Republicans pass restrictive voting bill in U.S. House

Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives are pushing major election reforms before the midterms. WITF's Jim Jordan Wilkie talks with Votebeat editor Nathaniel Rakeach, who is following this story. Rakeach says one of the key changes will be to force new voters to prove their citizenship to register to vote. This isn't necessarily going to be easy for a lot of people, particularly, I think, the proof of citizenship requirement. So that's something like your passport or a combination of your birth certificate and your license. But some people have lost access to those documents entirely. Some people don't have passports. About half of Pennsylvanians don't have passports. There are a lot of people who are worried about the inconvenience on voters to prove their citizenship. The second half of the law, which would affect everybody, is a photo ID requirement when you are actually voting. Those election officials who'd have to make this work, how would they be affected by this law? So I've talked to a lot of election officials who are worried about... basically the speed of which this would be implemented, it would go into effect immediately. And obviously, the elections are coming up. The primary is very soon in a state like Pennsylvania. The general election, of course, is in November. And election officials are already kind of have a lot on their plates to prepare for that election. But this would add a lot of extra work. And it's just time out of their day to review those documents for voters that they already don't really have because putting on election is hard work. Give us a more time, you know, give us a couple of years to implement this. Give us some more money to hire additional staff to check these documents. Now, this bill doesn't have a great shot politically. It has moved out of the House, but there isn't a huge appetite for it in the Senate because that would need to pass the 60-vote filibuster. Republicans don't by themselves have that vote, and at least one Republican, Lisa Murkowski, has said that she will not support this bill. Oftentimes lawmakers. will advance a bill or vote on a bill to send a message. What is the message that's being sent by trying to advance this bill? I think that Donald Trump's message is to say that American elections are not secure, which they are. The rates of non-citizen voting is extremely low. But then second, I think that the message that House Republicans are trying to send is that they are behind Donald Trump, right? They are trying to appease Trump. And I think a lot of the House Republicans know that this is not going to get past the Senate, but they want to show a base that is concerned about election security. They want to show that base that they are trying everything we can. Could you elaborate on how secure our elections are already? Yeah, I mean. We know because there are, you know, people do audits of results all the time. We know that they review the voter rolls constantly for non-citizens of the type that this law is trying to prevent, and it's always a minuscule fraction of voters. The concern that a lot of opponents of this bill have is that it would disenfranchise a lot more voters who are valid because they don't have the passport or the birth certificate necessary.

I think the number of non-citizen voters that were found in the last election was somewhere in like a few dozen. Do you want to prevent those few dozen voters versus preventing perhaps tens of thousands of eligible voters? The language around this bill is nonpartisan. It's election security. Is there a partisan impact that would affect the ability of either party to successfully make its way into office? So that's a really interesting question because I think that both parties think that there will be a partisan impact. You know, people make a big deal about voter ID laws or about vote by mail, you know, helping Republicans or Democrats, respectively. And academic studies generally have not borne that out. So I think my starting assumption would be actually that it would have a neutral, if any, partisan impact.