National: Red states advancing bills to curb mail-in voting | Gabby Birenbaum/The Hill
GOP legislators in states across the country are advancing bills that would prevent elections officials from sending out absentee ballot applications ahead of November’s election, even in states where those top officials are fellow Republicans. At the height of the coronavirus pandemic, secretaries of state in places like Arizona, Georgia, Iowa, South Dakota and Wyoming encouraged residents to cast ballots from home by sending out absentee ballot request forms. Those forms led to increased participation during the primaries, with many states seeing record turnout. But now, Republican state legislatures are pushing back on those secretaries of states’ efforts by authoring bills to thwart their ability to send out ballot applications for the general election. Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) last week signed a bill that requires the secretary of state to receive approval from a bipartisan legislative council before authorizing the mailing of absentee ballot request forms, after Secretary of State Paul Pate (R) sent applications to active voters. Eighty percent of the 524,000 votes cast in Iowa’s June primary were absentee ballots. In Ohio, legislators proposed a measure to bar Secretary of State Frank LaRose (R) from sending out request forms en masse, even though the secretary of state’s office has done so for years. The bill was later amended to stop the state from paying for postage on the return envelope after LaRose lobbied legislators.