The Final Push To Change State Election Laws Includes Pro-Voter Measures As Well

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?? Hello readers! Some of us — like myself — are hoping we make it to the beach by the end of the summer. Former President Trump thinks he’ll be back in the White House by the time fall rolls around, according to several reports about how deeply his election reversal delusions have taken hold in his head. The fantasy would be comical, if it wasn’t propelling a surge of restrictive voting measures, while shaping a Republican playbook for how to never accept an electoral defeat again.

But let’s start today with some good news for voters, with a rundown of recent moves lawmakers in some states have made to make voting easier. So here we go:

It’s not all gloom and doom for voters in state legislatures. Nevada became the latest state to expand ballot access as its legislative session came to a close. Here’s a look at what those lawmakers and others elsewhere did in recent weeks to make voting easier.

• Mail-in elections are now a fixture in Nevada going forward, with Gov. Steve Sisolak signing into law a measure that will have mail ballots automatically sent to voters unless they opt out of the system. In-person voting options will remain available as well.
• Connecticut’s Democratic legislature wants to send to the ballot a constitutional amendment to make no-excuse absentee voting permanent, though after approving the move once this year, lawmakers have to adopt it again before the expansion is put in front of voters. The legislature is also considering an automatic voter registration bill.
• Illinois lawmakers have sent to Gov. JB Pritzker’s desk a bill that will create a permanent mail in voting list, while increasing ballot access for inmates who have not yet been convicted of their charges. The legislation also moves back the electoral calendar to account for delays in the release of Census redistricting data.

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) made clear in an op-ed this weekend that he’s not budging on his refusal to support any elections overhaul legislation, including the For the People Act, that does not have bipartisan support. He’s said as much in the past, but his latest declaration comes as a floor vote on the For the People Act, or S.1, approaches later this month. Manchin instead wants to focus on restoring the Voting Rights Act, which is moving along a legislative track separate from S.1. But it’s unclear whether such a move would get any Republican support beyond the one GOP Senator, Alaska’s Lisa Murkwoski, who supports it.

The obsession MAGA-media has had with Arizona’s sham election audit has turned to Pennsylvania, particularly after three Republican Keystone State lawmakers traveled to Phoenix on Wednesday to observe the shambolic partisan review of Maricopa County’s 2020 results.

The Pennsylvania Republicans are now agitating for a similar review of Biden’s win in their state, and they now have gotten the backing of former President Trump (who earnestly believes the audits will have him back in the White House by the end of August). So far, the GOP leaders of Pennsylvania’s state House have sounded weary of such an endeavor, but top state Senate Republicans appear open to it. In a statement Friday, Trump called out those Senate leaders by name.

Here’s a quick rundown of the fiascos from the Arizona audit that have happened just in the last week:

• Patrick Byrne, the ex-Overstock.com CEO and a chief fundraiser for the recount, has made a movie about the audit, working with a filmmaker known for a film suggesting that 9/11 was an alien conspiracy.
• Secretary of State Katie Hobbs listed a whole new list of concerns with the audit, based on her office’s observations, which included overhearing the audit’s co-chair, former AZ GOP head Randy Pullen, say that the shirt he had to wear on the counting floor made him "look like a transgender.”
• The auditors’ plan to review sensitive election data at a “secure lab” in Montana raised questions about whether that “lab” was actually just a cabin in the woods.
• In what appeared to be a response to the reporting around the Montana lab, the Maricopa auditors tweeted a copy of their cybersecurity policies — which were plagiarized from a Justice Department manual.
• On Friday, emails obtained by an open records request revealed that Senate President Karen Fann, who is leading the audit push, had conversations in December with Trump and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani about “pushing to prove any fraud.”

But these debacles aren’t what Trump supporters are seeing when they turned to their preferred media for coverage of the Arizona operation. Instead, an alternate reality has been created for them in which Trump’s election defeat can continue to be questioned. Case in point: A new, absolutely unhinged lawsuit from MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell that Lindell swears will end in a 9-0 Supreme Court decision overturning the election. There’s also now talk in Michigan that Republican lawmakers will this week put forward a measure demanding a 2020 audit.

Troublesome Republican legislation that targets local election officials has reunited a pair of prominent election lawyers — one Democratic and one Republican — who previously co-chaired a presidential commission on election administration convened by former President Obama. In the New York Times, they raised the alarm about these measures, which include laws that criminalize inadvertent mistakes by election officials, punish them for seeking to rein in disruptive poll watchers, and allow state officials to remove local election officials from their jobs. The lawyers, Democrat Bob Baeur and Republican Ben Ginsberg announced in the op-ed their efforts to provide election officials with a legal defense if those laws are weaponized against them.

Meanwhile, here is the latest in the legal challenges to restrictive state laws:

• Voting rights groups are suing over new Kansas laws that they say hamstring their voter assistance efforts, while making it more likely that ballots will be arbitrarily rejected for supposed signature mismatch.
• A new lawsuit seeks to block a Montana measure limiting voter outreach efforts in certain campus areas; the lawsuit alleges that the way the limits were tacked on to another bill was procedurally flawed.
• Disability rights groups are joining the court fight to challenge Georgia’s elections rules overhaul.

Also worth keeping an eye on: A new ballot initiative campaign has emerged that seeks to bring automatic and same day voter registration to the Sunshine State, while reversing the Florida legislature’s 2019 move to gut ex-felons’ voting rights.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has a new analysis of Georgia’s ID requirement for mail voting. Black voters, who are less than a third of Georgia’s electorate, make up about 56 percent of the 272,000 registered voters who don’t have on the state’s files the ID number now required to vote by mail.

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