, the one that has really, I think, annoyed a lot of election officials that they've almost testified against - and these are bipartisan election officials - has been some of the limits on dropboxes that, you know, basically render them almost pointless. So, you know, those things are kind of a major theme in the bills that we're seeing across the country is efforts to add new restrictions and limits to voting by mail. So now that someone who is eligible to vote by mail downloads or obtains their own application and then sends it in themselves, you know, certain secretaries of state, to encourage turnout, will just proactively mail out a ballot application. There's been, you know, an effort to ban election officials, secretaries of state, county election officials from proactively mailing out absentee ballot request forms. There's been new efforts to add ID requirements kind of running the gamut. So there's a lot of efforts in different states to limit dropboxes, which are basically bins where a voter can come - in an ideal world, at 24/7 - and just put their ballot in a box as if you're kind of returning a book to the library. And it basically was favored more by Democrats because the Democratic Party, in their get-out-the-vote efforts, really pushed their voters to vote by mail as a safe way to do it during the pandemic. So one specific thing that they've targeted has been absentee ballots and mail-in voting.īecause of the pandemic, you know, voting by mail soared in the 2020 election. And so as these Republican legislatures have started to take aim at different methods of voting, they've often been in response to turnout that they might have seen, you know, kind of going in a direction that might harm them at the polls in future elections. A few things that we're seeing across the country right now when it comes to all of these bills in different states that are seeking overhauls of state election rules has kind of been a response to what happened in the 2020 election, where we saw record turnout kind of across the board. Well, thanks so much for having me, Terry. Let's start by talking about what many of the new and proposed laws have in common when it comes to restricting voting rights. I know you just got back from Texas, where you've been covering the proposed new voting restrictions there. He was one of the lead reporters covering Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. He's been writing about voting and voting rights. Nick Corasaniti covers national politics for The New York Times. New restrictive voting bills have already been signed into law in Georgia and Florida. He says these efforts could further undermine the country's democratic norms. At the same time, Republican lawmakers in at least eight states controlled by Republican legislatures are trying to remove the powers that secretaries of state, governors and nonpartisan election boards have over how elections are run. My guest, Nick Corasaniti, has been reporting on what he describes as how the Republican Party is attempting to lock in political control for years to come by pushing through new laws to restrict voting access, limit ballot initiatives that could undermine Republican goals and stiffen penalties for poll workers and election officials who make even minor mistakes.
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