To Open The Sky

Changes to election laws

In addition to making it harder to vote, and confusing or intimidating voters with misinformation and threats, Republicans are amking changes to the way states control elections. For example, in Georgia the Republican-controlled legislature has essentially removed final auhority to certifyy elections from secretary of state Brad Raffensperger. In Nebraska, an attempt to restore that state to a traditional winner-take-all status for electoral-college votes failed.

This revolt continues in various states where GOP-led legislatures attempt to consolidate power unto themselves. The conservative majority Trump and Mitch McConnell manuevered onto the Supreme Court, and onto lower courts, backstops this revolt.

I regret that I am out of time to provide more detail on this aspect of their scheme.

Georgia

You may remember this request, made by Trump in a call to Georgia election officials after he lost the state in 2020. Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, to his everlasting credit, refused to go along. But Raffensperger, and Gov. David Kemp, still support Trump -- as does the state legislature, which passed SB 202. Saying the bill makes it "easy to vote and hard to cheat," Gov. Kemp signed it immediately.

The bill does make it easier to vote in some ways. But here is how it makes voting harder.:

• Anyone wanting an absentee ballot must provide a driver's license or other identification. Those lacking a driver's license or state ID must verify their identity in some other way.
• Drop boxes must be inside early voting locations. They will no longer be in libraries or other government buildings, locations convenient for many voters. Also, no drop boxes will be available for the final four days of an election.
• Each county must have a minimum of one drop box. But there are also maximum limits. These can reduce the number of drop boxes in larger counties. For example, Atlanta's Fulton County would go from 38 drop boxes down to just 8.
• A runoff election will now take place four weeks after the general election, versus nine weeks.
• The early voting period for runoffs will shrink from three weeks to one.
• Absentee ballots will be sent to voters 29 days before an election, versus 49 days prior.
• Requests for absentee ballots can be made 78 days before the election, versus 180 days.
• Volunteers will be prohibited from offering food, water and folding chairs to voters waiting in long lines. (The rationale was to prevent anyone trying to influence voters.)
• The law allows a citizen to challenge the elgilbility to vote of an unlimited number of other citizens.

Note that the claimed justification for this bill was concern over tampering with the election. This despite three recounts of votes in Georgia's 2020 presidential election, with no significant problem found.

Then in May 2024, Gov. Kemp signed Senate Bill 189 into law, adding still more restrictions. They include:

• Homeless individuals will have their mailing address for elections set as the registrar's office in their county.
• Registering to vote in another state or municipality will count as a change of residence. If the voter returns to the original district, they must renew their registration.
• Having proof of renting a post office box or private mail service will no longer count as proof of residency for voting purposes.

In addition, both measures exapnd the opportunities for citizens to challenge voter eligibility...

Both these laws have been challenged by the ACLU and other organizations.

Nebraska

The tradition with electoral-college votes is that each state awarded all its EC votes to the candidate who got the majority of the popular vote. After the 2020 election, two states, Maine and Nebraska, changed to a proportional system. What this means in 2024 is that in the very red state of Nebraska Trump would get one fewer EC vote than he would have under the traditional system.

The measure to reverse this, introduced in April, failed because of opposition from Republican legislators.

With Trump's support, state Republicans again endeavored to reverse this on short notice, figuring that Maine would not follow suit so close to the election. However, this new try also failed due to Republican holdouts.

Late-Breaking News

With just days to go, Republicans are mounting a flurry of last-minute legal actions to gum up the works in the presidential campaign. Here are some examples (along with general references):

Donald Trump is suing CBS over a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris that he claims is deceptive.

The Republican National Committee is asking the Supreme Court to Stop Pennsylvania from counting certain absentee ballots.

Some 130 lawsuits have been filed. This flurry of cases argues that RNC strategy is shifting to litigation because they know the voter tide is turning against them.

Now that you have (I hope) read some or all of the content of those links, a big question arises: Why does any of this matter? It matters because Republican politicians — with a few notable exceptions —are not helping the people they are supposed to serve: their constituents. When those Republicans are in Congress, their misbehavior afects the whole nation and even foreign countries. I won't go into detail here, but see the links I provide below.

Many people think both major parties are the same. It is true that the Democratic Party has fallen short of its traditional support for working people. But Joe Biden's victory in 2020 began to reverse that trend. On the bread-and0-butter issues that affect the daily lives of most Americans, the Biden administration has made solid improvements: cut child poverty in half, relieved many college debts, launched massive infrastructure improvement, capped drug prices for seniors, created record numbers of jobs, reduced ACA healthcare premiums, strengthened the hands of labor union organizers, and reauthorized the Violence Against Women Act. Again, see the links below for details.

The Republican Party, by contrast, has been a party of words and not of deeds. They blame Democrats for "destroying the country" and — like Trump himself — constantly accuse them of "weaponizing the Justice Department with "politically motivated prosecutions" against him. What they have done in legislative measures mostly benefits the rich — like Trump's major achievement, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017.

And when it comes to voting rights, they are — as David Frum noted — opposed. That opposition is what I will examine in these pages. The first set of links below are prime sources for daily updates.

This source on YouTube is excellent for daily updates on the fast changing situation.