As the 2024 presidential election approaches early in-person voting has begun already in some states.
It comes as a number of voting laws have seen changes in recent years.
Andrew Garber, with the Brennan Center’s Counsel in Voting Rights and Elections Program, is a former clerk to Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware.
He told Scripps News the Brennan Center has found that going back to January 2021 at least 30 states have passes at least 78 laws “that make it harder to vote.”
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The center says trust in election integrity in the U.S. is incredibly important.
Garber says the amount of election law changes is almost twice what his organization saw in the prior two election cycles combined. The Brennan Center has a stated goal of tracking every election law and changes to them around the United States.
Garber, who has a background in election integrity and security, says states including Georgia, Florida and Texas has passed omnibus laws that the Brennan Center says make it harder to vote in multiple ways.
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In some states laws can make it more time consuming or harder to register to vote, while in other states it might be harder to get assistance to go out and cast a ballot. And Garber says around half of the 78 election laws around the U.S. make it harder to obtain absentee ballots.
The Brennan Center found that at least 41 states have passed around 168 laws that the organization says make it easier to vote, in their findings. It comes down to what state voters are in, as laws have changed since 2020.
