The NPR Politics Podcast - Here's How Voting Is Different In Georgia and Texas This Year

Episode Date: January 25, 2022

After Democrats failed to pass federal voting rights legislation, changes to election processes enacted by Republican-controlled state legislatures will reshape how voters cast a ballot in 2022 and beyond.This episode: White House correspondent Scott Detrow, voting reporter Miles Parks, KUT reporter Ashley Lopez, and WABE reporter Sam Gringlas.Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Aloha, this is Kate on the last day of my honeymoon on Kauai's east shore. My husband is breaking down camp before we head back to our home in frigid Minnesota. This podcast was recorded at... It's 2-07 Eastern on Tuesday, January 25th. Things may have changed by the time you hear this. Okay, enjoy the show. I was gonna say I was jealous, but if they're going back to Minnesota for the rest of the winter, I feel like it evens out. I'm still jealous. I've always wanted to go to Hawaii. Miles, speaking of honeymoons, you just got engaged the other day. Congratulations.

I did. I did. We don't know where we're going to go for our honeymoon, but... Maybe Hawaii. Hawaii's in the running. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the White House. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. And we have talked a lot about voting here on the podcast lately. Republicans blocked Democrats' efforts to pass voting rights legislation at the federal level. Senate Democrats failed to change filibuster rules to get it done with a simple majority vote.

Today, we are going to zoom back into the state level for two reasons. First, because there are new pushes in Republican controlled states to restrict voting. And we are starting to get a sense of how some of the laws passed last year are affecting elections. So first, we're going to start in Texas with Ashley Lopez of KUT in Austin. Hey, Ashley. Hey there. Welcome back to the podcast. You were with us to talk all about the push to pass this law last year. Big picture, what did it do? What does it do?

Well, Texas's new voting law does a lot of things. It amounts to actually a pretty massive rewrite of Texas's election code. For one, it restricts how long county election officials can keep polling locations open. In 2020, Houston in particular opened up 24-hour voting centers and the legislature put a stop to that. Lawmakers also banned drive-thru voting, which was another innovation that bigger counties took on during the pandemic. The new law also creates like a bunch of new crimes related to voting and also increases penalties for things that were already crimes like falsifying a voter registration form is a good example. This is something that has really worried a lot of folks because they fear voters will get in legal trouble for stuff that could amount to like innocent mistakes people make while voting. And that's particularly worrisome because the law is,

you know, creates a lot of new paperwork requirements like ID requirements for vote by mail and getting assistance at the polls now has paperwork. And, you know, some of this is already starting to trip up some voters. And Ashley, you've been doing a lot of reporting on the county level about how this is affecting people's votes. What have you found so far? Yeah, so a couple of counties, including the county I'm in, where Austin is, Travis County, election officials here have said, you know, what I mentioned,

which is like the new ID requirements for vote by mail, is starting to already create issues. So there's a provision in the new law that people have to put either their social security number or their driver's license on their vote by mail application, you know, of course, as well as the ballot itself. And whatever number they put on the ballot has to match the number they put on their voter registration. And for a lot of folks, they don't remember what they put on their voter registration

card so you have to guess the either or it's not just like writing down your social security correctly exactly yeah and local officials say they've been forced to reject some of those applications because people have guessed wrong um and there wasn't you know immediately information about how they cure those ballots i mean there has been some um guidance now and what you know, immediately information about how they cure those ballots. I mean, there has been some guidance now and what, you know, voting groups are telling people is like, hey, fill out both. So that way, like, you're bound to be right if you put both right. So like, that's what they're telling voters to do now. But for the ones that already came in who already submitted their application, they're having to do this, like run around with the state now to figure out how to how to cure those ballots. So, you know, this doesn't affect a ton of people, because I think we've talked about this before, Texas has a pretty

restrictive vote by mail program. So like you have to be out of town, disabled or over 65 to vote by mail, not a lot of people get to do that. But for the few people who rely on that kind of voting, this could be something that trips them up. So Ashley, I'm curious, when you're talking to voting rights groups about how they're responding to this new law, have you found that the groups are just taking an educational response and they're just trying to teach people what the law says and what to do about it? Or are they doing other things to get around these roadblocks? The answer is yes, and. Like, they're trying, like, you know, I've seen voting groups trying to give people more information so that they limit the amount of mistakes that are that could potentially

be made. But, you know, voting rights groups have also been saying, like, we cannot organize our way out of what we see is like, like straight up voter suppression tactics. Like it's really hard to organize around things that are just designed to make it harder to vote. Now, Republicans, of course, would say that is not the point of their laws. It is not to make it so that it's hard for people to vote. It's so that it's, you know, what voting rights groups perceive as mistakes, they sometimes view as fraud. So that's what they want to eliminate is the possibility of fraud. But, you know, when you have new, all these new rules like this and criminal penalties, you know, voting rights groups say it's really hard to get, you know, voters to like, even feel like they're safe enough to vote, like, like, you know, like voting is a good idea. And

that's like kind of hard to, you know, organize enough around of in some cases, sometimes, you know, it does inspire voters to vote regardless, but or find a way around the different hurdles that Texas is putting up, but that's not always the case. So that's the voter side of things. Miles, from where you've been looking all over the country on this, how do you think new laws like this are going to affect the people administering the elections, trying to put these laws in place? Well, I think it's helpful for voters to kind of put themselves into the shoes of election officials. You know, if you're somebody who's been doing your job a certain way for a decade

or two decades or a couple of years, and your job involves thousands upon thousands of individual pieces of paper, and then your boss came over to you one day and said, hey, I know this is a really logistically difficult job that we're making you do. And we're making you do it in a harder way than other states do it. Other departments do it. But also, if you make a mistake, now that's no longer just kind of an issue that you can figure out on the back end. Now you potentially could go to jail or pay a huge fine for making that mistake. Your reaction would probably be, wow, is there another job I can go get somewhere that doesn't make it so I could go to jail for making a mistake on these thousands of pieces of paper? And I think that is another worry when you change election laws like this and you create larger penalties for mistakes for election workers who are already under-resourced, already underpaid in a lot of situations. I think the motivation for

good people to do these jobs just becomes less and less. And I think there's a big worry that we're going to see a mass exodus this year and before 2024 of good election workers. Yeah. Well, Ashley, it was good to talk to you and hear from more of your reporting on all of this. Thanks for joining us. Thank you. This is Ashley Lopez from KUT in Austin. We're going to take a quick break.

When we come back, Miles and I are going to keep talking about this. And this time we're going to focus in on Georgia. We are back. Sam Greenglass covers Georgiaorgia politics for wabe hi sam hi scott you're new to the podcast as a reporter but we should say you were a long time all things considered producer and i have a confession to make to you i still have your headphones i'm wearing them right now what no way i i mark my headphones with blue tape does it have blue tape. Does it have blue tape on them? It has blue tape. We accidentally traded headphones covering Iowa. We never returned them and they just became my headphones. They say hi.

One of the last good field trips pre-pandemic. Yeah. But you have traded me stealing your headphones and all things considered for covering Georgia politics. And let's start with probably the biggest storyline you're going to be covering in Georgia. And that is the fact that Georgia is one of the states where these high profile voting laws went into effect. Joe Biden has focused especially on Georgia. He went to Atlanta to give that voting rights speech a couple weeks ago. How is voting looking different in November in Georgia based on this new law? So just to rewind a tiny bit, Georgia lawmakers passed a pretty massive overhaul of election laws last year. I think it was like 98 pages long or something like that. And it deals with pretty much everything from how votes are actually cast and how they're counted to how the state oversees elections

overall. And I think one of the big changes that voters will actually notice right away is how absentee ballots are handled. So maybe we can zoom in there. Because it's a really big deal, because so many people vote absentee now because of the pandemic. A lot of election departments also say that they got overwhelmed in 2020 trying to count all of those ballots in time. So now under this new law, the window to request and turn in an absentee ballot is a lot narrower. And there's also a strict ID requirement if you're voting absentee. So gone is this thing called exact signature match, which caused a lot of problems in the past. You know, the signature on the ballot had to exactly match the signature on file with

the state. They've gotten rid of that now. You have to send in your driver's license number, a state ID number, or you can send in a photocopy of another kind of ID. Lots of voting rights activists say this is going to be a big burden for people because not everyone can just get to a Xerox machine and send in that photocopy. Yeah. And then when it's time to turn in the absentee ballot, the law basically mandates that every county has to have a drop box. That's new. But the law also limits how many a county can have. In Fulton County, where I am, it's going to be way fewer than it was in 2020. So there are some changes that are actually trying to fix real issues

that came up after the last election, but also a lot of changes that will objectively make it more difficult for people to vote. But Miles, Sam makes a good point there. Democrats nationally certainly focus a lot more on the limits on drop boxes than the mandates for drop boxes to be there. It's just one small example of this and the wide ranges it covers. Yeah, I mean, I think there has been a disconnect broadly between, you know, the outrage around this bill. And to be frank, a lot of what the bill says, I mean, if you remember, at the time this bill passed, you know, Major League Baseball moved the All-Star game as a response to this

bill. But then I think now as we, whether it's Sam covering politics in Georgia or me, you know, thinking about voting nationally, thinking about, okay, looking ahead to November, how hard is it going to be for people to vote? And I think when you look at that question, it's still comparing Georgia to a lot of other states and even comparing Georgia to 30 years ago, Georgia, it is still fairly easy for people to vote. There is no excuse absentee balloting there. You know, there are they've done an amazing job on decreasing the amount of lines in recent elections in early and day of voting. And so I think it's important to focus on the things that do restrict access because Georgia is a state that was won by less

than 20,000 votes in the presidential election. So changing things on the margins does matter without saying voting is impossible. Voting is going to be hard for you. Voting in Georgia, for most people, is still going to be fairly easy and pain free. Though, it's important to point out, and Sam, we said at the top that Joe Biden has focused a lot on Georgia, Donald Trump has as well, because a lot of the call for changes, the push for changes was based on the false lying premise that Biden did not win Georgia, which he did. Trump has really focused in on Georgia of the states that he lost to kind of make this false claim over and over again. And Trump's claim about the Georgia election, is it fair to say it dominates Republican politics in Georgia right

now and dominates the races that people are running this year? I think that's totally fair. I mean, I've been saying this in stories a lot over the last couple of weeks, but I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that the ghost of 2020 basically has been hanging over Georgia and will hang over the 22 election in Georgia. I mean, just look at the sitting Republican governor and the secretary of state who are both facing Trump backed primary challenges. And those challenges hinge on the fact that the incumbents supposedly didn't do enough to help Trump overturn the election results here in Georgia. And, you know, willingness to talk about widespread election fraud has become almost like a litmus test for Trump and his allies

when deciding who they want to support in a primary race. And so lots of Republicans, especially those who are in tough primaries, are basically trying to prove their conservative election integrity credentials as much as they possibly can to score those endorsements. I mean, here we're in the middle of our legislative session right now, which is only about three months. And the leadership of the House and Senate are basically saying the election was fair in 2020, and they don't want to do anything more than what last year's election law this session. Like the Senate just voted on whether to add a ban on non-citizens voting to the state constitution. There's a bill to ban drop boxes entirely. These bills probably aren't going anywhere, but they're still keeping this debate about election fraud alive and well. Yeah. All right, Sam Greenglass, it was nice to talk to

you. I miss you. Let me know if you want your headphones back. Thanks, Scott. You can keep them. All right. I appreciate that. That does it for today. We'll be back in your feeds tomorrow. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the White House. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.