🌊 Roca Deep Dive: The Voting Wars

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We are living in a cycle of endless media spin in the lead-up to the election. On perhaps no topic is this more apparent than voting, where the Democratic-aligned outlets insist Republicans are trying to steal the election by letting no one vote and Republican-aligned ones claim Democrats are trying to steal the election by letting everyone vote.

Or as MSNBC says: “GOP power grabs are taking voter suppression to the next level.”

And Newsmax declares: “Dems Voting Scam Turns Illegal Migrants Into Voters.”

But what’s actually happening?

The Constitution and its amendments set general rules – including timing and some restrictions – for federal elections.

Beyond that, Congress has passed six laws enshrining voter rights. These include The Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prevents discriminatory practices like race-based voting restrictions; The Help America Vote Act of 2002, which modernized voting systems after nearly 2M votes were disqualified in the 2000 election; and The National Voter Registration Act of 1993, which required states to simplify their voter registration processes.

The remaining rules – affecting voter ID, which ballots count, early voting, and mail-in ballots, among other things – are largely left to the state and local governments. In most states, the Secretary of State, most commonly an elected official, is ultimately in charge of elections.

It’s these rules that are the subject of so much scrutiny.

State legislatures controlled by both parties have spent the last four years modifying voting rules. Both parties say they want to apply lessons learned from the 2020 election. Democrats have said that means enshrining the pandemic-era policies that led to expansions of mail-in and early voting, while Republicans have said it’s modifying or enforcing laws to address concerns about election integrity.

Almost every major swing state has changed who can vote or how. Amid this, viral stories have suggested that voting laws are tipping the election. These include:

• North Carolina’s county election boards announcing the removal of 747,000 voters from their rolls;

• Arizona’s Supreme Court allowing nearly 100,000 flawed registrations to remain active;

• And a judge deciding whether Georgia’s State Election Board has introduced too much uncertainty into the election

Below, we break down each of these stories and explain each swing state’s new voting policies.

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