The Atlantic: “The GOP drive for stricter voting laws, and in particular to make voting by mail more difficult, is rooted in three incorrect assumptions. The first, and most widely debunked, is that the 2020 election was tainted by significant fraud. The second is that the historically large turnout was responsible for Trump’s defeat. As the CNN data analyst Harry Enten recently wrote, ‘Trump lost because he was an unusually unpopular president, and he likely would have been defeated if turnout looked like it did in 2016.’ The third is that mail voting swung the election toward Democrats. A Stanford University report released this month concludes that ‘no-excuse absentee voting mobilized relatively few voters and had at most a muted partisan effect despite the historic pandemic. Voter interest appears to be far more important in driving turnout.'”

“If these laws pass, they are likely to make it harder for Democratic-leaning minority voters to cast ballots. Randy Perez, who until this month was the democracy director at the progressive organization Living United for Change in Arizona, calculated that the purge bill would kick about 50,000 Latinos off the permanent early-voting list, or about 7 percent of the state’s Latino voters – almost five times Biden’s margin of victory. Torey Dolan, who works on voting issues at Arizona State University’s Indian Legal Clinic, listed a range of ways that proposed bills would hurt Native American voters: Many don’t have utilities or pay property taxes or have access to copiers, making it challenging to provide documentation; street addresses on reservations aren’t always standard; and mail delivery is slow, so shorter voting periods would be a particular burden. But just as Trump’s claims of fraud were not backed by evidence, Republicans don’t seem to have carefully thought through all the ways their bills might affect state’s the entire electorate. Whereas past efforts at voter suppression around the country seemed to target Democratic demographics ‘with almost surgical precision’ (as a federal judge wrote of North Carolina’s 2013 voter-ID law), some of the laws currently under consideration in Arizona and nationwide look like blunt instruments that could end up making it harder for Republicans to vote too.”