198 search results for ""election integrity""

Have the Republicans over-reached on these voting restrictions, possible hurting their own voters? It sure looks like they might have, which makes sense since a whole lot of the rules they changed benefited their own constituents.

Greg Sargent notes that they are belatedly becoming aware of it — and it’s too late:

Such a moment comes courtesy of this great new report by Amy Gardner of The Post, about the new voter suppression bill in Florida that Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis is expected to sign. The bill would make it harder to vote by mail in numerous ways, adding curbs on the use of drop boxes and requiring voters to reapply for absentee ballots with each two-year election cycle.

Some Florida Republicans now fear this could unintentionally make it harder for Republican voters to cast ballots. They worry about the provision requiring reapplication for mail ballots every two years — rather than every four years, as previous law had it — fearing it will confuse voters who expect ballots to be sent to them automatically during midterm elections.

This could have a pronounced impact on seniors and members of the military, Republicans fear. Both are GOP-aligned constituencies, and both rely heavily on vote-by-mail.

It turns out some Republicans wanted to address this problem in a surprising way:One former state party official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to relay private conversations said some Republicans briefly discussed whether lawmakers could exempt those two groups from the provision requiring voters to request mail ballots every election cycle. “Key lawmakers said, ‘You can’t do that,’ ” the former official said. “It would raise equal protection problems.”Now, the damage is done, he added. “Now, you’ll have military personnel who might not think they have to request a ballot who won’t get it. And we’ve got senior voters who have health concerns or just don’t want to go out. They might not know the law has changed, and they might not get a ballot, because they’re not engaged.”

This Republican source says Republicans were so worried that this key provision would dampen participation that they talked about getting lawmakers to exempt two of their key constituencies from it, and to selectively apply it to other voters. It wouldn’t pass legal muster and didn’t go anywhere.

That’s quite a glimpse into the mind-set of Republicans supposedly motivated by a pious desire to restore election integrity!

As it is, the new provisions would heavily target African American and newly registered voters, according to University of Florida political scientist Daniel A. Smith, whose calculations show that those demographics disproportionately relied on vote-by-mail in 2020.

However, Smith’s research shows Republican voters also relied to an unexpected degree on vote-by-mail — hence these new GOP fears. As Smith notes: “The GOP leadership has discounted any collateral damage, calculating that the benefit to the party outweighs any harm done to its party faithful.”

I had always understood that absentee voting benefited the Republicans and they were always the ones pushing it. Now that the Democrats have been able to get their voters to do it too they don’t like it. But what will that do to the GOP voters who have come to depend on it? I guess we’ll find out.

Honestly, I think the bigger problem is the new move to have partisan “poll watchers” be allowed to harass and intimidate voters and the move to have partisan weirdos count the votes. I don’t know where that’s going but it’s very dangerous.

“At stake is something I never expected to worry about in the United States: the integrity of the vote count,” Rick Hasen begins in his offering this morning at the New York Times. The professor of law and political science at the University of California, Irvine is not just talking about reciminations against Georgia’s secretary of state, Republican Brad Raffensperger, or Michigan’s state canvassing board member, Republican Aaron Van Langevelde, both of whom chose following the law over manipulating it for Donald Trump in 2020:

Republican state legislatures have also passed or are considering laws aimed at stripping Democratic counties of the power to run fair elections. The new Georgia law gives the legislature the power to handpick an election official who could vote on the state election board for a temporary takeover of up to four county election boards during the crucial period of administering an election and counting votes. That provision appears to be aimed at Democratic counties like Fulton County that have increased voter access. A new Iowa law threatens criminal penalties against local election officials who enact emergency election rules and bars them from sending voters unsolicited absentee ballot applications.

A Texas bill would similarly stymie future efforts like the one in Harris County to expand access to the ballot and give challengers at the polls the ability not only to observe but to interfere with polling place procedures meant to ensure election integrity. According to a new report by Protect Democracy, Republican legislators have proposed at least 148 bills in 36 states that could increase the chances of cooking the electoral books.

State legislatures and others also have been taking steps to amplify false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, solidifying the false belief among a majority of Republican voters that the November vote count was unfair. It’s not just the hearings featuring charlatans like Rudy Giuliani or Sidney Powell spewing the big lie. It’s also steps like the Arizona State Senate demanding the seizure of November ballots from Democratic-leaning Maricopa County, and ordering an audit of the votes to be conducted by a proponent of the bogus “Stop the Steal” movement who falsely contended that the election was rigged against Mr. Trump. Never mind that Arizona’s vote count has been repeatedly subject to examination by courts and election officials with no irregularities found.

Trump himself launched such a commission. Headed by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R), the voting integrity commission “uncovered no evidence to support claims of widespread voter fraud” when it disbanded in 2018. Kobach’s Interstate Crosscheck program is itself all but disbanded. The thinly veiled effort to substantiate the myth of widespread voter fraud under the guise of voter list maintence is the subject of a class-action lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas.

The vote-counting process is more arcane and harder to explain to the public than prohibiting giving water to voters in line at polling places, Hasen warns. He recommeds every jusistiction use tangible paper ballots rather than electronic records. H.R. 1 contains that requirement for federal elections.

Hasen also suggests several other ways attempts to subvert the process might be thwarted. But we might not know until January 2025 if enough has been done.

“It may begin with lawsuits against new voter-suppression laws and nascent efforts to enshrine the right to vote in the Constitution,” Hasen concludes. “But it is also going to require a cross-partisan alliance of those committed to the rule of law — in and out of government — to ensure that our elections continue to reflect the will of the people.”

Even tougher when one of the country’s major political parties is committed to neither the rule of law nor to rule by a majority of the American people.

The New York Times is publishing a podcast series entitled “The Improvement Association” by “This American Life” reporter Zoe Chace. The series examines the backstory to the Republican absentee ballot fraud in Bladen County, North Carolina that when exposed caused the state Board of Elections to overturn the 2018 congressional election in NC-9.

Chapter 2 looks at Republican allegations that the Black-run Bladen Improvement PAC has been cheating for years. Chace found no evidence for this in observing multiple elections since. What “evidence” Republicans in the area showed her was more a collection of suspicions and unsubstantiated allegations. But it might be voter fraud, could be, possibly, etc.

Essentially, Bladen Republicans were indifferent to Black voters organizing until Black candidates (including a Black sheriff) began winning elections in the rural county. Republican allegations that followed of Democrats cheating sound familiar here on the opposite end of the state. It is a pattern Hullabaloo readers will recognize from national Republican politics: elections are only legitimate if Republicans win.

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Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!

Marc Elias of Democracy Docket is Democrats’ most prominent election protection attorney, He issued another “On the Docket” email today. Subject line: Republican “Army” Expands State Strategy. Here is just some of what else is percolating in the states:

In the States: Republicans’ 50-State Strategy

There’s a lot to keep track of in the world of voting rights this week. Corporations are feeling the pressure to weigh in on suppressive legislation. Republicans are planning ahead—proposing legislation to make voting harder, and recruiting for their Election Day activities around bills that have yet to pass. Plus, redistricting is coming up, in what will be a much-litigated process to establish the landscape for the 2022 elections (we will have your guide to all things redistricting, coming soon). Here are some key highlights from the states this week:

Texas: Republicans in Harris County are preparing a poll watching “army” to intimidate Black and brown voters and gin up unfounded allegations of voter fraud. In a leaked video obtained by the watchdog group Common Cause, Texas Republicans are heard laying out their recruitment plan for a 10,000-member “Election Integrity Brigade.” They’re recruiting suburban conservatives from mostly white areas of the Lone Star state to flood Black and brown precincts of Harris County with partisan poll watchers—who, under recently-proposed Republican legislation, would be empowered to film voters they suspect of fraudulent behavior and send those videos to the Secretary of State. The potential for voter intimidation and harassment here is virtually unlimited, and the Republican Party knows it: they’re asking for volunteers with “confidence and courage” to come to Harris County and film the “voter fraud” they know isn’t happening. Why such courage would be needed for honest, good-faith poll watching is up to you to infer. You can watch the video for yourself here. 

New Hampshire: The introduction of cameras at polling places is not limited to Texas. In New Hampshire, new voter ID laws that have passed the Republican-led state house would require voters who register on Election Day and do not have an accepted photo ID to have their photos taken at their polling location; the bill, HB 523, would also eliminate previous religious exemptions for voter ID requirements. Another piece of legislation, HB 292, would add additional ID requirements for voters requesting an absentee ballot be sent to a different address than the one on file with their county clerk. This provision clearly targets highly-mobile college students, who have been a key focus of Republican voter suppression in the Granite State. New Hampshire has one of the highest student populations as a share of their total electorate, and HB 292 is just one of many attacks on their access to the ballot this year. The two voter suppression bills now move to the state senate for consideration.

Ohio: The Buckeye State holds an honorable title at the moment: it is one of only three states that is not currently considering voter suppression legislation. That will soon change—it was reported this week that the state Republican leadership plan to introduce their first voter suppression bills of 2021 soon. We don’t have a draft of the legislation yet, but it will include banning drop boxes except in emergencies, as well as taking aim at other voting reforms that were the center of debate during the 2020 election. Also under consideration: eliminating early voting on the day before Election Day, and moving up the deadline for absentee ballot requests. Democrats in Ohio have been proactive about battling these restrictions; last year, they sued the Secretary of State to allow counties to set up multiple drop boxes, and Democratic legislators have proposed a bill to establish at least one permanent drop box per county. But the legislation has no Republican sponsors and has not been put on the committee schedule by Republican leadership. We’ll keep you informed as new voter suppression legislation in Ohio gets introduced. 

They aren’t even trying to hide it, which is a form of voter intimidation in itself. If they can pass laws allowing what are essentially vigilante wingnuts to have free rein, they may very well be able to keep some people from even trying to vote:

In a leaked video of a recent presentation, a man who identifies himself as a GOP official in Harris County, Tex., says the party needs 10,000 Republicans for an “election integrity brigade” in Houston.

Then he pulls up a map of the area’s voting precincts and points to Houston’s dense, racially diverse urban core, saying the party specifically needed volunteers with “the confidence and courage to come down here,” adding, “this is where the fraud is occurring.”

The official cites widespread vote fraud, which has not been documented in Texas, as driving the need for an “army” of poll watchers to monitor voters at every precinct in the county.

Now the government accountability group Common Cause Texas — which published the footage Thursday — is raising the alarm that such an effort could instead serve to intimidate and suppress voters in metro Houston.

“It’s very clear that we’re talking about recruiting people from the predominantly Anglo parts of town to go to Black and Brown neighborhoods,” Anthony Gutierrez, the group’s executive director, told The Washington Post.

“This is a role that’s supposed to do nothing but stand at a poll site and observe,” he added. So “why is he suggesting someone needs to be ‘courageous’?” Gutierrez asked.

In a statement to The Post, the Harris County Republican Party said Common Cause was “blatantly mischaracterizing a grassroots election worker recruitment video.” The party chair, Cindy Siegel, accused the group of trying “to bully and intimidate Republicans.”

“The goal is to activate an army of volunteers for every precinct in Harris County,” Siegel said. “And to engage voters for the whole ballot, top to bottom, and ensure every legal vote is counted.”

The video, recorded in early March, comes as the Texas Legislature considers a set of voting changes that would expand the role of poll watchers and limit other election officials’ ability to oversee those volunteers.

Republicans have proposed a raft of such legislation in dozens of statehouses across the country, insisting they are necessary to shore up confidence in voting systems. But nationwide, as in Texas, critics say these voting bills would only tighten access to the ballot box, particularly for voters of color and other marginalized groups.

This is an old tactic. The Republicans ran a similar program nationally back in the 1960s.

It it was the presidential election of 1964 that marked the first national effort at partisan vote suppression. It was called Operation Eagle Eye. The approach was simple: to challenge voters, especially voters of color, at the polls throughout the country on a variety of specious pretexts. If the challenge did not work outright—that is, if the voter was not prevented from casting a ballot (provisional ballots were not in widespread use at this time)—the challenge would still slow down the voting process, create long lines at the polls, and likely discourage some voters who could not wait or did not want to go through the hassle they were seeing other voters endure.

A Republican memo, obtained by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in 1964, outlined plans for challenging voters at the polls and described the tactics as including encouraging stalling on lines in Democratic districts, equipping poll watchers with cameras to “frighten off . . . Democratic wrong-doers,” enlisting the help of local police sympathetic to the Goldwater campaign, and charging that ineligible Democratic voters were on the registration rolls.

Almost 60 years after the civil rights movement, they are still at it.

Election “integrity” efforts by Republicans in New Jersey (including posting off-duty cops outside minority polling places) led to the recently expired 1982 consent decree. It required a federal court to review any of Republicans’ “proposed ‘ballot security’ programs, including any proposed voter caging.” One would think it in the party’s best interests not to invite another three-plus decades of such oversight. Or something worse.

But one would not be a Texas Republican, would one?

Via the Washington Post:

In a leaked video of a recent presentation, a man who identifies himself as a GOP official in Harris County, Tex., says the party needs 10,000 Republicans for an “election integrity brigade” in Houston.

Then he pulls up a map of the area’s voting precincts and points to Houston’s dense, racially diverse urban core, saying the party specifically needed volunteers with “the confidence and courage to come down here,” adding, “this is where the fraud is occurring.”

The official cites widespread vote fraud, which has not been documented in Texas, as driving the need for an “army” of poll watchers to monitor voters at every precinct in the county.

Fraud and rumors of fraud are by now as gospel among Republicans as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Voter-suppression legislation purportedly drafted to restore confidence in elections the GOP has worked assiduously at undermining for decades is really not in the party’s long-term best interests, argues Ryan Cooper at The Week.

Nor is rationalizing who should and should not be enfranchised, as National Review‘s Kevin D. Williamson argued recently. Voters so “often vote from low motives such as bigotry and spite, and very often are contentedly ignorant.”

Funny how, in recent years, as lots of low information voters (to put it charitably) voted Republican, conservative elites didn’t go on about the importance of knowledge to voting, the quality of voters matters, etc. But a lot of black voters turn out in Georgia, and suddenly…

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) April 9, 2021

Cooper counters:

On the merits, this is a crock. The average citizen is every bit as trustworthy as the average graduate of Harvard, investment banker, elected official or political pundit, if not more so. Moreover, the whole moral foundation of democracy is political equality — a social contract between the people and their elected representatives.

But there is another more cynical case for universal voting. Democracy, which has come to be based on an ever-greater franchise, provides legitimacy to government and an orderly mechanism for resolving political conflict. Undermine those things, and violence and instability could spill out of control.

As it has already this year, death and injuries in its wake. Besides the risk of civil war or autocracy replacing the peaceful democratic transfer of power, Republicans nervous about being replaced put themselves more at risk for that, not less, by undercutting the democratic process:

Anti-democracy conservatives such as Williamson and Georgia Republicans, just like their fire-eater ideological ancestors, do not realize the danger the arguments and tactics they are pushing pose to themselves. If a large enough fraction of the population comes to believe that democracy is illegitimate, then we are right back to raw force as the ultimate arbiter of political conflict. Why accept that somebody is your “real” representative when the system has been rigged so they cannot possibly lose? And in that case why not march on Washington and throw them out? The reason even a minority party should support fair elections based on a universal franchise is that it’s better than civil war — and besides, history shows that today’s minority is most often tomorrow’s majority.

This country doesn’t even have a tradition of monarchy that might theoretically provide a minimal foundation for permanent Republican rule — on the contrary, the entire legitimacy of the American state is based on the consent of “we the people” (which is why conservatives have to come up with such preposterous arguments that “the people” should include fewer people, or convince themselves that Democrats are the ones stealing elections). Republicans would put themselves in basically the same position as King George III in 1776, and we all know how that turned out.

Another Republican state uses the excuse of Donald Trump’s Big Lie to suppress votes. They have to do it, you see. Republicans who believe Trump’s Big Lie have “lost faith” in the system and the only way to restore it is to make sure that Democrats can’t win elections. Perfectly understandable.

The Texas Senate in the early morning hours Thursday passed a package of election bills that would put new restrictions on voting in the state.

The final version of the Senate Bill 7 is not yet online for review, but the original bill banned overnight early voting hours and drive-thru early voting, while restricting how election officials handle mail voting.

The bill underwent hours of debate and “scores” of proposed amendments before passage, according to the bill’s author, Republican state Sen. Bryan Hughes.

“This bill is about making it easy to vote and hard to cheat,” he said in a social media video posted after 3 a.m. in Austin.

The bill now heads to the Texas House of Representatives, which is considering its own omnibus package of restrictions, House Bill 6, later Thursday. 

The Texas legislature leads the nation in restrictive voting bills, according to the Brennan Center for Justice; 49 bills have been introduced to add restrictions on access to the ballot box.

Advocates have slammed the Senate bill as unnecessary and a major threat to voting rights.

“SB 7 is the most dangerous threat to voting rights we’ve seen in years,” Joaquin Gonzalez, an attorney with Texas Civil Rights Project, said in a statement. “The biggest threats to election integrity are codified racist attacks on voters, unequal access to the polls, and harassment by partisan poll watchers who would seek to disrupt safe and fair elections.”

In an interview with NBC News last month, Hughes said that the 2020 election increased interest in legislation Texas lawmakers were already keen on passing.

“This was already in process, but then the 2020 election was so in the national spotlight, and so many people have questions, so many people have concerns,” he told NBC News last week. “I would say that has raised the profile of the issue.”

These people don’t even try to hide the fact that they simply don’t want people voting. The only thing that could justify all these actions would be proof of systematic voter fraud as a result of expanded opportunities to vote. There is none. So we know why they are doing this: to suppress the vote of Democrats and pander to Donald Trump and his ignorant cult.

Jonathan Chait explains why state Republicans are moving so quickly to destroy voting rights for Democrats, mostly people of color, in their states. He notes that even as the national Republicans, led by Trump, blame Republican officials for denying Trump his second term, the state Republicans blame Trump’s toxic rhetoric for his loss.

Still:

Both Republican factions heartily agree on the proper corrective steps: a sweeping bill curtailing voting rights and handing new powers to Republican legislators to prevent the unfortunate events of 2020–21 from happening again. After the state’s governor, Brian Kemp, a target of Trump’s rage, signed the measure, the former president offered his hearty congratulations. “They learned from the travesty of the 2020 Presidential Election, which can never be allowed to happen again,” the former President wrote in an official statement. “Too bad these changes could not have been done sooner!”

If you want to understand why this is happening, a timely new paper by University of Washington political scientist Jacob Grumbach helps explain. Grumbach surveys the performance of every state government across a broad array of measures of democratic health, such as indices of voting access like wait times and same-day and automatic voter-registration policies, felon disenfranchisement, gerrymandering, and civil rights.

His paper finds that the states that backslid on democratization over the past 16 years were shared a single characteristic: Republicans gained full control of their state government.

In other words, states that are rolling back democratic protections are not responding to demographic change nor to any change internal to their state. They are following the agenda of the national Republican Party. That agenda is spreading throughout the states, which are imposing voter restrictions almost everywhere their party has the power to do so. Restricting the franchise has become perhaps the party’s core policy objective.

Some Republicans frame that agenda in explicitly Trumpist terms: They are acting to stop the next stolen election, having failed to prevent the last one. Those GOP officials who are too embarrassed to openly endorse Trump’s election lies instead offer superficially plausible rationales.

First, they insist they are acting to protect states’ rights to run their own elections. Overlooking the awkward historical resonance of using the exact same justification once put forward to justify Jim Crow–era restrictions, they insist states’ rights are all about preserving local variation. Elections should be run by those “closest to the people, elected by the people, most responsive to the people,” argues one leading Republican. “State legislators are the closest to those we represent,” insists another. “States have long experience running elections, and different states have taken different approaches suited to their own locales and populations,” pleadsNational Review.

And yet this mania for geographic proximity in election administration evaporates completely when they move from the state to the local level. Indeed, the most damaging provision in Georgia’s vote-suppression law removes power from local election boards and concentrates it in the hands of the states. If anybody actually does have local knowledge of election administration, it is the nice librarian who has been volunteering to organize the polls for many years.

But that form of localism has been crushed — because, of course, the whole point is that the state government is run by Republicans. Democrats control the federal government. They also control many local governments where Democrats live and vote. They don’t control many state governments, though, which are beholden to legislatures whose district maps give Republicans an insurmountable advantage. And so the right-wing intelligentsia has discovered a “principle”: The state is the only level of government neither too big nor too small to administer elections.

Second, they claim they seek merely to restore “confidence” in election integrity. And it is true that many Republicans voters lack confidence in the fairness of elections. What is the reason for their lack of confidence? It’s that Democrats won a fair, clean, high-turnout election. (Indeed, they won it in spite of an electoral college system that forced them to beat Trump by four percentage points in order to gain a narrow majority.) It follows that restoring confidence means eliminating the conditions that gave rise to this concern: Democrats winning a clean election.

What gives the game away is that Republican vote-suppression maneuvers include a purge of Republican officials who worked in states Trump lost. The Michigan Republican Party removed Republican Aaron Van Langeveldefrom the Board of State Canvassers after he infuriated Trump and his fans by certifying the state’s electoral votes, thwarting Trump’s attempt to override the election and secure an unelected second term.

In Georgia, Republicans stripped Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger of his authority over state elections. Sterling’s chief operating officer, a Republican, told CNN the move was retribution for Raffensperger’s refusal to submit to Trump’s demand to disregard the election results and hand the state’s electoral votes to him.

They are determined to win by any means necessary and they do not care that most of the country is aghast at what they are doing. It’s simply irrelevant since their base is now as shameless as they are.

They all know that Trump is a nightmarish mix of imbecility and narcissism. And many are secretly happy that he lost. But they see the opportunity his Big Lie provides to ensure their minotarian dominance for the foreseeable future and they are taking it.

The fight in the Senate over H.R. 1, the For The People Act passed in the House, is heating up as Democrats and the Biden administration prepare to go bare-knuckles over how and whether Americans can vote in 2022. The bill would restructure how voting in federal elections is conducted in the U.S. of A. Most importantly, it would restore Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act eviscerated by the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby decision. Among its other changes, the bill (Vox):

• Creates new national automatic voter registration that asks voters to opt out rather than opt in, ensuring more people will be signed up to vote. Requires chief state election officials to automatically register eligible unregistered citizens.
• Requires each state to put online options for voter registration, correction, cancellation, or designating party affiliation.
• Requires at least 15 consecutive days of early voting for federal elections; early voting sites would be open for at least 10 hours per day. The bill also prohibits states from restricting a person’s ability to vote by mail, and requires states to prepay postage on return envelopes for mail-in voting.
• Establish independent redistricting commissions in states as a way to draw new congressional districts and end partisan gerrymandering in federal elections.
• Prohibits voter roll purging and bans the use of non-forwardable mail being used as a way to remove voters from rolls.
• Restores voting rights to people convicted of felonies who have completed their sentences; however, the bill doesn’t restore rights to felons currently serving sentences in a correctional facility.

Sahil Kapur and Jane C. Timm at NBC News explain that the bill would also make Election Day a national holiday:

The divisions between the two parties are sharp. President Joe Biden and Democrats say federal intervention is needed to stop Republicans from reviving racist Jim Crow-style restrictions that make it harder for minorities to vote. Republicans say Democrats are executing a power grab to remove necessary protections on the voting process and usurp authority from states.

Where they agree: This is about the future of democracy.

The problem is Democrats and Republicans have vastly different definitions for the word, one expansive and the other restrictive. As Donald Trump believes and the Jan. 6 insurrection illustrates, the Republican definition is “heads we win, tails you lose.” As movement conservatism godfather, Paul Weyrich, once observed, Republican “leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” Republicans in state after state mean to shrink the pool of eligible voters to improve their chances of winning elections. This they call election integrity.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) decried H.R. 1 as “a grab-bag of changes” that includes more than voting rights. Republicans are digging in and Democrats are strategizing on how to pass their legislation through the Senate with only 50 votes against a Republican filibuster:

“The choice is the republic or the filibuster — there is no third option,” said Ezra Levin, co-founder of Indivisible, a national network of progressive activists. “We are at an inflection point in American history. Down one path is a Trump-inspired white plutocracy, and down the other is a representative democracy.”

Levin said he will consider it a “personal, organizational and movement-wide failure of historic, catastrophic proportions” if the voting rights bills, along with making Washington, D.C., a state, don’t pass this year.

But at nearly 800 pages, the bill in present form may be too cumbersome. Rick Hasen (UC Irvine and Election Law Blog) argues a narrower, more-focused bill has a better chance of success than an all-eggs-in-one-basket approach. Furthermore, Hasen writes:

Some parts of it could well be found unconstitutional if it passed, such as a provision requiring states to re-enfranchise all people convicted of felonies who are not currently serving time in a correctional institution. Courts could potentially find that provision interferes with states’ constitutional right to set qualifications for voters.

But potential unconstitutionality of some provisions is not the main problem with H.R. 1. Instead, the problem is that the bill contains a wish list of progressive proposals that make it unlikely to survive debate in the Senate. In addition to sensible provisions protecting voting rights, the bill also contains controversial rules on campaign financing, including the creation of a public financing program for congressional candidates, new ethics rules for the Supreme Court, and a requirement that most candidates for president and vice president publicly disclose their tax returns.

Democrats’ all-or-nothing position on the bill may simply be an opening bid. If so, it means they have not begun by negotiating with themselves before bringing the legislation to the floor as they did with the Affordable Care Act.

Republicans see the demographic handwriting on the wall, refuse to moderate their stances to attract more voters, and are desperate to cherry-pick who can vote. Preserving democracy is not their goal. Preserving minority-rule for themselves is.

Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said of H.R. 1, “It’s an existential threat, I think, to our election system and to our democracy.” Staunchly opposed to the bill, Cornyn said, “Basically what they want to do is install a permanent partisan advantage and run all the elections out of Washington, D.C., and eliminate ballot integrity measures like voter ID.”

Translation: Democrats seek to extend the franchise and neutralize the structural advantages small states (dominated by Republicans) have enjoyed since the nation’s founding under the Constitution’s system for allocating senators and drawing congressional districts.

Internal migration to southern states such as Georgia is changing their political makeup permanently. Republican’s grip on those states and the country is loosening and there is nothing they can do to stop it. Not that they won’t try.

John Blake argues at CNN that Georgia’s white legislators pissing off the state’s black voters is not exactly a bright idea. Really. Don’t make them angry. You wouldn’t like the outcome when they’re angry:

“No one but Pee Wee Herman believed them when they talked about the ‘integrity of the vote,'” says the Rev. Tim McDonald, an Atlanta-based pastor who founded the African American Ministers Leadership Council. His group created “Souls to the Polls,” a get-out-the-vote movement among Black churches nationwide. Earlier versions of the Georgia elections bill would have virtually eliminated early Sunday voting, which is popular with Black voters.

“Black folks are not stupid. We know their tricks. We know their motivation,” McDonald says. “They are the [Ku Klux] Klan in three-piece suits.”

Republican legislatures across the country have introduced…. Well, you know how many of these BS “election integrity” measures Republicans have introduced.

Republicans actually made some inroads under President George W. Bush, Blake writes, then squandered it all in even proposing to eliminate Sunday voting.

McDonald says that by targeting “Souls to the Polls,” Georgia Republicans didn’t even try to disguise their hostility toward Black voters.”

They know it’s being perceived as racist, but they are so racist that they don’t care,” says McDonald, senior pastor of the First Iconium Baptist Church in Atlanta.

They. Don’t. Care. Isn’t that obvious?

“There has always been a strand of Black people, particularly Black men, who have been enticed by the conservative rhetoric of the Republican Party,” says Jemar Tisby, author of “How to Fight Racism.” But the GOP has stopped reaching out and that’s gone. “They’re doing voter suppression so they don’t have to reach out to Black voters.”

Blake continues:

Black leaders won’t have to push the passion button in Georgia, because that button was pressed a long time ago.

Georgia has some of the most organized and mobilized groups of Black voters, thanks to Stacey Abrams, who may be the shrewdest and most tenacious voting rights advocate in the nation.

Many of these Black voters remember when Abrams lost a close race for Georgia governor in 2018, a contest tainted by allegations of voter suppression. Kemp, Abrams’ opponent, ran for governor while also holding onto his position as the state’s chief elections officer — a position many viewed as a conflict of interest.

The perception that the GOP is trying to suppress the Black vote will only make Black voters in Georgia more determined to vote in 2022, when Abrams is widely expected to run against Kemp again, says the Rev. Jamal Byrant, senior pastor of New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Lithonia, Georgia.”

Georgia is frankly becoming browner and more progressive, and the Republicans are having anxiety about the upcoming gubernatorial election and they’re trying to do everything in their power to stop the wave,” Bryant says.

White conservatives in Georgia are a’feared Black folks are comin’ ta git ’em. So after the Roberts court’s removing the preclearance section of the Voting Rights Act in its 2013 Shelby decision resulted in more voting restrictions but no decrease in Black voter turnout, Republicans made sure to give Black voters even more incentive to turn out and to turn out Republicans.

Great plan.

Sen. @ReverendWarnock (D-GA) on new restrictions on voting: "You had legislators who are running scared. So rather than having the people select their politicians, the politicians try to cherry pick their voters. This is an assault on the covenant we have with one another…" pic.twitter.com/lQVVonZgXu

— The Recount (@therecount) March 28, 2021

Here are the new articles off wingnut faith.

Because I am a masochist, I subjected myself to a cavalcade of crazy yesterday. I watched / listened to much of the seven hours of a nutso livestream from Regent University masquerading as an academic forum on “election integrity.”

Enough falsehoods were spewed by the speakers sponsored by Pat Robertson’s school yesterday to merit two-dozen rebuttal articles—but in the interest of time, I’ll just give you some broad strokes.

First, I would like to note that the emcee of the event was former Republican congresswoman, failed presidential candidate, and dean (!) of the Robertson School of Government, Michele Bachmann.

This is a woman who, after election day last year, asked God to #StopTheSteal in a prayer. I am not kidding:

Her opening statement yesterday was . . . really quite something. Do our votes even count anymore? she wondered. Did the pilgrims give us Biblical principles that are no longer being followed today? What about the elites and their pursuit of continued power? Is cancel culture coming after people who question the results of the 2020 election? (Brad Raffensperger, don’t answer that.)

Already I knew it was going to be a long day.

After Bachmann spoke, there was an opening prayer offered by Eric Metaxas—the Trumpist childrens’ book author, supposed Bonhoeffer scholar, and alleged sucker-punch-assault perpetrator. Surprisingly, as he offered up a prayer to “Father God,” there was nary a MyPillow promo code to be seen. Praise be.Eric Metaxas

After Metaxas came Dr. Ben Carson, the former neurosurgeon and former housing and urban development secretary. In his Teddy Ruxpin tone, Carson insinuated that the media never talks about election fraud. Don’t tell the right-wing media.

Next up was John Fund, who was the ghostwriter for Rush Limbaugh’s first book, spent many years at the Wall Street Journal, and now writes for National Review. Much of Fund’s writing, including two books, has focused on voting, elections, and concerns about fraud. Yesterday, he said that the voting-reform bill H.R. 1 was the “single worst” piece of legislation he’s seen in his forty years of commenting on American politics. As hyperbolic as that may seem, it is at least slightly toned down from what Fund said about H.R. 1 at CPAC last month: There he called it “the worst bill that’s of a non-fiscal nature that has ever been introduced in Congress.” Worse than the Sedition Act? The Indian Removal Act? The Fugitive Slave Act? Prohibition? The act backing up FDR’s internment of Japanese-Americans? To say nothing of the countless horrible bills that were introduced but never passed.

Fund yesterday also had some fun ‘2016 whataboutism’ to justify 2020 truthers because there was a poll where a certain percentage of Democrats thought that Trump stole the 2016 election. Which is true: Every election, some percentage of Americans, more often on the losing side in the election, doubt the validity of the results. And in 2016, recall that the first news reports of Russian interference in the 2016 election emerged just a few days after the election. But comparing that small, lingering resentment in 2016 to what happened after the 2020 election, when a false belief in massive electoral fraud became a defining feature of the Republican party, and when the defeated president pushed that lie and instigated an insurrectionist mob at the Capitol, is risible.

Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft spoke yesterday, too, telling anyone who would listen that he would file a lawsuit and tell the feds to “pound sand” if H.R. 1 were to become law. Ashcroft apparently has a fetish for in-person voting, which comes across as a bit unseemly for an attorney, much less an elected official who oversees elections. In the Q&A, Ashcroft, Fund, and the Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky were referred to as the “three smartest people on the planet.”

Whoever made that reference (I think it was Bachmann) needs to get out more.

Next up were Jim Hoft and his twin brother, Joe. You probably don’t know who these guys are unless you’re extremely online, but Jim runs a blog that, according to Joe, gets “670 million hits” a day. Which seems totally legit. (Anybody who knows anything about how web traffic works knows that “hits” is a useless figure.)

Joe and Jim had an Abbott and Costello routine going, where they went through some of the claims of fraud posted on their website—like the supposed incident in which a van with an out-of-state license plate brought ballots into Pennsylvania, thereby throwing the election—all of which have been thoroughly debunked. It tells you a lot about Regent—none of it good—that Jim Hoft, a raving conspiracy theorist, would be given prime billing at a conference like this.

But it gets worse.

Peter Navarro, a left-wing gadfly who got a job in the Trump administration because he hates free trade, has an election “report” and he and the others want to tell you about it. Navarro seems to believe that the Democrats, of which he was one until Trump descended from that brass escalator in his gaudy highrise, “stole just enough votes to win.” Odd strategy. Perhaps losing seats in the House was just cover?

Navarro went on and on about “fake ballots” and “fake fire alarms” to prove his case, but let one thing be known: Graphic design is Peter Navarro’s passion:

Navarro, who holds a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard, talked about election turnout that supposedly was “above 100 percent” and claimed “this election was stolen.” He also name-dropped his buddies Steve Bannon; Raheem Kassam, an alt-right British journalist; and John Solomon, a discredited propagandist.

Then came Kris Kobach, the former Kansas secretary of state who ran the post-2016 election-fraud investigation that then-President Trump concocted—an investigation that failed to find any evidence of widespread fraud—and then ran for a Senate seat last year and lost in the primary to Roger Marshall.

Despite tech issues, Kobach, now a private citizen, was able to make clear his views that voter ID doesn’t necessarily stop voter fraud, and that we need signature verification at a level that might make a bank-fraud analyst blush.

The moral of the story? Voting should be harder than it is. For good measure, Kobach also attacked the ACLU.

I tuned out for a bit to put my kids to bed, but came back to find on my screen Mark Steyn, the Canadian commentator better known for his cat crooning than any expertise in the intricacies of election integrity, sharing such gems as this: “The minute you’re driving it [the ballot] around, it becomes less secure.”Mark Steyn

Also, Steyn suggested, without reference to any—what are they called again? oh yeah—facts that widespread mail-in voting and voting via digital machines that count your vote “enable fraud” and that judges have the ability to “amend an election,” whatever that means.

Many of the panelists brought up (you guessed it) GEORGE SOROS. I didn’t count how many times this bogeyman’s name was invoked, but if you had been playing a drinking game while watching yesterday’s livestream with the sole rule of having another shot every time someone said “Soros,” you’d soon have been under the table. Which, come to think of it, might have been the best way to experience this travesty.

The event’s organizers saved the “best” for last: David Clements, a professor at New Mexico State University. Clements staged a talent show of absurd MAGA whataboutism that made all the day’s other participants, even the Hofts, look cautious by comparison. Judges? Cowards. Why not jury trials? Do I even understand basic legal concepts? Probably not. Sidney Powell? She’s the “gold standard.” Why not have an eight-month-long mock trial? She’s so brave. We should rally around her.David Clements

The ballots brought in from a rented truck with out-of-state license plates? ALL THE HALLMARKS OF ARTIFICIAL MARKING. President Biden? The “fraud in chief.”

Michele—excuse me, Dean—Bachmann closed off the circus by saying “I don’t think we’ve heard the real story yet.” That may have been the truest thing said all day—just not in the way she meant it.