More than 400 voter-restriction bills were considered in 47 states during the 2021 legislative session, according to a new Democracy Docket report.

To date, some 25 Republican-sponsored bills, including one in Georgia, were signed into law. The legislative session is rapidly coming to a close nationwide.

“The volume of voter suppression bills proposed in state legislatures this year has been unprecedented,” the report noted.” And even though they did not all get passed into law, one thing is clear: Republicans are determined to make it even harder to cast a ballot in 2022.”

Here’s a brief look at some of the measures:

  • Georgia is one of three states that banned water and food distribution to voters in line by anyone other than poll workers. The practice is called line-warming and usually happens in areas with long wait times such as minority communities, Democracy Docket noted. The average early vote time in Georgia was 44 minutes – well above the 30-minute standard considered to be easy and accessible, according to The Center for New Data.
  • Every state that considered voter suppression legislation this year had a bill that would restrict absentee voting. All told, that’s 198 bills in 41 states. Georgia introduced SB 241, which would have repealed the state’s long-standing no excuse absentee policy. It didn’t pass.
  • Eighteen states considered measures that proposed new voter roll purges.
  • Some 85 bills in 32 states sought stricter voter identification laws.

That said, these new regulations aren’t without contention. Georgia’s two-month-old election reform law is facing a raft of legal challenges.

The Coalition for Good Governance filed a lawsuit last week, becoming the latest organization to challenge the omnibus SB 202 measure signed into law on March 26 by Gov. Brian Kemp.

The new law reduces the number of drop boxes, cuts the time voters have to vote absentee, requires voter identification in order to vote absentee by mail, prohibits monitors and observers from reporting suspicious activity, bans photographing electronic ballots, and adds more legislative control over how elections are conducted.

A total of seven lawsuits have been filed, Democracy Docket noted. Other groups that have filed suit include The New Georgia Project, the Georgia NAACP, the ACLU, VoteAmerica, Concerned Black Clergy, and Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta.

Here’s the Democracy Docket report on the various voter restriction measures in their entirety.

Read more about the various lawsuits filed against Georgia’s new law and other voting-related lawsuits here.

(Header Image: The U.S. Capitol Building. Image by Louis Velazquez via Unsplash.)