During a legislative committee hearing last week to discuss whether Mississippi should adopt in-person early voting, one of the chairmen of the session asked an odd question.
Sen. Jeremy England wanted to know whether any of the 47 states that allow voters to cast their ballots early without having to provide a reason had switched from Republican to Democratic in their voting pattern.
The expert who was testifying, Samantha Buckley of Secure Democracy USA, said that where states had switched from “red” to “blue,” or vice versa, the cause was due to demographic shifts and not to making voting more convenient.
We don’t suspect England, the Republican chairman of the Senate Elections Committee, is all that worried about Mississippi, now deep red, becoming blue, or even purple, anytime soon. He may have been asking this question, though, in response to feedback he has received from his more paranoid GOP colleagues.
England tried this year to get in-person early voting enacted. He authored a bill that would have allowed for 15 days of early voting at the circuit clerk’s offices prior to an Election Day. The proposal also would have eliminated in-person absentee voting, since it would no longer be necessary. Mail-in absentee voting would not be affected.
The bill overwhelming passed the Senate, but it died in the House. The outcome produced the hearing last week headed by England and his House counterpart, Rep. Noah Sanford.
Although Democrats tend more than Republicans to favor steps that make voting easier, that’s largely because Republicans have been misled by some in their leadership to not trust the voting process in general and to also believe that lower turnouts benefit GOP candidates. Former President Donald Trump’s four years of falsely claiming that the 2020 election was stolen from him by Democratic-orchestrated fraud hasn’t helped matters.
As far as in-person early voting, though, it is popular across party lines with the people who matter the most — the voters. Buckley told lawmakers that according to a national poll, 65% of Republicans support in-person early voting. That’s not as high as the 82% of Democrats, but it still represents a large majority.
Such bipartisan popularity is why all but three states — regardless of whether they are heavily Republican, heavily Democratic or among those handful of states that are evenly split — have adopted in-person early voting.
The change accommodates Americans’ busy lifestyles, while potentially increasing voter participation and decreasing election fraud. The latter benefit accrues from reducing the volume of absentee voting, where most election fraud occurs.
If any GOP lawmakers are worried about Mississippi shifting to the Democratic column in federal and state elections, they are worrying about nothing. That’s not going to happen anytime soon, if ever, given the conservative voting patterns this state has demonstrated for decades.
Republicans hold all eight statewide offices, five out of the six seats Mississippi has in Congress, as well as supermajorities in both chambers of the state Legislature. The GOP has an iron grip on political power in this state.
It would take a whole lot more than early voting to weaken it.
