After Record 2020 Turnout, State Republicans Weigh Making It Harder To Vote

Poll workers help voters get ready to cast their ballots at on Nov. 3, 2020 in Atlanta. State lawmakers are now considering legislation that could roll back some laws that made it easy for voters to cast ballots by mail.

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After an election that saw record voter turnout, with many of those voters casting their ballots early and by mail, some Republican state lawmakers are proposing a wave of new voting laws that would effectively make it more difficult to vote in future elections.

The proposals come in the aftermath of the unprecedented onslaught of disinformation about the conduct of the 2020 election by former President Donald Trump and some of his allies in the Republican Party.

“Some folks bring these proposals forward and say, ‘Well, we just need to address confidence in our election systems,’ when it’s some of those very same people, or at least their allies and enablers, [who] have denigrated our election system by either telling lies or at least leveraging or relying on other people’s lies to justify some of these policies,” said Steve Simon, Minnesota’s Democratic secretary of state, at a news conference organized last week by the Voter Protection Program.