But even with all these hurdles, a cadre of advocates, nonprofits, churches, and community-minded elected officials have shown up year after year for decades, working hard to protect the right to participate in democracy—especially for Black and other minority voters, who are often the most affected by voting restrictions. 

“We have organizations across the state that are part of the Civic Engagement Roundtable that’s organized by One Voice,” said Representative Zakiya Summers, a Democrat in the state house, referencing a Jackson nonprofit focused on policy advocacy. “These organizations are on conference calls every month. They have created voting rights guides and information that partner organizations can distribute in their community to get people educated and engaged.”

In the lead-up to this year’s primary elections in August, these advocates were gearing up to contend with the latest obstacle that Mississippi’s Republican-controlled legislature had thrown their way: Senate Bill 2358. The bill, which passed in the spring and went into effect on July 1, prohibits anyone from assisting another voter in handling and returning a mail-in ballot unless they are an immediate family or household member, a caregiver, or authorized election worker or mail carrier. Anyone caught violating the law could face up to a year in county jail and a fine of up to $3000.

Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves praised the bill when he signed it into law, saying that it would protect against “ballot harvesting,” or the practice of collecting ballots en masse, a fear that is central to the unfounded conspiracies about voter fraud that conservatives around the country latched onto since the 2020 election.

Despite a lack of evidence of widespread ballot harvesting or other fraud in Mississippi elections, the bill has threatened to limit the number of volunteers and advocates involved in get-out-the-vote efforts from sending or retrieving ballots on behalf of voters they don’t live with. More importantly, it could impede ballot access for people who count on this kind of assistance. 

“It just seemed like another barrier that would prevent people with disabilities from being able to vote autonomously,” says Jane Walton, the communications officer for Disability Rights Mississippi, which includes voting access among their advocacy work. “The bill in question dealt with whether or not someone can have a person assist them. Really, it’s an issue of whether a person with a disability has the autonomy to choose to vote in a way that is most accessible to them.”

Soon after it was passed, groups including Disability Rights Mississippi and Mississippi’s League of Women Voters sued the state in federal court to block the law, stating it “impermissibly restricts voters with disabilities from having a person of their choice assist them in submitting their completed mail-in absentee ballots.” On July 26, a federal judge sided with them and temporarily blocked the law, saying it disenfranchised voters with disabilities and violated the Voting Rights Act.

The decision blocked enactment of SB 2358 just in time for the Aug. 8 primary, and will also prevent it from taking effect ahead of the general election in November, when Mississippians will vote on nearly every major office, including governor and lieutenant governor, secretary of state, and representatives in both legislative chambers. Polling indicates that Republican incumbents who supported the bill—including the embattled Reeves, and Attorney General Lynn Fitch—are favored to win in this deep red state.

But no matter who people cast their vote for, advocates are more concerned about some residents being able to cast a vote at all. The suspension of SB 2358 offers some temporary relief, but these advocates fear that the threat of similar legislation still looms.

“For the past two years, we’ve been monitoring legislation that [has]pretty much been pushed by the Secretary of State every year to deal with ballot harvesting, Jarvis Dortch, Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in Mississippi, told Bolts. ”That makes it harder to return a ballot by absentee, especially individuals with disabilities.”

Before the passage of this bill, advocates already had their hands full navigating existing restrictions that make it harder for citizens to vote, and for Black candidates to win. 

The state requires eligible voters to register 30 days before elections, one of the earliest deadlines in the country. This means that often, advocates must find eligible voters early, and educate them on the importance of registering long before there’s any major discussion of elections in the media, because there’s no early voting or same-day registration options as a backup. And advocates must repeat this process every year thanks to Mississippi’s odd-year elections. 

But in order to even register, eligible voters must comply with a stringent voter ID law, passed in 2011 by way of a ballot initiative that established a strict list of acceptable forms of ID, including a birth certificate, firearms permit, driver’s license, college ID card, US passport, tribal ID, or Voter ID card. 

“Voter ID targeted vulnerable populations who may not have access to ID or may not have access to a birth certificate so they can get an ID. The law was written so strongly that the state was willing to provide a free Voter ID,” says Summers.

Voting absentee by mail is also an involved process in Mississippi. As opposed to the majority of states, which offer no-excuse absentee voting, mail ballots are only available to populations with qualifying characteristics, including those living out-of-state, students, people with disabilities, people over 65, and certain others. Absentee ballots must be postmarked by election day to be counted. 

“We make it harder than anyone else to get folks registered and make it hard for people to vote absentee,” said Dortch. We don’t provide early voting. Now, instead of making it easier for folks to vote, we’re trying to get people off the voting rolls… and make it harder for people to actually vote absentee. When we have one of the hardest processes to vote absentee in the country. It doesn’t make sense.” 

Mississippi has also had a longtime a lifelong ban on voting for people convicted of certain types of felonies, a policy which has disenfranchised nearly 130,000 Black voters, or 16 percent of the state’s adult Black population. It’s one of only three states, alongside Tennessee and Virginia, where anyone stripped of voting rights loses it for their whole life. They can only regain it if they receive an exceedingly rare pardon from the legislature or the governor.

A federal appeals court this summer struck down that system as unconstitutional, calling it a “cruel and unusual punishment,” and denouncing Mississippi as “an outlier among its sister states, bucking a clear and consistent trend in our Nation against permanent disenfranchisement.” The state appealed the decision in late August, and the rights of hundreds of thousands of Mississippians are still hanging in the balance.

Perhaps unsurprisingly given all these restrictions, Mississippi has one of the lowest voter turnout rates in the country. In the 2022 midterms, Mississippi ranked eighth from last, with roughly 46 percent of voters showing up. And turnout for non-white voters was even lower.

Democrats and progressives have historically championed an increase in access to voting options in the state, and have in turn looked to Black and other disenfranchised voters for support in elections. This upcoming race is no exception. Democrat gubernatorial candidate Brandon Presley, for example, is betting on bases of support in majority-Black enclaves around the capital city of Jackson, as well as pockets of white and immigrant progressive and moderate voters scattered around the Mississippi Delta in his long-shot bid to oust Tate Reeves.

Ty Pinkins, the Democratic candidate for secretary of state, is a recent addition after previous candidate Shuwaski Young dropped out of the race for health reasons. While Pinkins has limited time to build name recognition before the contest, he’s hoping that a campaign message of easing the state’s restrictive voting laws will connect with voters.

“Making sure people can register to vote online makes sense, making sure that we have a way for people to do early voting—that makes sense, and not restricting access to the ballot for people with disabilities,” Pinkins told Mississippi Today. 

SB 2358 remains on hold until further hearings are held and a final decision is handed down. And while advocates, voters, and progressive candidates can continue to move as if the law had never been signed, the landscape for voting rights remains difficult in Mississippi. But advocates are quick to mention that they will continue to work to make progress. 

“We along with our partners and our co-counsel are absolutely prepared to do everything that we can to protect the rights of citizens with disabilities,” said Walton. “Whatever that road looks like going forward, we’re prepared to fight for accessibility in Mississippi’s voting system.”

Correction (Sept. 14): An earlier version of this post misspelled the name of the communications officer from Disability Rights Mississippi.

This article is part of U.S. Democracy Day, a nationwide collaborative on Sept. 15, the International Day of Democracy, in which news organizations cover how democracy works and the threats it faces. To learn more, visit usdemocracyday.org.

The post Mississippi Organizers Navigate Difficult Voting Rights Terrain in Run Up to November appeared first on Bolts.

In the church vestibule, someone had put out free “Justice 4 Wisconsin” spice packets from the outspokenly progressive spice company Penzeys, which is headquartered in the Milwaukee area and has trademarked the phrase “Season liberally.” “Wisconsin’s Republicans lie and cheat, and when we stay silent they win,” says the messaging on the packet. “Speak out for Justice, our environment, a fair playing field for all, and the importance of voting April 4.”

The event itself was nonpartisan and the candidates’ names were barely mentioned. Instead, the panelists discussed how they grapple with getting out the vote in underserved Milwaukee communities that are struggling with gun violence, underfunded schools, and food deserts.

They lamented the challenges of organizing in Milwaukee given some state conservatives’ undisguised hostility toward the voters of color who make up the majority of the city’s population. Most recently, a GOP member of the Wisconsin Elections Commission bragged to other Republicans in a January email about a successful voter-suppression campaign “in the overwhelming Black and Hispanic areas” of Milwaukee; the commissioner, Bob Spindell, refused calls to step down and has not been disciplined.

“There’s so many needs pressing our community today. When we talk about disparities in this country, Milwaukee leads the nation,” said panelist Sharlen Moore, who co-founded the local youth leadership program Urban Underground in 2000. To energize voters, “we got to get back to the block” and build community with neighbors.

Another panelist, 20-year-old activist Deisy España, shared a message that she said resonates with her peers, many of whom—like España—have immigrant parents who cannot vote. “I tell them they’re voting for their parents,” she said.

After the town hall, attendee Deborah Thompson told Bolts that in her neighborhood of Heritage Heights, a small middle-class, majority-Black community about six miles northwest of the church, she is talking with her family, friends and Bible study group about voting on April 4.

“Democracy is a big concern of mine because I do see it as under threat,” said Thompson, who is 75. To encourage people to vote, she first brings up the erosion of voting rights and the loss of ballot drop boxes, which the state supreme court disallowed last year in a 4-3 ruling. 

“If I feel safe enough, then I’ll bring up women’s rights,” she added.

Tuesday’s election will settle if conservatives keep a majority on Wisconsin’s supreme court or if it flips to the left, and all of those issues hang in the balance. Amid an outpouring of national attention and spending, the urgent questions the race will decide have dominated the campaign and its coverage. Will the state’s abortion ban from 1849 survive a legal challenge, will Wisconsin end up with fairer electoral maps for the rest of the decade, will voters regain access to drop boxes? For people who are volunteering their time on this race, these stakes are as enormous as they are self-evident.

But they also face a difficult reality. This momentous showdown is taking place in an off-year, springtime, low-turnout election, far from the energy that greets a presidential race.

Mobilizing people to come out in elections that aren’t synced with national cycles is always a challenge, and there’ve been efforts across the country to move their time. “Historically these spring elections have extremely low turnouts. This election is going to be all about who gets the people out to vote,” Christine Sinicki, a Democratic Assembly member who represents the southernmost parts of Milwaukee and some adjacent suburbs along Lake Michigan, told Bolts. 

Roughly 960,000 people statewide cast ballots in the first round in February that decided which two judicial candidates would move on to next week’s general election. That’s a huge drop from November 2020, when nearly 3.3 million Wisconsinites voted for president. It’s an especially pressing headache for liberals: The drop-off is far more prevalent in Milwaukee, an engine of Democratic politics, than in the outer ring of conservative suburbs that power Wisconsin’s GOP candidates.

As a share of all registered voters, turnout in February was 26 percent in Milwaukee County and 33 percent in the WOW counties. Within just the city of Milwaukee, it reached only 22 percent.

In Wisconsin’s nail-biters, these shifts can make all the difference. And now, control of the state’s supreme court hinges in part on whether organizers in Milwaukee persuade and help enough city residents to vote.

Restrictions that have been blessed by that same court, like the ban on drop boxes, have not helped. A Republican law adopted in 2018 also cut back early voting in Milwaukee from nearly six weeks to two weeks before an election. That makes it harder for working families in Milwaukee to find time to vote, Sinicki said. “There’s a lot of people out there working two jobs who just can’t get there on Election Day.”

Even within the city of Milwaukee, turnout is not spread evenly. According to an analysis by Marquette University researcher John Johnson, Milwaukee’s overall voter turnout in recent years has declined, with the biggest losses in low-income and predominantly Black and Latinx areas. That pattern held in the first round in February: Turnout varied wildly, from roughly 5 percent of registered voters in some wards to roughly ten times that rate in more affluent neighborhoods.

In the ward that contains St. Gabriel Church of God in Christ, turnout reached only 12 percent in February—down very precipitously from where it stood in the November midterms, 51 percent.

LaToya White, another panelist in the town hall, pointed to the disparities felt by residents on the north side of Milwaukee, especially younger people. “Being an organizer, you’re in the community every day, and you see our youth,” she said. “They feel like they’re left out.”

White works at Wisconsin Voices, a community organization that promotes civic participation; she saw “amazing” engagement here last fall but this has not carried into the judicial race. “This election is so quiet,” she said. “A supreme court race to them, they don’t see how important this is and don’t know that this election here is one of the most important out of the next ten years.”

In a race where so much is at stake, organizers and party representatives aren’t sticking to one issue to energize voters.

“A lot of people until recently I don’t think understood the importance of the supreme court and how important it was to our day-to-day lives and our rights,” Sinicki said. “People are finally waking up. I always said we have to hit rock bottom before people realize what’s going on here, and I think we’re there. If they can strip away our rights to control our own healthcare, what’s next?”

A lawsuit against the state’s abortion ban is working its way through state courts, and Janet Protasiewicz, the liberal candidate in the race, has campaigned on her personal support for abortion rights. Last week, in her only public debate with her conservative opponent Daniel Kelly, Protasiewicz said, “If my opponent is elected, I can tell you with 100 percent certainty, that 1849 abortion ban will stay on the books.” 

For reproductive rights advocates, anger over the ban is tied in with concerns about democracy in Wisconsin. There is no plausible path for Democrats to overturn it legislatively because Republicans have maintained ironclad control over Wisconsin’s legislature thanks to the heavily gerrymandered electoral maps they have drawn. The maps are widely considered some of the most skewed in the country. Sam Munger, an election consultant and panelist at the town hall, said the maps have “rendered voting largely irrelevant.”

But the supreme court election is a statewide race, so it offers Wisconsinites the opportunity to vote outside the confines of those gerrymanders. Protasiewicz has called the state maps “rigged” and many Democrats hope that a liberal court could strike them down. 

Protasiewicz’s supporters talk up the election’s implications for the future of voting rights. The Democratic Party of Wisconsin held a “Voting Rights Panel” in mid-March on Milwaukee’s north side to address issues of gerrymandering and voter suppression, in the presence of prominent Democrats like former Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes, who lost the U.S. Senate race last fall.

Conservatives are mobilizing around the same issues. Wisconsin’s leading anti-abortion groups have rallied around Kelly. 

Scott Presler, a young, pro-Trump conservative from Virginia and founder of the Super PAC Early Vote Action, has spent the last couple of weeks in Wisconsin, door-knocking and making appearances to get out the Republican vote for Kelly, with the long-term goal of advancing what he calls “election integrity” in swing states to ensure a win for Trump in 2024. On a March 16 episode of Steve Bannon’s War Room show, Presler called the April 4 election “one of the most consequential elections in Wisconsin history” because of the state supreme court’s control over voter access issues like ID and proof-of-residency requirements.

“If the liberals are able to win on April 4, we will have unmanned drop boxes in Milwaukee and Madison going into the 2024 election,” he warned. The morning after the first day of early voting last week, Presler took to Twitter to celebrate strong turnout numbers in conservative Waukesha County and to call on people to vote in a string of counties that did not include Madison and Milwaukee.

Other Republicans are also treating Milwaukee, where Protasiewicz serves as a local judge, as a foil for the rest of the state. That’s a frequent campaign tactic for the GOP in Wisconsin. Some are already floating impeaching her over her work as a Milwaukee judge if she wins. (On the same day as the supreme court race, a special election for a state Senate seat will decide if the GOP has the Senate supermajority it would need to remove a state official on a party-line vote.)

The judicial race is ostensibly nonpartisan but Democratic groups are backing Protasiewicz and Republican groups are supporting Kelly, a lawyer who used to sit on the state supreme court and has a long history in conservative politics.

Money has poured into the race, reflecting national interest but also lax campaign finance rules that allow for massive expenditures. Total spending in the supreme court race is already near $45 million with a week to go, according to WisPolitics, which triples the national record for a judicial election.

That includes at least $15 million in independent spending since Jan. 1, according to the Wisconsin Ethics Commission. Groups supporting Protasiewicz have a slight edge in spending as of publication, but far more of the money on the liberal side has gone directly into the candidate’s campaign coffers. Billionaires George Soros and J.B. Pritzker, the Illinois governor, are among the largest liberal donors, while conservatives include megadonors Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein and Federalist Society co-chairman Leonard Leo. People and groups with ties to the efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election have also donated millions to help Kelly. 

But as the panelists of the St. Gabriel Church town hall attested, that noise isn’t heard equally in all parts of the state. 

After the March 18 town hall, a few groups of volunteers left to canvass nearby. They handed out nonpartisan fliers that listed general election and early voting information.

Milwaukee resident Jodi Delfosse, 55, took a stack of fliers and walked up and down a nearby block knocking on doors. It was a finger-numbing 16 degrees and the weather switched disorientingly between blizzard-like snow and clear sunshine every few minutes. She was met mostly by Ring security systems, with residents answering the door through their intercom, and a few face-to-face interactions. In a friendly voice, one resident told her through a closed door to leave the flier outside because “I’m not dressed.”

These obstacles to reaching voters door-to-door was one reason Linea Sundstrom started Supermarket Legends, a nonpartisan Milwaukee voter advocacy group that is run exclusively by volunteers, mostly retirees. They pass out informational literature and register voters outside local supermarkets and food pantries, at bus stops, on college campuses and on public sidewalks or outside any business that gives them permission.

“Everybody has to eat, and what we’re trying to do is go where people are instead of expecting them to come to us,” she told Bolts. The group’s flier for the supreme court race does not advocate for a candidate but identifies issues with a series of questions, such as “Is the 1849 abortion ban right for Wisconsin today?” and “What regulations are right for tap water?”

Supermarket Legends focuses on low-turnout areas and wherever “people don’t have a lot of resources,” Sundstrom said. They pay attention to where other groups are working and “try to fill in the gaps.” Right now, she said, the biggest gap is on the near-south side, a predominantly Latinx area where voter turnout outside of major elections is typically very low. 

Sundstrom described her group’s work in a ward where only 29 people voted in February, which is only 6 percent of registered voters. “One person standing in front of El Rey Supermarket on the south side can talk to 60, 70 people an hour, face to face,” Sundstrom said. 

Sylvia Ortiz-Velez is a Democratic lawmaker who represents the Wisconsin Assembly district with the highest share of Latinx residents in Wisconsin. Two weeks out from the runoff, she was canvassing her constituents in Milwaukee’s Polonia neighborhood, which is located about three miles south of the El Rey supermarket. Voter turnout is reliably higher in this neighborhood—26 percent in the primary—as is household income.

Going door to door is a way to reach the registered voters who regularly vote because they are the “lower-hanging fruit” of any get-out-the-vote campaign, she said. Plus “you learn a lot about what’s landing.”

At one house, the barrel-chested 64-year-old who opened his door to Ortiz-Velez already had his mind made up about the two candidates. “Get rid of ’em both. They’re wishy-washy. We need law and order,” he told her. He was wearing a National Latino Peace Officers Association T-shirt. He said Protasiewicz is too soft on crime, echoing GOP attacks. He called Kelly, who was paid by state Republicans to advise them in a covert scheme to overturn the 2020 election, “a crook.”

Then he added: “The one thing I like about (Protasiewicz) is giving women their rights.”

This comment surprised Ortiz-Velez. “In my district, abortion might come up, but it might not come up. It’s not something I would lead with,” she told Bolts. “Most of the people in our community make maybe $35,000 per year and work very hard for their families and they’ve always had to do a lot with less.” If she has time, she said she’ll “absolutely talk” with voters about gerrymandering, rigged district maps and voter access.

Here in Polonia, Ortiz-Velez made sure to mention that Protasiewicz is homegrown—she grew up on the south side, her parents are buried in a nearby cemetery and she attends a Catholic church about eight blocks away.

As she walked, she consulted a canvassing app on her phone called MiniVAN. It tells her the name, age and voting history of registered voters on the block. 

“Back in the day we put this all on index cards,” she said.

Ortiz-Velez has been canvassing in the district for over 20 years. Some things have not changed. “My father was an evangelist and he always told me, ‘Smile, smile, smile,’” she said outside one house while waiting for an answer at the door.

The post “This Election Is So Quiet”: Inside the Scramble to Mobilize Milwaukee in a High-Stakes Judge Race appeared first on Bolts.

“(T)here’s a time where we all have to make a little bit of sacrifice. Our president called us to D.C.,” he told local news at the time. “It was inspiring to be there and I hope he calls us back.”

His loyalty to election denialism has not appeared to harm his political career; he was re-elected last fall after a tight Republican primary and a blowout general election, and, earlier this year, he was named chair of the Senate panel tasked with reviewing election policy. 

Azinger is now one of several election deniers leading legislative committees on election law, including in the battleground states of Pennsylvania and Arizona. Others have been elected to lead state Republican parties in recent weeks.

This takeover of GOP infrastructure by candidates who spread false conspiracies about the 2020 election has continued even since their high-profile losses in the fall of 2022. But in West Virginia, voting rights advocates say Azinger’s appointment to the chamber’s elections subcommittee has barely registered as scandalous. Bolts found this is neither being covered in local media nor inspiring any particular outcry among fellow lawmakers or the general public.

Senator Mike Caputo, a Democrat on the elections subcommittee and the longest-tenured member of his party’s tiny Senate caucus, told Bolts, “The voters in Senator Azinger’s district elected him. They knew what his actions were. That’s just the way it is around here.”

Azinger’s heightened influence over election policy in his state fits neatly within the status quo in GOP-dominated West Virginia, where voting access is relatively restrictive, turnout is among the worst in the nation, and election deniers abound in the halls of power—and specifically in offices with real influence over election policy. 

Republican Secretary of State Mac Warner, for example, appeared at a pro-“Stop the Steal” rally outside West Virginia’s capitol building in December 2020, and was quoted that day saying “it’s important” to keep Trump, who had already lost, in office. Warner is now running for governor.

Republican West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey signed on to a federal lawsuit seeking to overturn 2020 election results in key swing states won by President Joe Biden, and Warner endorsed the effort.

In January of 2021, both current West Virginia members of the U.S. House of Representatives, Republicans Alex Mooney and Carol Miller, voted to overturn 2020 presidential election results. Miller now faces a challenge from former Delegate Derrick Evans, who was imprisoned for three months in connection with storming the U.S. Capitol and last month announced he is running for Congress.

Eli Baumwell, interim director of the ACLU of West Virginia, is one of those playing defense against the state’s increasingly overwhelming GOP majority. He said it helps obscure Azinger’s appointment to the elections subcommittee that the “fringe” keeps shifting further right in West Virginia on a number of other political fronts, which are taking attention away from elections policy. 

This session has brought a slew of anti-LGBTQ legislation, including House Bill 2007, which seeks to ban gender-affirming health care for West Virginia children. That policy passed the House by a vote of 84-10 and now sits in the Senate, which Republicans control. The House also passed a bill to give state funding to so-called “crisis pregnancy centers,” which discourage people from learning about or seeking abortion—something already near-totally banned in the state. Another bill, passed by the House this week, expands religious exemptions that critics worry will allow organizations to discriminate.

Amid that backdrop, it’s easy for a Senate subcommittee on election policy to go relatively unnoticed.

“We are continually dealing with more and more extreme politicians,” Baumwell told Bolts. “Mere attendance at January 6 isn’t even enough to understand how extreme some of these people are.” 

Asked by Bolts about the reception to Azinger’s subcommittee chairmanship, Julie Archer, of West Virginia Citizens for Clean Elections, said, “I think people care, but also, when I think about some of the issues that some of our partners and allies are dealing with, … there’s just so much bad stuff, and people only have so much headspace for outrage.”

Azinger declined to be interviewed for this story.

Despite his participation in federal election subversion, plus newfound control of the subcommittee gavel, Azinger this year did not champion much in the way of legislation on elections, the state’s log shows. 

The most controversial bill he has sponsored on this front, Senate Bill 516, would make it easier for dark-money political donors to donate in even higher amounts. The bill passed the Senate earlier this month, and currently sits in the House.

Other Republican lawmakers filed a pile of legislation that worried voting rights advocates, including bills to refer voter fraud cases to the (pro-election subversion) attorney general instead of to local prosecutors; to make state voter ID laws stricter; and to repeal the state’s automatic voter registration programs. 

The package is all but dead—it would take an unexpected suspension of legislative rules by GOP leaders to revive it—with West Virginia’s legislature set to adjourn its session in less than two weeks. That’s in keeping with Republicans’ recent approach on elections policy: one nonpartisan evaluation of West Virginia’s 2022 session found the legislature was “restrained” on that front. 

That Azinger and his party aren’t doing more to restrict the vote may be explained by the fact that Republicans are more likely to pass legislation in this area in states with closely contested general elections. West Virginia is hardly competitive; Trump beat Biden there by nearly 40 percentage points in 2020, and Republicans won nearly 90 percent of legislative seats in November.

Analyzing voting-access legislation around the country, researchers out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Spelman College found last year that, “among Republican-dominated states, the most active legislatures were those in which the 2020 presidential election was close.” They add, “legislative activity to expand or contract the electorate has often been motivated by electoral threat.”

Still, West Virginia generally ranks among the worst states for voting access, according to several nonpartisan groups. It does not provide no-excuse mail voting, ballot drop boxes or same-day registration. While it was an early adopter of automatic voter registration, implementation was repeatedly delayed, which Azinger supported, and voting rights advocates say the existing program is hardly effective.

According to the U.S. Elections Project, West Virginia voter turnout was fourth-lowest among states in 2020. Last November, West Virginia turnout was second-lowest in the country, at under 36 percent.

Azinger, in fact, may be more open to certain measures that might expand the state’s paltry electorate. Kenneth Matthews, a formerly incarcerated West Virginian working to restore voting rights for people released from state prisons on parole or probation, said Azinger at one time indicated he might support that policy, Senate Bill 38. Still, the Senate subcommittee on elections did not hold a vote on the bill, despite holding a hearing, before a legislative deadline.

“He applauded me for the efforts I’ve put in for my re-entry,” Matthews told Bolts, “and he said he’s glad I’m up here advocating and letting my voice be heard.”

Azinger has also not questioned the legitimacy of results within West Virginia. Around the country, election-denying Republicans are often more trusting of election systems, and open to liberalizing them, in their own jurisdictions. In rural Nevada, for example, a county elections chief this month told Bolts she is routinely hounded in her own community about election security—but that those questioning her usually are upset about other counties. And in Cochise County, Arizona—a hotbed of election-denier activity—Votebeat reported this month that the local elections chief “defended his own county’s election but couldn’t defend elections elsewhere in the state.”

Regarding the disconnect between Azinger’s more muted approach to elections in West Virginia and his proudly conspiratorial views on federal elections, Matthews notes that “it’s easier to see the weeds in your neighbor’s yard than your own, sometimes.”

The post West Virginia Adds to Election Deniers’ Ongoing Takeover of State Politics  appeared first on Bolts.

From the very first days of early voting, voters queued in long lines all around the state waiting to cast their ballots in person. Some polling sites in the Atlanta metro area had estimated wait times of two to three hours.

A handful of counties offered Saturday voting on Nov. 26 after Thanksgiving, despite objections from the state’s Republican leadership, such as Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. The majority of the state opened the polls on Monday Nov. 28, which saw a record 300,000 people turn out. According to the secretary of state’s website, more than 1.7 million votes have been cast in early voting so far.

Speaking with Bolts, Crystal Greer from Protect the Vote GA, a grassroots group formed to combat voter suppression, said the current scramble to turn out voters was exactly what voting advocates worried about after the passage of Senate Bill 202 shortly after the 2020 election and Senate runoff. 

“We knew that what we’re seeing right now is what that bill was pretty much created to do,” Greer said. “The lines you’re seeing right now are not a good sign. A form of voter suppression.”

Just as they did two years before, Georgians are turning out to decide an open Senate seat in a runoff election after no clear winner emerged in the contest between Republican Herschel Walker and Democrat Raphael Warnock, the incumbent Senator. Control of the Senate is not at stake this time, but Democrats are looking to expand their majority.

But unlike the 2020 election, where the runoff period lasted nearly two months, this cycle there’s approximately four weeks with only five days of mandated early voting. Republicans tightened the runoff election period with a provision in SB 202 last year, a move that advocates at the time worried would make voter turnout more difficult.

The bill, signed into law by Governor Brian Kemp in 2021 with support from Raffensperger and other Georgia Republicans, created myriad new obstacles for people who want to take part in the runoff. It has meant, for one, that people could not register to vote after Nov. 8 because there isn’t enough time for them to get on the voter rolls, unlike in the run-up to the 2021 runoffs. 

It also shortens the window to vote by mail, a procedure that Democrats have rushed toward since the pandemic; voters had less time to request a mail-in ballot (that deadline was Nov. 25) and must mail it back by the deadline of runoff Election Day. It also limited the use of secure absentee ballot drop boxes to only during the early voting period. Ballot drop-off was further restricted to the times early voting polling stations are open, versus 24-hour availability in 2020. 

That change has added pressure on the state’s in-person voting facilities, as already short-staffed polling places have had to simultaneously certify the results of the general election and prepare for the runoff election. Capacity has been a factor in the serpentine lines voters have had to contend with. 

Most contentiously, the shorter window threatened the viability of weekend voting. Raffensperger’s office originally interpreted the law to prohibit early voting on Saturday, Nov. 26, due to an existing law saying that voting cannot be held immediately following a state holiday. A lawsuit filed before Thanksgiving challenged Raffensperger’s determination, leading upwards of 22 out of 159 counties to open locations for Saturday voting. 

All of these restrictions have impacted students home for the holidays and full-time workers unable to wait in line during the week, for whom the importance of weekend voting—along with these other alternative methods of voting—cannot be stressed nearly enough. 

During a press briefing, Vasu Abhiraman, senior policy counsel at the ACLU of Georgia, spoke about the challenges the tight timeline and confusion around Saturday voting caused for many voters, including students. 

“We had short lines on Election Day two years ago, for both the general election and the runoff, because there were robust early voting opportunities and opportunities to vote by mail,” Abhiraman said. “What do we see here for the runoff? Well, we see absentee by mail, nearly an impossible proposition. We have been contacted by so many out-of-state students who are worried about voting absentee by mail.” 

Abhiraman said he waited an hour and 45 minutes to vote at a library in DeKalb County in metro Atlanta. 

Besides the confluence of issues during this runoff that stems from SB 202, Raffensperger’s actions as secretary of state have fueled challenges. Raffensperger gained national attention for opposing then-President Donald Trump’s subversion effort in 2020, but he then channeled that reputation to defend the GOP’s changes to voting laws. 

“The cries of ‘voter suppression’ from those on the left ring as hollow as the continuously debunked claims of ‘mass voter fraud’ in Georgia’s 2020 election,” he said in 2021.

But Raffensperger has a history of fanning the flames of suspicions about election integrity; in the 2020 primary he created a criminal task force to investigate alleged absentee ballot fraud after mailing all eligible Georgia voters an absentee ballot application. (Nearly two years later, the group’s investigation found virtually no fraud.) After the general election, Raffensperger created a process with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to conduct a signature audit of absentee ballots in Cobb County, something he previously had indicated was not possible. 

In the run-up to the runoff, he issued guidance claiming the provision of Saturday voting after a holiday ahead of the Dec. 6 runoff was prohibited by a state statute, even though he had not challenged Saturday voting after a holiday ahead of the Jan. 5, 2021, runoff. Even after Saturday voting was allowed to proceed, Raffensperger’s office signaled to the state legislature it should address “the confusion.” That could result in an outright ban on Saturday voting in future runoffs. Georgia Republicans retained control of the state government on Nov. 8, so they have the ability to further restrict voting laws in their next legislative session. 

Meanwhile, students like Madeline Berns are already experiencing challenges trying to vote. Berns told Bolts that she lives an hour south of where she currently attends school. Planning to vote in the 2022 general election, Berns said she applied for an absentee ballot on Sept. 23. She said the ballot was issued on Oct. 11 but never received it. 

“On Election Day, I had to skip school and leave a medical appointment early to vote at my assigned polling place,” Berns said. “It took about three hours out of my day and 80 miles worth of gas. The poll workers hadn’t filed a provisional ballot before, so they were confused. We got it worked out, though.”

​​Reflecting on the 2020 election, Berns said she voted absentee without issue. With the tight turnaround for the runoff election, she planned to drive home on Election Day.  

“I don’t want to risk that again, so I didn’t apply for another absentee ballot,” she said. “My county didn’t have early voting when I was home for Thanksgiving. It’s unfortunate because I’ll be in the middle of finals season, but I think it’s important.”

Voting rights advocates and engagement organizers say the secretary of state should have done more to ensure voters had the best information available about polling locations and voting options. County election boards, which in the 2020 election took advantage of donations from voting-focused non-profit organizations such as the Center for Tech and Civic Life to fund election administration, were banned from directly receiving such funding under SB 202. The secretary of state’s office has the power to step up its assistance, but so far has not, leaving non-profit organizations to stand in the gap.

During a press briefing at the start of early voting, Stephanie Ali, policy director at the New Georgia Project, said the coalition reached out to officials in each of the state’s 159 counties to get the correct information out to voters. According to Ali, the secretary of state’s site had little to no information going into the weekend early voting. 

“We did the legwork,” said Ali. “This is work that shouldn’t have to be done by nonprofit organizations. It shouldn’t have to be done by political entities. It should be done by our counties, especially our Secretary of State.”

Greer said that some polling locations around the state needed more workers on site, resulting in long lines during early voting. She attributed the poll worker shortage partly to the increased attacks on poll workers in the aftermath of the 2020 election. 

“You have this bottleneck happening in these lines because there’s only two people working or something like that,” she said. “There’s no incentive to hire new poll workers. And also make them feel safe.”

The various accounts of workers being doxxed, harassed and threatened created a chilling effect for some who might otherwise sign up. Greer also said proper training was an issue. 

“We’re still evolving with these voting machines, and so if something goes down, there’s just not enough adequate training for that person to reboot it,” she said. “The line literally stops. Nothing’s happening until that gets fixed.”

Greer said the voter protection coalition would continue fighting for improvements in election administration and expanding ballot access. Georgia voters have remained resilient and continued to vote regardless of wait times and tight deadlines, right up through the final hours of early voting.

Berns believes schools could do more to help students engage in the electoral process, like having Election Day as a school holiday.

“I don’t even think it’s an excused absence here,” she said. “It would be better, though, to just make sure absentee ballots are approved, sent, and received in a timely fashion.”

Joanna Louis-Ugbo, a student at Emory University and organizer with the Georgia Youth Justice Coalition, echoed the importance of making voting accessible for students. 

“We had to fight to keep our precinct on campus because a lot of these students do not have cars or transportation to go to a precinct that will be a little bit further out,” Louis-Ugbo said. “It’s very important to have precincts on these campuses.”

The post Long Lines, Short Windows: How Georgia’s New Restrictive Voting Law Complicates the Senate Runoff appeared first on Bolts.

Compared to the larger electorate that votes in a presidential or midterm year, off-cycle elections tend to see depressed turnout and draw a wealthier and whiter electorate, which can skew whose interests are spoken for in local politics, research shows.

“This reform makes it such that the power of the people is shared among the whole community,” Chelsea Castellano, an organizer who helped champion Ballot Question 2E to move city council elections in Boulder, Colorado, from odd- to even-numbered cycles, told Bolts. She said the status quo was “keeping voter turnout small and low and among certain groups that are typically pretty well represented on our council.” Question 2E passed easily, with almost two-thirds of the vote.

Election data show that turnout in Boulder hasn’t topped 51 percent in any of the odd-numbered years, when its municipal elections were held, between 2013 and 2021. In the even-numbered years of that same span, city turnout averaged 83 percent.

The drop-off is similarly dramatic in jurisdictions around the country that elect local leaders in odd-numbered years. In San Francisco, which also just passed a ballot measure to move its local elections to even-numbered years, turnout averaged 43 percent in off-cycle years but 80 percent in presidential election years.

Voters in nine other localities also approved measures this year to move their elections to even-year cycles, according to an analysis by Ballotpedia. They Include St. Petersburg, Florida; in King County (Seattle), Washington; and in San Jose, Long Beach, and five other California cities. 

This wave of changes came among a series of reforms to election procedures that voters approved last week with an aim of increasing voter participation and turnout. In Connecticut and Michigan, voters codified more days of early voting into state constitutions. Voters in Oakland, California passed two measures enabling noncitizen voting in certain elections and creating a public funding program that allows more voters to financially back candidates of their choice.  

In Boulder, Castellano and her allies hope that moving municipal elections away from off-cycles will engage more people of color, low-income earners, and students (Boulder is home to the University of Colorado), making for an electorate more reflective of the actual populace. Another local progressive organizer, former city council candidate Eric Budd, said he hopes this encourages candidates to run on issues that matter to a larger and more diverse set, as opposed to catering to the narrower group of off-cycle voters.

“Back when I was running,” in 2017, Budd said, “a lot of people were giving me the advice that you need to run a really moderate message, to appeal to homeowners.” Looking back at his own platform from that campaign makes him cringe, he added: “The way I was talking about occupancy limits was very guarded, the way I was talking about duplexes. … I think (2E passing) really shifts not only the people that are running, but the platforms that we’re running on.”

Budd and Castellano advocate for housing density and more flexible zoning as tools to build a larger, more transit-oriented housing stock in the name of climate action and improved socioeconomic and racial diversity, and to address the unaffordability of Boulder, where the median home listing tops $1 million. The other, unofficial political party in Boulder has worked to beat back density and development, prizing so-called “neighborhood character” above affordability strategies and has dominated most of the modern era until recently. The pro-density urbanists previously battled the city council to place a measure on the ballot to relax occupancy limits in Boulder, then lost in the off-cycle 2021 election. Budd said they started organizing for 2E three days after that defeat.

John Tayer, head of the local chamber of commerce, which took a neutral position on Question 2E, believes that progressives are more likely to hold onto power moving forward, with the help of voters more likely to turn out in the city’s new even-year election cycle. “There’s no question that this will—and I think it’s the intended purpose of the initiative—draw out a voter pool that would skew toward the youth, lower-income and renter populations, which would then probably align with candidates of a similar character,” Tayer told Bolts.

Opponents of 2E argued that off-cycle elections mean an electorate that is more involved. “Maintain an informed vote!” argued one longtime council member in the opinion pages of Boulder’s Daily Camera newspaper. Similar cries echoed from opponents of various related measures around the country.

For evidence that a larger and more diverse electorate can indeed change political makeup, the pro-2E organizers have looked to cities like Berkeley, California, and Ann Arbor, Michigan—like Boulder, two wealthy, small cities with major universities, where municipal elections have flipped from odd- to even-numbered years.

In Ann Arbor, this change has had the effect of wiping out all council members who strongly resist housing density and development. That city also requires partisan markers for local candidates which means that, in even-numbered years with higher turnout, conservatives have an even harder time winning in the liberal stronghold. One former Ann Arbor council member, a longtime Republican, said in 2020 that she registered as a Democrat just to have a chance. She lost by 20 percentage points that year. (Boulder’s elections remain non-partisan, though there are so few Republicans in town that one needn’t squint to discern most candidates’ affiliations based on their policy proposals.)

Surveying the nation, researchers at the University of California, San Diego found shifts in power are not surprising, given the “unequivocal” finding that, “Across the nation, turnout in cities with on-cycle elections is dramatically higher than those with off-cycle elections.” Moving municipal elections to presidential years produces an average turnout boost of 29 percent, the researchers wrote, as higher-profile races draw more people to ballot boxes in those years.

Inspired by this data and the passage of 2E, Colorado state Representative Judy Amabile, a Democrat of Boulder, told Bolts she is now working on a bill to lift the state prohibition on school board elections in even-numbered years. 

And just to the east, in the city of Aurora, progressive council member Juan Marcano is pushing for changes that he believes will better align the local government with its broader citizenry. Aurora, with a population of nearly 400,000 people and greater racial and ethnic diversity than any other city in the state, is clearly liberal: Its congressman, U.S. Representative Jason Crow, is a Democrat who just coasted to reelection. Its state legislative delegation is almost entirely Democratic. And yet the city council, elected in non-partisan races in odd-numbered years, is controlled by conservatives. In the most recent municipal election there, turnout was only at 30 percent, city data show. Nearly three times as many registered Aurora voters turned out for the 2020 presidential election, the Sentinel newspaper reported.

Aurora has had some exceptionally close local elections in recent years—most notably, the former Republican U.S. Representative Mike Coffman won the 2019 mayoral race by about 200 votes over Democratic local NAACP chapter president Omar Montgomery—and Marcano believes his side stands a good chance at flipping power in November of 2023. If it does, he said, he’d like to refer to voters amendments to the city charter that would make local elections partisan and place them on even-numbered years. 

“They know that if we had the opportunity to actually have more attention shown to municipal elections, coinciding with when more people are turning out, that they would likely not prevail, to put it politely,” Marcano told Bolts. “They’re relying on low turnout and the disproportionate white, wealthy and conservative voters that turn out for municipal elections.”

The idea, he said, is to meet voters where they’re at. He likened it to designed sidewalks and bike trails.

“You’re going to find the social trails out in the world, and that tells you where the sidewalks should be,” Marcano said. “What we’re seeing from our residents is they want to vote in even years. That’s when they turn out, so it’s our responsibility to allow people to follow the path of least resistance and to be heard when they want to be heard.”

Marcano won his race, in 2019, by 232 votes, or less than 2 percent. The state representative whose district roughly overlaps with his Aurora ward, a Democrat named Iman Jodeh, just won re-election by 28 percentage points.

Those striking numbers aren’t lost on Republican Dustin Zvonek, an Aurora council member who opposes even-numbered and partisan local elections. He said such changes would make municipal politics less personal and more nationalized, and rob city campaigns of the spotlight they presently enjoy during off-cycle elections.

“If you’re just about getting partisan majorities, I understand why you’d want to do this,” he told Bolts. “You can say there are more people that vote overall, so that’s better. But I guess it depends on what you’re looking for.”

Were Aurora to make the moves Marcano seeks, Zvonek added, there is little question that this liberal city with conservative local leaders would elect a more progressive council. “I absolutely believe that,” he said.

The post To Boost Turnout, Some Cities Just Synced Up Their Local Elections With National Cycles appeared first on Bolts.