“It’s all sort of geared toward addressing this specter of fraud and the specter of problems that don’t really exist,” said Brad Ashwell, the Florida state director for All Voting is Local, a voting rights nonprofit.
“They’re looking to make the process harder, more costly, and create a lot more voter confusion.”
Aklima Khondoker, Georgia State Director for All Voting is Local, a national voting rights group, is concerned that the new limits on the availability and access to dropboxes will especially impact voters in areas with fewer early voting sites—often in diverse neighborhoods—as well as those with disabilities. “You can’t call it a mailbox anymore if you shove it inside of the United States Postal Service and say that this is a mailbox like any other mailbox,” says Khondoker. She describes the new law as similar to “death by 1,000 cuts,” calling it “voter suppression by 1,000 measures.”
But this provision is problematic for many Native Americans who live on reservations with unreliable postal service, said Rosemary Avila, a campaign manager for All Voting Is Local’s Arizona chapter.
Avila said it’s clear this Arizona bill is “a direct response to the 2020 election and the increase in turnout in communities that turned out and make their voices heard.”
Brad Ashwell works with All Voting is Local. He said if these bills pass, millions of Floridians who have the ability to vote could end up disenfranchised. “This is a really bad provision in both bills that needs to change,” he said. “Hopefully they’ll work on that.”
Some voting-rights advocates come right out and say the goal is to cut into voting by Democrats, particularly Democrats of color, who collectively cast nearly 700,000 more ballots by mail in Florida in 2020 than did Republicans.
“It seems to be coming from national forces,” said Brad Ashwell, Florida director of All Voting Is Local, a voting rights organization with state chapters around the country.
Alex Gulotta, the Arizona state director of All Voting is Local, said hearings like Wednesday's reveal the "privilege of the suburban legislators" who assume everyone has easy access to the documents proposals advancing this year would make necessary, and fail to take into account the limited internet access rural areas and some of the state's Native American communities face.
