The Most Dangerous Provisions of the Voter Suppression Bills Are Ones You’ve Probably Never Heard About
People who run elections in local county election offices all around the country, understand one thing: The process relies on an army of citizens, many of whom are thankless volunteers. That’s why many of the new criminal provisions in GOP voter suppression bills, ones that are specifically aimed at these workers and at election officials, will have a chilling effect on the proper running of elections. In some states, election workers now face threats of felony charges, fines of up to $25,000, and jail time from simply doing their job in an increasingly acrimonious and partisan setting.
Add to that the harassment, bullying and even death threats that county officials and election poll workers now face from angry GOP voters who have been fed the Big Lie about fraud and a stolen election, and it may become insurmountable difficult to find people willing to contribute their time to our elections. Even a single, high-profile prosecution of a volunteer or official who made an honest mistake could have devastating consequences on recruitment and morale—and the GOP knows it.
The new election laws are often vague and impose requirements that are difficult to meet. In Texas, for example, the new law penalizes any action that “would make any observation not reasonably effective” for a poll worker. In Florida, failure to have continuous supervision of a drop box by staff (an unfunded mandate for most counties) could result in serious fines. If a worker sends absentee ballots out in Iowa or Texas to anyone who didn’t request one, it could result in stiff penalties.
“The default assumption that county election officials are bad actors is problematic,” Chris Davis, the county election administrator in Williamson County, Texas, north of Austin, said to the New York Times. “There’s so many moving parts and things happening at a given polling place, and innocent mistakes, though infrequent, can happen. And to assign criminal liability or civil liability to some of these things is problematic. It’s a big-time issue that we have.”
“These poll workers don’t ever, in our experience, intend to count invalid votes, or let somebody who’s not eligible vote, or prevent somebody who’s eligible from voting,” said Davis, who is a nonpartisan official. “Yet we’re seeing that as a baseline, kind of a fundamental principle in some of the bills that are being drafted. And I don’t know where it’s coming from, because it’s not based on reality.”
Indeed, none of these laws was at all necessary in light of the smoothest election in our nation’s history. Instead, they result from the self-created need by the GOP to feed a narrative that the election was somehow fraudulent or unfair, and that nefarious volunteers and county officials are somehow complicit. GOP County Supervisors and officials, however, have unanimously rejected this charge and are now at odds with lawmakers and the GOP base in Florida, Texas and Georgia. For their principled stance, many of them, from county supervisors to Secretaries of State, regularly receive threats to their families and to their own lives. As a result, we may see more moderate civil servants, who are simply following the law and overseeing perfectly free and fair elections, forced out in favor of rabid partisans.
Troublingly, the GOP base already has been conditioned to accept the false narrative that voting rules should and must change for the GOP to win. In the most recent CBS-YouGov poll, Republican voters were asked many questions about which direction their party should go. Among the most alarming responses was to a question about focusing on the difference between the “message” and the “rules.” Pollsters asked GOP voters whether, in advance of the 2022 election, they would advise Republican leaders to “tell the public about popular policies and ideas” because the GOP “will win if more people hear about them,” or instead “push for changes to voting rules in the states and districts to ensure fair elections,” because the GOP “will win once those changes are in place.”
A full 47 percent of GOP respondents chose the latter. In other words, there is now such widespread belief in non-existent election fraud that nearly half of GOP voters believe that “fixing” the voting rules will mean the GOP wins again. The problem of course is that the “fixing” of the rules by the GOP legislatures is nothing more than raw voter suppression aimed at minority voters. And the new imposition of potential criminal penalties on hard-working and innocent poll workers and county election officials will only drive people away from volunteering their time or running for these thankless jobs.
Asked why there is a need for such harsh penalties, GOP lawmakers say they want to force prosecutors to punish those who break the election laws, a practice that led in Texas to a five-year prison term for Crystal Mason, a black voter who mistakenly cast a provisional vote while out on supervised release for a criminal conviction. (By contrast, a white voter named Bruce Bartman who intentionally cast a fake ballot for Trump under his dead mother’s name in Pennsylvania received only probation.)
In Texas, the push for penalties appears to be aimed at so-called “low-level offenses” in the running of elections, even though there is absolutely no evidence any actually occur. “There’s an indication that sometimes lower-level offenses do not get the attention that high-level offenses do,” State Senator Bryan Hughes of Texas, who sponsored one of the voter suppression bills, said to the Times. “And so if there’s a crime, it’s a problem and it’s not being prosecuted, one approach is to raise the level of offense so that the prosecutors know this is a big deal and you should take this seriously.”
He added, “It’s always going to be balanced. But people have to follow the law, and if I’m going to work for the government and I’m going to promise to follow the law and to serve the people of Texas, I’ve got to follow the law.”
Whether they are followed or not, these laws are expressly designed to undermine the safeguards of our democracy by discouraging the participation of election volunteers, who are needed by the thousands, and many of whom have been helping run elections for decades. Add to this that the new laws now also prohibit outside funds from going to help local election officials recruit staff, upgrade machinery, or otherwise run their precincts more smoothly, and the new penalties could set us up for significant delays, a lack of qualified volunteers, and general chaos in the 2022 and 2024.
And that is no accident.