Hoosiers — the people who live and work in Indiana — have not been clamoring for their elected officials to restrict voting.
Instead, the motivation driving the proposed laws introduced into the Indiana General Assembly this winter comes from national party politics.
The ruling party at the Statehouse — the Republicans, with their super-majorities in the Indiana House and Senate — have proposed those restrictions to follow along with a nationwide strategy.
They cloak their proposals as “election security” measures, but as every probe has proven during the Trump era, American voting systems already are overwhelmingly secure.
In reality, these proposed restrictive voting laws come from the power party’s own insecurities. Yes, they have already conformed Indiana’s electoral landscape to ensure they remain in power, by craftily drawing legislative boundary lines that isolate areas where voters might actually choose a Democratic candidate. That protects incumbents, who rarely lose an election and often run unopposed, given that a rival’s chances are so slim.
That is not enough for the party leadership, though. They also aim to add hurdles for groups of people who could cast a Democratic ballot or split their ticket.
So, in the current General Assembly session, Republicans have introduced proposals — unwanted by most Hoosiers — such as Senate Bill 284. Its target? Indiana’s popular, heavily used early voting period. The state currently offers 28 days of early voting, one of the longest in the nation. That is a good thing. Hoosiers like it.
National political movements, not so much. As a result, SB 284 would cut Indiana’s early voting in half, from 28 to 14 days.
Republicans pushing the idea insist that some counties struggle to staff vote centers for that amount of time. Indiana had the ninth-lowest turnout of the 50 states — 58.6% of eligible Hoosiers voted. What on earth would these places do if turnouts in Indiana were as perpetually robust as in places like Wisconsin (76.9%), Minnesota (76.4%), Michigan (74.6%), Maine (74.2%) or New Hampshire (74.1%)?
They did not quit at SB 284. SB 10 would eliminate college students’ ability to use their university-issued student IDs as a form of acceptable identification at the polls. Republicans behind the bill have no proof, but claim those IDs are not as reliable as state-issued IDs or driver’s licenses.
Those students are Americans, who live in Indiana’s college communities, boost local economies, provide future workers and help boost those towns’ population counts. They deserve to be able to vote smoothly in those places, where they live most of the year, if not all of the year.
SB 201 would jump on the red-state bandwagon by closing Indiana’s primary elections. Those May elections currently allow any voter to choose a Republican or Democratic ballot, to pick one particular party’s nominees for a slate of offices to be finally decided in the fall general elections. SB 201 requires primary voters to register under a party affiliation 119 days before the primary election.
Primary election turnouts in Indiana have gotten dreadfully low, and this will sink those numbers further. But for the political movement, SB 201 will help Republicans control who votes for their candidates, and those primary elections basically determine who fills the office, because fewer and fewer Indiana races are contested.
Then there is SB 287, which might be the worst of the bunch.
SB 287 would make school board elections partisan. Most Hoosiers prefer the longtime nonpartisan nature of their local school board races, but the residents’ preferences are not the focus of those behind the bill. They are instead focused on the political forces behind efforts to put party tags on those candidates. They claim partisan races would inject transparency, yet it would only further unleash the polarization of national politics into the community schools.
These restrictive voting bills do not fix problems. They create problems, the largest of which is too much control by one political party.
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