First State Times

President Biden inadvertently made Delaware’s voting laws national news when he called Georgia’s recent voter legislation, “Jim Crow on steroids,” suggesting that changes in the law were intended to suppress the black vote even more so than the decades-old laws in the South that enforced racial segregation.

However. the voting laws in Biden’s home state of Delaware, set down in the state’s Constitution, are actually far more restrictive than Georgia’s, according to a recent story in The Atlantic.  

“Biden has assailed Georgia’s new voting law as ‘Jim Crow in the 21st Century’ for the impact it could have on black citizens,” Russell Berman of The Atlantic wrote. “But even once the GOP-passed measure takes effect, Georgia citizens will still have far more opportunities to vote before Election Day than their counterparts in the president’s home state, where one in three residents is black or Latino."

The November 2020 election in Delaware was different. Democratic Gov. John Carney, citing the COVID-19 pandemic, signed legislation in July 2020 that allowed all Delawareans to vote by mail – nothing in the Delaware Constitution permits such no-excuse mail-in voting. The law expired by sunset provisions in January.

“It was a jumbled mess,” state GOP Chairwoman Jane Brady told First State Times. “Over 190,000 applications went out, just over 160,000 came back and 22,000 voters never even responded. Between 15% and 18% of those on the voter rolls don’t even live in the state.”

Brady, a former Delaware attorney general and Superior Court judge, fears that mail-in voting procedures implemented during the pandemic could be made permanent, resulting in “thousands of ballots floating around” unaccounted for.  A proposed constitutional amendment before the Delaware House, HB 75, will take authority over voting laws covering absentee voting from the constitution and place it with the General Assembly.  

“They could change the voting laws anyway they wanted whenever they wanted,” Brady said. “We are not at all opposed to mail-ins but we believe the voters must request applications every election and that they must present some form of ID.”

The Democrats, with 26 House members, need two Republicans to move HB 75 forward.

Brady said she’s asking the Republicans to hold the line against the amendment.