> supposedly restrictive voting laws do not generally have more restrictions than blue states such as New York

Can you give any examples to support this?

We have no ID requirement, no questions asked mail-in ballots, early voting, and paper ballots.

The Texas law isn’t all bad. Recording vote counting, paper trails and regulating the removal of voters from rolls is good policy. But the restrictions on early voting and ballot distribution & collection are bad. The limits on urban polling locations are blatantly partisan.

Here are those limits: https://www.votetexas.gov/faq/early-voting.html

They really don’t seem draconian to me.

Those are the current limits. These are the new ones [1].

[1] https://www.texastribune.org/2021/04/21/texas-voting-restric...

> Regulating voting hours

> Currently, counties with a population of 100,000 or more must provide at least 12 hours of early voting each weekday of the last week of early voting.

> SB 7 would lower that population threshold to 30,000 so more counties would be required to offer more early voting hours between the newly established window of 6 a.m. to 9 p.m.

You’re against this?

> But the legislation also sets a 12-hour cap on how long early voting can run during that week, so polling places that stay open until 9 p.m. would have to open up later in the morning.

Or you think only being open for 12 hours is too constraining for [in person, early] voting… nonetheless in towns of 30k people?

I mean, there’s going to be a mixed bag if I were to really dig in, and now that I’m not a TX resident anymore, I don’t really care to.

In Palo Alto, during the last presidential election, I had to hand my ballot to a person who before feeding it into the machine reviewed my votes. She was particularly concerned about me choosing to NOT vote on certain issues, asking me if I wanted to try again. I never had anything like that in Texas or Oklahoma.

What about vaccine passports?

> What about vaccine passports?

Vaccine passports are not a voting restriction in New York, or anywhere else in the US.

You can vote regardless of vaccine status so they aren't relevant.

At this point I feel like it's beyond ridiculous to try to defend the Republicans restrictive voting rights restrictions, because in many areas Republicans themselves have basically admitted they just don't like democracy. In Arizona the head of the GOP was lamenting there wasn't a statewide "Electoral College" (i.e. a way for the majority vote winner to be declared the loser), and in Georgia some in the GOP only toned down some of their voting rights restrictions when they realized it would hurt rural white voters. They don't even try to hide their cynicism in the BS "voting integrity" language anymore, because many of the restrictions (reducing early voting hours for example) just make it harder to vote with no benefit to voting security.

New York does not require voter id and these are the New York State voter registration requirements.

https://ballotpedia.org/Voter_ID_in_New_York

https://www.elections.ny.gov/VotingRegister.html

Yeah, you're allowed to bring water to people waiting on line to vote in Massachusetts, "Bostonian".