Voting Law Proposals and Voting Rights Efforts (1 Viewer)

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    MT15

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    This is, IMO, going to be a big topic in the coming year. Republicans have stated their aim to make voting more restrictive in just about every state where they have the means to do so. Democrats would like to pass the Voting Rights Bill named after John Lewis. I’m going to go look up the map of all the states which have pending legislation to restrict voting. Now that we have the election in the rear view, I thought we could try to make this a general discussion thread, where people who have concerns about voting abuses can post as well and we can discuss it from both sides. Please keep memes out of this thread and put them in the boards where we go to talk about the other side, lol.
     
    Top Georgia Republicans are renewing their push to only let voters who register as party members cast ballots in GOP primaries.It’spart of an attempt to guarantee more ideological purity among the nominees.

    The idea to end Georgia’s open primaries, which now allow any voter to choose either party’s ballot, has long failed to gain traction.

    But Georgia GOP chair Josh McKoon says it’s time to reopen the debate now that President Donald Trump is back in the White House.

    He released the party’s “election integrity priorities” late Tuesday, which is topped by a call for closed party primary elections.

    McKoon told Politically Georgia that party stalwarts are clear they want “Republican voters electing the Republican nominees.”

    “It is common sense to limit participation in Republican primaries to those voters who declare their allegiance to the Republican Party so our nominees reflect the philosophy of our voters,” he said.

    The overhaul faces long odds under the Gold Dome and will be staunchly opposed by more mainstream Republicans who rely on moderate and independent votes to carry swing legislative districts….


     
    WASHINGTON (AP) — The centerpiece election legislation from congressional Republicans would require voters to prove their citizenship when registering, raising concerns among state election officials about how it would be implemented and who would pay for it.

    In recent interviews, secretaries of state from both parties said they were wary of federal lawmakers creating state election rules and of costly new procedures that would come with them, including collecting and storing sensitive documents. They also criticized a provision that would allow for civil or criminal penalties against any election official who registers someone without evidence of citizenship.

    Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows said there is no federal database that states can use to confirm a person's citizenship status. Election officials described databases maintained by the Social Security Administration and Department of Homeland Security as unreliable.

    “Reasonable people can agree that only citizens should be voting in our elections,” said Bellows, a Democrat. “If they want us to prove citizenship, then they need to build the infrastructure for that to happen.”

    With the urging of President Donald Trump, House Republicans are expected to move quickly to advance the legislation, known as the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act. A proof of citizenship requirement was included in a package of priority bills that can bypass committee and head straight to a floor vote. That could happen as soon as this week, though the bill’s prospects in the Senate are uncertain amid likely Democratic opposition.

    State election officials said they generally support steps to ensure that only U.S. citizens are voting, an issue that typically involves a tiny fraction of ballots and is more often an individual mistake rather than an intentional and coordinated attempt to subvert an election. Debates largely center on how best to accomplish that, whether the responsibility should fall on the voter or whether the federal government should do a better job providing states with reliable data to verify citizenship status.

    “Every time there’s federal legislation, I’ve got concerns, especially when the feds talk about things that the states typically do on a year-by-year, day-to-day basis,” said Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab, a Republican. “Just because you think it’ll work in your state doesn’t mean it will work in everybody else’s state.”

    Republicans in Congress have said the current process for registering voters is filled with loopholes that have allowed people who are not U.S. citizens to vote in past elections and relies on a system in which voters sign an oath that they are a citizen.

    Before the 2024 election, Trump pushed claims without evidence that such people might vote in large enough numbers to sway the outcome. In fact, voting by noncitizens is rare and can lead to felony charges and deportation.

    Since his victory in November, Trump has continued to press for changes to how elections are run, including requiring proof of citizenship.

    Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, a Republican who oversees elections in her state, said she was concerned about federal overreach and the legislation lacking the support states will need to make it work.

    "It definitely shouldn’t be on throwing election workers or secretaries of state or county clerks in jail for accidentally registering a noncitizen to vote when we don’t have adequate tools to even verify citizenship,” she said...........

     
    MADISON, Wis. (AP) — An audit of the November election won by President Donald Trump in swing-state Wisconsin found that not a single vote was counted incorrectly, altered or missed by tabulating machines.

    The audit also found no evidence that any voting machine or software had been hacked or otherwise tampered with. The Wisconsin Elections Commission released audit's findings last week and is scheduled to discuss them Friday.

    Trump defeated former Vice President Kamala Harris in Wisconsin by just over 29,000 votes.

    In 2020, when Trump lost to Joe Biden by just under 21,000 votes, Trump and his supporters alleged there was widespread fraud in Wisconsin. But two partial recounts, a nonpartisan audit, a conservative law firm’s review and multiple state and federal lawsuits did not support the claims.

    Trump and his allies have not made similar accusations about wrongdoing in the 2024 election that he won.

    Meagan Wolfe, Wisconsin’s top elections official, said in a memo that the audit shows the public how effectively elections are run and also works to “dispel any misinformation or disinformation about the security of electronic voting systems.”

    The post-election audit is required under state law and has been done after each general election since 2006. Local elections officials in 336 randomly selected municipalities across the state hand-counted 327,230 ballots as part of the 2024 audit. That is nearly 10% of all Wisconsin ballots cast in the 2024 election and the largest post-election audit ever undertaken in the state.

    The only errors found during the audit were made by people, not the vote-counting machines. And only five human errors were detected, resulting in an error rate of just 0.0000009%, according to the report.

    “My hope is that this reassures persons on all sides of the political aisle that voting tabulators are doing their jobs accurately,” Ann Jacobs, chair of the elections commission, said in a post last week on the social media platform X. “We all lament when our candidate loses, but in WI, it wasn’t because someone hacked the machines. The other guy just got more votes.”................

     

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