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Related: About this forumRepublicans Fear New Voting Restrictions Could Backfire On Their Own Voters - Rachel Maddow - MSNBC
Amy Gardner, national political reporter for the Washington Post, talks with Rachel Maddow about how Florida Republicans, in their zeal to appease irrational Trumpian concerns about election fraud, passed new voting restrictions that include making it harder to vote by mail, which many Republican constituencies do.
Downtown Hound
(12,618 posts)uneducated white guys was smart.
mahina
(17,612 posts)quakerboy
(13,915 posts)LittleGirl
(8,277 posts)impeached idiot going to stop having a chance to screw up our democracy?
Gaaaaaaa
SunSeeker
(51,508 posts)And that difference is all that matters to Republicans.
Maine Abu El Banat
(3,479 posts)Give me a group of black women, and a group of Trump humpers. Have each group register, and vote with these draconian laws. My money is on the black women to have that shit figured out first.
jaxexpat
(6,796 posts)Maine Abu El Banat
(3,479 posts)pressbox69
(2,252 posts)Let them do themselves in.
milestogo
(16,829 posts)LetMyPeopleVote
(144,898 posts)I have been working on voter protection efforts for a very long time. In Texas the GOP has relied on vote by mail and for this reason vote by mail was excluded from the GOP voter suppression/voter id law. The full nasty Texas voter id/voter suppression law was only in effect for the 2014 election (Chad Dunn and Marc Veasey sued and got the law largely gutted for subsequent elections). 2014 was teh first year that the Democratic Party made a serious effort at vote by mail. In 2010, the GOP in my county the GOP had 9 to 1 advantage in straight ticket vote by mail ballots and in 2014 we cut that advantage to about 3 to 2 advantage.
A good percentage of GOP voters are older and have used vote by mail for a very long time
I a hard core Democrat but I have received vote by mail applications from GOP candidate even though I was under 65 years of age. Vote by mail has been a major element of the GOP for a long time in Texas and in other states. We actually had more vote by mail ballots in 2020
The GOP's voter suppression efforts are likely to hurt GOP turnout
Link to tweet
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In the past, Gardner notes, absentee voting was something that Florida Republicans encouraged.
"Republican campaigns invested millions of dollars encouraging their supporters to cast ballots by mail," Gardner points out. "State legislators passed laws making it easier. Over the ensuing decades, GOP voters in Florida became so comfortable with casting ballots by mail that in 2020, nearly 35% of those who turned out did so, according to state data compiled by University of Florida political science professor Daniel A. Smith. Virtually every narrow Republican victor of the past generation and there have been many, including two of the state's current top officeholders, Gov. Ron DeSantis and Sen. Rick Scott owes their victory, at least in part, to mail voting."
It wasn't until 2020 that Florida Republicans started to turn against mail-in voting in a big way. Then-President Donald Trump claimed, with zero evidence, that voting by mail encouraged voter fraud and many Florida Republicans, including those in the state legislature, obediently went along with his claim.