Happy Thursday,
There’s been a whirlwind of voting rights stories over the last week. Republicans continue to advance a wave of restrictions in statehouses across the country while there is mounting pressure in Washington for Democrats to do away with the filibuster to pass significant federal voting rights legislation.
This is an indication of how voting rights has only emerged as an escalating issue after the 2020 election.
Here’s a look at some of the key developments:
Georgia
The Georgia senate passed a bill on Tuesday that would make it significantly harder to vote by mail in the state after record turnout in 2020. The measure would do away with the no-excuse system Republicans implemented in the state and only allow people to cast a mail-in vote if they are aged 65 or older. The bill now heads over to the Georgia house of representatives, which last week passed its own sweeping restrictions to voting.
New data shows how these policies would disproportionately harm Black voters.
While the share of white voters who cast a mail-in ballot fell from 2016 to 2020, the share of Black voters increased from 23% to 31%, according to an analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice. Despite those changes, white voters still made up a larger portion of the voters aged 65+ who voted by mail in 2020. A different new study also shows that Black voters in Georgia are more likely than white voters to cast their ballot on the weekend days that could be cut.
It’s still unclear whether lawmakers will ultimately choose to get rid of no-excuse absentee voting in the final version of whatever bill they pass. Top Republicans in the state oppose requiring voters to give an excuse and several Republicans, including the lieutenant governor, Geoff Duncan, refused to participate in the senate vote.
The filibuster
Last week, my colleague Daniel Strauss and I spoke with Jim Clyburn, one of the most powerful Democrats in the US House of Representatives, about how Democrats should approach the filibuster.
The procedure stands in the way of blocking HR1, a bill passed by the House last week, that would require states to offer early voting as well as same-day and automatic registration, among other significant measures. It also stands in the way of blocking a new version of the Voting Rights Act that would require states with a history of voting discrimination to get changes pre-cleared by the federal government.
Clyburn stopped short of saying the filibuster should be eliminated entirely, but said Democrats needed to find a workaround for voting and other civil rights legislation. He also offered a warning for two moderate Democratic senators, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, some of the staunchest advocates of keeping the filibuster in place.
“There’s no way under the sun that in 2021 that we are going to allow the filibuster to be used to deny voting rights. That just ain’t gonna happen. That would be catastrophic,” he said. “If Manchin and Sinema enjoy being in the majority, they had better figure out a way to get around the filibuster when it comes to voting and civil rights.”
Biden’s executive order
Joe Biden issued an executive order on Sunday that makes some modest, but potentially consequential, expansions around voting rights.
Two provisions in the executive order stood out to me. The first requires federal agencies to offer voter registration if a state requests that it do so. This measure – long pushed by civil rights groups – could make it significantly easier for vulnerable populations to register to vote. Requiring the federal Indian Health Service to offer voter registration, for example, could affect up to 1.9 million Native Americans and Alaska Natives.
The second significant piece involves directing the attorney general to provide voter registration information to eligible people with felony convictions in federal custody. That’s significant because people with felony convictions, and the officials who supervise them, often face a confusing maze of rules to figure out if they can vote again. In 2018, Crystal Mason, a Texas woman, was sentenced to five years in prison for voting while she was on supervised release (similar to probation) for a felony offense. The federal officials supervising Mason testified in court that they never told her she was ineligible to vote. The guidance required under Biden’s order could help prevent that kind of confusion.
Also worth watching …
Iowa’s governor signed a new law that cuts early voting, requires the polls to close an hour earlier, limits who can collect an absentee ballot and imposes criminal penalties for local election officials who don’t follow state guidance.
Florida lawmakers advanced a bill that would prohibit local officials from setting up drop boxes for mail-in ballots, something that was widely popular in 2020. “I’m at a loss for words,” one Republican local election official told Politico.
A new study found that mail-in voting neither boosted turnout nor benefited Democrats.
Republicans in Arizona continue to aggressively advance restrictions on mail-in voting. One measure that caught my eye yesterday was a bill that would require officials to reject a ballot that arrived by the close of the polls on election day if it was not also postmarked by the Thursday before the election.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
