Mediaboss Marketing

A Save U.S. Postal Service rally in front of the U.S. Post Office in Santa Ana, California.

Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times / Getty Images

About a month ago, we laid out five ways that Republicans are making it harder to vote and more generally undermining the electoral process in 2020. We focused on Republicans for two reasons. First, making it harder to vote is a more controversial and anti-democratic goal than making it easier to vote, as Democrats are aiming to do. And second, President Trump is playing a central role in these voting wars. Trump has publicly said that he is opposed to efforts in many states to make absentee voting and voting by mail (the two are functionally the same thing) available to virtually anyone who wants to vote that way. He has also suggested that higher overall voter turnout would make it harder for Republicans to win elections.

Over the last month, with the election approaching, Republican officials from county-level election administrators to the president himself have in some ways escalated their use of these tactics. So heres an update on those efforts to complicate the voting process and oppose moves that would make it easier. These five categories, which we used in the last article, are generally ordered from least alarming to most alarming. (There is no formal system tracking every lawsuit concerning voting and the electoral process in all 50 states, so this article is based on our informal tracking, which means we might have missed a key development in a state or two.) Heres whats happening:

This is different from the prior category (and more concerning) because in these instances Republicans are seeking to overturn decisions already made to ease the voting process.

There are plenty of Republican officials, even in some of the states listed above, taking steps to make it easier to vote. Texas, for example, increased the number of days in which early voting is available. So its not that all Republicans are trying to complicate the voting process. Rather, most of the officials trying to complicate the voting process are Republicans. Also, Republicans arent the only people filing a lot of lawsuits and pushing a lot of changes to the voting system its just that Democrats extensive legal efforts are generally pushing to make it easier to vote.

So the most surprising aspect of the voting process is what we have laid out here: One party seems to be systemically making it harder to vote and taking other steps that undermine the integrity of the electoral process. The big question is whether these tactics will work, either by keeping anti-Trump ballots from being cast or counted, or by throwing the election results (whatever they end up being) into doubt.

Go here to read the rest:
The Latest On Republican Efforts To Make It Harder To Vote - FiveThirtyEight