In a private meeting last month with big-money donors, the head of a top conservative group boasted that her outfit had crafted the new voter suppression law in Georgia and was doing the same with similar bills for Republican state legislators across the country. “In some cases, we actually draft them for them,” she said, “or we have a sentinel on our behalf give them the model legislation so it has that grassroots, from-the-bottom-up type of vibe.”
The Georgia law had “eight key provisions that Heritage recommended,” Jessica Anderson, the executive director of Heritage Action for America, a sister organization of the Heritage Foundation, told the foundation’s donors at an April 22 gathering in Tucson, in a recording obtained by the watchdog group Documented and shared with Mother Jones. Those included policies severely restricting mail ballot drop boxes, preventing election officials from sending absentee ballot request forms to voters, making it easier for partisan workers to monitor the polls, preventing the collection of mail ballots, and restricting the ability of counties to accept donations from nonprofit groups seeking to aid in election administration.
All of these recommendations came straight from Heritage’s list of “best practices” drafted in February. […]
I live in Pa. and was surprised when I was told that I could not vote by mail because I have to sign up for it every year and I was too late to be able to do that. It was my impression that a permanently disabled person would always be automatically be signed up because I was signed up last year. So now I cannot even vote anymore because I am not signed up anymore. I cannot afford to go to the polls in person because I have not yet been able to get a vaccine and it would be unsafe. I feel like I have been screwed by my Republican leaders in the state government. We may have a Governor who is Democrat but the rest of the state government officials are all Republican, and I hate them with a passion.