Advocates want temporary lifting of absentee voting restrictions extended beyond pandemic
Matt DeRienzo, Editor-in-Chief, Center for Public Integrity
It will be in place for a November election even though the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles, the main source of required IDs, has mostly been shut down since the spring due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The state also
has some of the most onerous rules in the country for casting absentee ballots
— requiring both a witness signature and a notary certification — but they were suspended due to concerns about the
pandemic after Common Cause and the League of Women Voters sued.
Republicans appealed the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court but were denied.
Voting rights
advocates say they will push lawmakers next year to make that reform stick.
“It’s a permanent problem, too,” said Steven Brown, executive director of the Rhode Island chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. “The pandemic has helped demonstrate there’s lots of unnecessary barriers. … It’s demonstrated how far outside the norm our law was.”
Here’s a look
at some of the most significant barriers to voting rights and access in the
state:
ABSENTEE BALLOTS
Rhode Island
voters will be allowed this year to cast absentee ballots with no excuse and
without having to gather witness and notary signatures. The state is actively
encouraging it by mailing applications to every voter.
But advocates have been unsuccessful in another fight over mail-in voting this year. The state isn’t budging on its requirement that ballots must arrive before polls close on Election Day to be counted.
The ACLU state
chapter and others had asked the state that ballots be counted as long as they
were postmarked by Election Day, “in light of the pandemic and all the Postal
Service problems this year,” Brown said.
“Many more people
are voting by mail ballot than ever before,” he said. “It’s a critical way for
voters to protect their health and participate in the electoral process.”
Brown is
pleased, however, that the state has deployed secure drop boxes for absentee
ballots at local town and city halls this year as an alternative to the mail.
Voters can also drop off absentee ballots at their polling place on Election
Day without waiting in line.
VOTER ID
Rhode Island is
among states with a strict requirement that voters present photo identification at the polls before
they can cast a ballot. It must be either a Rhode Island driver’s license or
voter ID card, state or federal ID card, U.S. passport, U.S. military card,
student ID card from a U.S. educational institution, government-issued medical
ID card, or an ID issued by a federally-recognized tribal government.
But an added
concern this year is the requirement that photo IDs must not have expired
within six months of voting. Brown said that Rhode Island’s DMV has been mostly
shut down since March due to the pandemic, issuing license renewals by
appointment only.
His
organization will be asking Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo, a Democrat, to
issue an executive order extending that grace period to at least 9 months for
the purposes of voting this November.
POLLING PLACE ACCESS
Rhode Island is
also unusual among states in the Northeast in confronting at least one issue
with polling place closures that have disenfranchised voters in
other parts of the country.
On Oct. 16,
after the ACLU filed a complaint, the state Board of Elections overruled the city of Newport’s decision to
close a polling place at a local senior center and combine it
with another location.
Brown had
argued that the closure would have a disproportionate impact on Black, Latino,
elderly and disabled voters in the neighborhood.
Stateline and the Center for Public Integrity are exploring how changes to polling places and other election shifts affect Americans’ ability to vote. Stateline is an initiative of The Pew Charitable Trusts. For information on how to vote in 2020, click here.
