“It’s bananas,” Olivia Zink, executive director of the nonpartisan voting rights organization Open Democracy, tells Talking Points Memo.
The For the People Act may have slim chances of passing Congress, but one New Hampshire House Republican is taking no chances. In an amendment to elections bill SB89, Rep. Barbara J. Griffin proposes a separate system of registration and voting for state elections should Congress open up the voting process for federal races:
Under the amendment, the state would keep its authority over “procedures and requirements relating to voter eligibility, voter registration, absentee voting, conducting the vote and counting of votes” in state elections.
“This would require two ballots to be distributed, ” Zink told TPM. “You’d have one set of rules to register to vote for the federal election, you’d have one set of rules to register to vote for the state elections. You’d have two different checklists, you’d have two different ways to request absentee ballots. It would double the cost of everything.”
Elections officials who supported SB89 will oppose it if it contains the Griffin amendment. TPM’s Tierney Sneed adds:
New Hampshire is not the only state where state-level Republicans appear to be contemplating workarounds in the event that the For the People Act became law, though none of those bills targeted the federal legislation as directly as the New Hampshire amendment. There were bills introduced in Texas to create a separate system of voter registration for state elections vs. federal elections. Arizona bills that banned automatic voter registration and Election Day registration, meanwhile, were interpreted by election experts as taking aim at the policies in For the People Act. Neither of those states’ bills have ultimately gotten much traction.
This is also not the first time that Republicans have considered a bifurcated election system so that they can implement stricter voting laws. When then-Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R) wanted to evade a federal court order halting his proof-of-citizenship registration requirement, he sought to implement the requirement just for state and local elections instead. That workaround was blocked by a state court judge.
Griffin’s amendment may be a stunt, but one whose spirit echoes the beliefs of Paul Weyrich, one of the founders of movement conservatism, as well as those of others like-minded. They may celebrate the colonists who fled religious discrimination in England to settle here, but reserve the right to restrict who constitutes “the People.”
“The nation’s history is storied with the demands of disenfranchised groups to be included in the American electorate,” wrote Kay Schriner and Lisa A. Ochs in a study of disenfranchisement based on disability in 19th-century Massachusetts. “In most cases, the groups have succeeded. The property-less, immigrants, African-Americans, religious minorities, and women are among the groups that have fought for, and won, the right to suffrage.”
Republicans aiming to lead America into the future are set on getting there by walking back that storied history.