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      In Restricting Early Voting, the Right Sees a New ‘Center of Gravity’

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      Donald Trump is no longer center stage. But many conservative activists are finding that the best way to raise money and keep voters engaged is to make his biggest fabrication their top priority.For more than a decade, the Susan B. Anthony List and the American Principles Project have pursued cultural and policy priorities from the social conservative playbook, one backing laws to ban abortion once a fetal heartbeat could be detected and the other opposing civil rights protections for L.G.B.T.Q. people. From their shared offices in suburban Virginia, they and their affiliated committees spent more than $20 million on elections last year.But after Donald J. Trump lost his bid for a second term and convinced millions of Americans that nonexistent fraud was to blame, the two groups found that many of their donors were thinking of throwing in the towel. Why, donors argued, should they give any money if Democrats were going to game the system to their advantage, recalled Frank Cannon, the senior strategist for both groups.“‘Before I give you any money for anything at all, tell me how this is going to be solved,’” Mr. Cannon said, summarizing his conversations. He and other conservative activists — many with no background in election law — didn’t take long to come up with an answer, which was to make rolling back access to voting the “center of gravity in the party,” as he put it.Passing new restrictions on voting — in particular, tougher limits on early voting and vote-by-mail — is now at the heart of the right’s strategy to keep donors and voters engaged as Mr. Trump fades from public view and leaves a void in the Republican Party that no other figure or issue has filled. In recent weeks, many of the most prominent and well-organized groups that power the G.O.P.’s vast voter turnout efforts have directed their resources toward a campaign to restrict when and how people can vote, with a focus on the emergency policies that states enacted last year to make casting a ballot during a pandemic easier. The groups believe it could be their best shot at regaining a purchase on power in Washington.Their efforts are intensifying over the objections of some Republicans who say the strategy is cynical and shortsighted, arguing that it further commits their party to legitimizing a lie. It also sends a message, they say, that Republicans think they lost mostly because the other side cheated, which prevents them from grappling honestly with what went wrong and why they might lose again.Some also argue that setting new restrictions on voting could undercut the party just as it was making important gains with Black and Latino voters, who are more likely to be impeded by such laws.“Restricting voting is only a short-term rush. It’s not a strategy for future strength,” said Benjamin Ginsberg, one of the Republican Party’s most prominent election lawyers, who has criticized Mr. Trump and other members of the party for attacking the integrity of the voting process.Former President Donald J. Trump speaking in 2018 at a Susan B. Anthony List gala in Washington.  Many conservative groups have raised money off his baseless claims of election fraud, and supported the Republican push to roll back voting rights.Doug Mills/The New York Times“Look at what it really means,” Mr. Ginsberg added. “A party that’s increasingly old and white whose base is a diminishing share of the population is conjuring up charges of fraud to erect barriers to voting for people it fears won’t support its candidates.”Just as notable as the brand-name conservative groups that are raising money off Mr. Trump’s revisionism — Susan B. Anthony List, the Heritage Foundation, the Family Research Council, Tea Party Patriots — are some of the heavy hitters that are sitting this fight out. Americans for Prosperity, the political organization funded by the Koch fortune, is not supporting the efforts to pass more ballot access laws, nor are other groups in the multimillion-dollar Koch political network.The debate over voting laws is also part of the bigger fight over the future of the Republican Party, and whether it should continue being so focused on making Mr. Trump and his hard-core voters happy.For now, many conservative groups are choosing to side with the former president, even at the risk of feeding corrosive falsehoods about the prevalence of voter fraud.It is certainly the more financially secure path and, some say, the one where they will encounter the least resistance. With polls showing that at least two-thirds of Republicans harbor doubts about President Biden’s legitimacy or believe that Mr. Trump somehow won more votes despite receiving seven million fewer than his opponent, Republican consultants said they were following their party.Some expressed a certain resignation about the situation: Mr. Trump created a perception that is now their party’s reality.“I’m not someone who thinks that China hacked the voting machines,” said Terry Schilling, the president of the American Principles Project. But at the same time, he said, “if you’re a conservative organization and you have small-dollar donors, you’re hearing this from everywhere: ‘Well, what’s the point in voting?’”One major focus for conservatives is rolling back the Covid-related changes that states enacted to make absentee voting easier last year. Mr. Schilling said his group’s intention was to “restore lost faith” in the process with policies that don’t allow those emergency procedures to become permanent. The American Principles Project, like other groups on the right, supports making states verify signatures on absentee ballots with signatures they have in their voter databases, and wants ballots sent only to people who request them.Shortly after Election Day, Trump supporters protested the results at the Georgia State Capitol in Atlanta.Audra Melton for The New York TimesVoters in Georgia who were disillusioned after Mr. Trump’s defeat — many of whom believed his far-fetched and debunked claims of voting by pets, dead people and other irregularities — helped cost Republicans control of the Senate. Georgia Republicans are now pushing a raft of new voting restrictions that Democrats have called political payback under the guise of “election integrity.” Many of the conservative organizations jumping in have a large network of activists in churches and anti-abortion groups across the country.The Susan B. Anthony List and the American Principles Project recently announced a joint “election transparency” campaign and set a fund-raising goal of $5 million. They hired a top conservative activist who is a former Trump administration official to lead it. They have organized conference calls for activists with other social conservative groups across the country, and say they have found participants to be enthusiastic about getting involved even if election law is entirely new to them.The Family Research Council, which advised the Trump administration on policies like ending military eligibility for transgender people and expanding the definition of religious freedom, recently dedicated one of its regular online organizing sessions, the “Pray Vote Stand Townhall,” to encouraging people to lobby their state legislators.Tony Perkins, the group’s president, expressed optimism about the number of voting bills that were moving along and suggested that last year’s election results were tainted. “We’ve got 106 election-related bills that are in 28 states right now,” he said to the audience. “So here’s the good news: There is action taking place to go back and correct what was uncovered in this last election.”Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, suggested that the results of the 2020 election couldn’t be trusted.Mark J. Terrill/Associated PressJoining Mr. Perkins on the stage was Michael P. Farris, the president of the deep-pocketed and powerful Christian legal group Alliance Defending Freedom. He chimed in approvingly: “Let me just say, ‘Amen,’” he said.Also throwing its weight behind the campaign is the influential Heritage Foundation and its political arm, Heritage Action for America, which recently announced that it planned to spend millions of dollars to support voting policies that are popular with conservatives. Those include laws that would require identification for voters and limit the availability of absentee ballots, as well as other policies that Heritage said would “secure and strengthen state election systems.”Several Republican strategists said that while the “stolen” election canard was accepted widely among rank-and-file Republican voters, they were surprised to find how deeply it had taken hold with major donors, who seem the most convinced of its truth and eager to act.Groups that are fighting these attempts to restrict ballot access said that the organizing on the right was so new that its impact had been hard to gauge. Michael Waldman, the president of the Brennan Center for Justice, said Republican legislatures seemed to understand the power of this issue on their own and didn’t need much persuasion to act.“Are we seeing a lot of new lawsuits, new lobbying, other things on the ground?” he said. “The answer is mostly no. We’re seeing a lot of fund-raising.” Still, the number of groups involved and the salience of the issue was striking, he said.“There’s massive organizational infrastructure behind it,” Mr. Waldman said. “It’s hard to identify too many unifying issues right now in the Republican Party. But this seems to be one of them.”As contentious as some of the past conservative-led campaigns to restrict voting were, this time is even more emotionally and politically charged given how closely associated it is with Mr. Trump and the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol that he incited. Some conservatives said the association with that day complicated what could be relatively uncontroversial changes to regulate how absentee ballots are sent out, collected and counted now that so many more people are likely to request them in the future.“We also took a look at the election results, and we don’t believe that it was stolen. But that doesn’t mean we don’t think there aren’t things that can be improved,” said Jason Snead, the executive director of the Honest Elections Project. The group supports a range of changes: Some would regulate mail-in voting at the margins, like requiring that ballots are mailed out no earlier than three weeks before the election and received by the time polls close on the day of.Others would no doubt be more controversial, like banning the organized, third-party collection of ballots that conservative critics call ballot harvesting.Mr. Snead said it was problematic that the 2020 election and its aftermath had cast a shadow over the entire issue. “There’s definitely a recognition that we don’t want this to be something that is tied to the last election,” he said. But as someone who started his work on election law before Mr. Trump was elected and shares the broader goal of establishing more conditions on voting, he acknowledged that the environment had never been riper.“It has risen to a degree of prominence it probably has never enjoyed,” Mr. Snead said. More

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      Can Anything End the Voting Wars?

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyCan Anything End the Voting Wars?As battles over voting rules burn hotter, the stakes are still lower than both sides seem to think.Opinion ColumnistMarch 16, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETCredit…Illustration by Arsh Raziuddin, Photos, via Getty More

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      Biden to Sign Order Meant to Make Voting Easier

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBiden to Sign Order Meant to Make Voting EasierThe executive order is relatively limited in scope. It calls upon officials at federal agencies to study and potentially expand access to voter registration materials.President Biden at the White House on Saturday.Credit…Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesMarch 7, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETWASHINGTON — President Biden is expected to sign an executive order on Sunday that directs the government to take steps to make voting easier, marking the 56th anniversary of the Bloody Sunday march in Selma, Ala., which swiftly turned voting rights into a national cause.The multipart order is aimed at using the far-flung reach of federal agencies to help people register to vote and to encourage Americans to go to the polls on Election Day. In a prepared speech for the Martin and Coretta King Unity Breakfast on Sunday, Mr. Biden will argue that such actions are still necessary despite the progress of the last half-century.“The legacy of the march in Selma is that while nothing can stop a free people from exercising their most sacred power as citizens, there are those who will do everything they can to take that power away,” Mr. Biden will say, according to the prepared remarks.“Every eligible voter should be able to vote and have it counted,” he plans to say. “If you have the best ideas, you have nothing to hide. Let more people vote.”The president’s actions come in the wake of his predecessor’s monthslong assault on the voting process during the 2020 election and the Jan. 6 riot that erupted at the U.S. Capitol after that predecessor, Donald J. Trump, repeatedly sought to overturn the election results.The executive order is relatively limited in scope. It calls upon officials at federal agencies to study and potentially expand access to voter registration materials, especially for those with disabilities, incarcerated people and other historically underserved groups.It also orders a modernization of the federally run Vote.gov website to ensure that it provides the most up-to-date information about voting and elections.But the order does not directly address efforts by many Republican-led state legislatures to restrict voting, including measures that would roll back the mail voting that was established in many states during the pandemic.Mr. Biden has said that he supports H.R. 1, a far-reaching voter rights bill that passed the House last week. It would weaken restrictive state voter identification laws, require automatic voter registration, expand mail-in voting and early voting, make it more difficult to eliminate voters from the rolls and restore voting rights to former felons.That legislation faces a difficult challenge in the evenly divided Senate, where Republican opposition appears to make it highly unlikely that it can win the support of the 60 senators required to send it to Mr. Biden’s desk.In the meantime, a senior administration official said Mr. Biden’s executive order was meant to show that the president was doing what he could.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      In Georgia, Republicans Take Aim at Role of Black Churches in Elections

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyIn Georgia, Republicans Take Aim at Role of Black Churches in ElectionsNew proposals by the G.O.P.-controlled Legislature have targeted Sunday voting, part of a raft of measures that could reduce the impact of Black voters in the state.Israel Small spent most of last fall helping members of his church with the absentee voting process.Credit…Stephen B. Morton for The New York TimesNick Corasaniti and March 6, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETSAVANNAH, Ga. — Sundays are always special at the St. Philip Monumental A.M.E. church. But in October, the pews are often more packed, the sermon a bit more urgent and the congregation more animated, and eager for what will follow: piling into church vans and buses — though some prefer to walk — and heading to the polls.Voting after Sunday church services, known colloquially as “souls to the polls,” is a tradition in Black communities across the country, and Pastor Bernard Clarke, a minister since 1991, has marshaled the effort at St. Philip for five years. His sermons on those Sundays, he said, deliver a message of fellowship, responsibility and reverence.“It is an opportunity for us to show our voting rights privilege as well as to fulfill what we know that people have died for, and people have fought for,” Mr. Clarke said.Now, Georgia Republicans are proposing new restrictions on weekend voting that could severely curtail one of the Black church’s central roles in civic engagement and elections. Stung by losses in the presidential race and two Senate contests, the state party is moving quickly to push through these limits and a raft of other measures aimed directly at suppressing the Black turnout that helped Democrats prevail in the critical battleground state.“The only reason you have these bills is because they lost,” said Bishop Reginald T. Jackson, who oversees all 534 A.M.E. churches in Georgia. “What makes it even more troubling than that is there is no other way you can describe this other than racism, and we just need to call it what it is.’’The push for new restrictions in Georgia comes amid a national effort by Republican-controlled state legislatures to impose harsh restrictions on voting access, in states like Iowa, Arizona and Texas.But the targeting of Sunday voting in new bills that are moving through Georgia’s Legislature has stirred the most passionate reaction, with critics saying it recalls some of the racist voting laws from the state’s past.“I can remember the first time I went to register,” said Diana Harvey Johnson, 74, a former state senator who lives in Savannah. “I went to the courthouse by myself and there was actually a Mason jar sitting on top of the counter. And the woman there asked me how many butterbeans were in that jar,” suggesting that she needed to guess correctly in order to be allowed to register.“I had a better chance of winning the Georgia lottery than guess how many butterbeans,” Ms. Harvey Johnson continued. “But the fact that those kinds of disrespects and demoralizing and dehumanizing practices — poll taxes, lynchings, burning crosses and burning down houses and firing people and putting people in jail, just to keep them from voting — that is not that far away in history. But it looks like some people want to revisit that. And that is absolutely unacceptable.”Diana Harvey Johnson, a former Georgia state senator, said she remembered facing “dehumanizing practices” when registering to vote in her youth.Credit…Stephen B. Morton for The New York TimesThe bill that passed the House would limit voting to at most one Sunday in October, but even that would be up to the discretion of the local registrar. It would also severely cut early voting hours in total, limit voting by mail and greatly restrict the use of drop boxes — all measures that activists say would disproportionately affect Black voters.A similar bill is awaiting a vote in the Senate. Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, has indicated he supports new laws to “secure the vote” but has not committed to all of the restrictions.Voting rights advocates say there is deep hypocrisy embedded in some of the new proposals. It was Georgia Republicans, they point out, who championed mail balloting in the early 2000s and automatic voting registration just five years ago, only to say they need to be limited now that more Black voters have embraced them.Georgia was one of nine mostly Southern states and scores of counties and municipalities — including the Bronx, Brooklyn and Manhattan — whose records of racist voter suppression required them to get federal clearance for changes to their election rules. The requirement fell under the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the civil rights era law that curtailed the disenfranchisement of Blacks in the South.The changes Republicans are now pursuing would have faced stiff federal review and possible blockage under the part of the act known as Section 5. But the Supreme Court, with a conservative majority, effectively gutted that section in a 2013 ruling.Even after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, churches played a key role in civic engagement, often organizing nonpartisan political action committees during the 1970s and ’80s that provided, among other resources, trips to vote on Sunday where it was permitted. The phrase “souls to the polls” took root in Florida in the 1990s, according to David D. Daniels III, a professor of church history at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago. Raphael Warnock, one of the Democrats who won a special Senate race in January, is himself the pastor of the storied Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.Historically, churches provided Black congregants more than just transportation or logistical help. Voting as a congregation also offered a form of haven from the intimidation and violence that often awaited Black voters at the polls.“That was one of the things that my father said, that once Black people got the right to vote, they would all go together because they knew that there was going to be a problem,” said Robert Evans, 59, a member of St. Phillip Monumental. “Bringing them all together made them feel more comfortable to actually go and do the civic duty.”In Georgia, the role of the A.M.E. church in civic engagement has been growing under the guidance of Bishop Jackson. Last year he began Operation Voter Turnout, seeking to expand the ways that A.M.E. churches could prepare their members to participate in elections. The operation focused on voter education, registration drives, assistance with absentee ballots and a coordinated Sunday voting operation.Bishop Reginald T. Jackson in Atlanta. He began a program to better prepare church members to participate in elections.Credit…Matthew Odom for The New York TimesIt had an impact in last November’s election, even amid the coronavirus pandemic: According to the Center for New Data, a nonprofit research group, African-Americans voted at a higher rate on weekends than voters identifying as white in 107 of the state’s 159 counties. Internal numbers from Fair Fight Action, a voting rights group, found that Black voters made up roughly 37 percent of those who voted early on Sunday in Georgia, while the Black population of Georgia is about 32 percent.State Representative Barry Fleming, a Republican and chief sponsor of the House bill, did not respond to requests for comment, nor did three other Republican sponsors. In introducing the bill, Republicans in the Legislature portrayed the new restrictions as efforts to “secure the vote” and “restore confidence” in the electoral process, but offered no rationale beyond that and no credible evidence that it was flawed. (Georgia’s election was pronounced secure by Republican electoral officials and reaffirmed by multiple audits and court decisions.)Limiting Sunday voting would affect Black voters beyond losing the assistance of the church. It would inevitably lead to longer lines during the week, especially in the Black community, which has historically been underserved on Election Day.The bill would also ban what is known as “line warming,” the practice of having volunteers provide water, snacks, chairs and other assistance to voters in line.Latoya Brannen, 43, worked with members of the church and a nonprofit group called 9 to 5 to hand out snacks and personal protective equipment in November.“We’ve learned that giving people just those small items helps keep them in line,” Ms. Brannen said. She said she had occasionally handed out bubbles to parents who brought young children with them.If Sunday voting is limited, it could induce more Black Georgians to vote by mail. During the pandemic, churches played an instrumental role in helping African-Americans navigate the absentee ballot system, which they had not traditionally used in the same proportion as white voters.At Greater Gaines Chapel A.M.E., a church about a half-mile from St. Philip Monumental, Israel Small spent most of last fall helping church members with the absentee process.“We took people to drop boxes to help make sure it would be counted,” said Mr. Small, 79. He said he was angered to learn this winter that Republicans were moving to restrict mail voting, too.Among the changes Republican state legislators have proposed is a requirement that voters provide proof of their identification — their license numbers or copies of official ID cards — with their absentee ballot applications.That signals a shift for Republicans, who have long controlled the Statehouse; in 2005 they passed a similar proposal, but for in-person voting.Pastor Bernard Clarke of St. Philip Monumental A.M.E. church has marshaled the effort to get his congregation to the polls for five years.Credit…Stephen B. Morton for The New York TimesThat measure included a new “anti-fraud” requirement that voters present one of a limited set of government-issued identification cards, like a driver’s license, at voting stations.The restrictions affected Black voters disproportionately, data showed. At the same time, state Republicans were moving to ease the process of absentee voting — predominantly used by white voters then — by stripping requirements that absentee voters provide an excuse for why they couldn’t vote in person and exempting them from the new photo-identification requirement.Justice Department lawyers reviewed the proposals under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act and found that the new ID law would likely make voting disproportionately harder for Black citizens. The attorneys recommended that the George W. Bush administration block it.In a memo that the department’s political leadership ultimately disregarded, staff lawyers noted that a sponsor of the legislation had told them that she believed Black voters were likely to vote only when they were paid to do so, and that if the new law reduced their voting share it was only because it would limit opportunities for fraud.The memo also stated that the law’s sponsors defended the more lenient treatment of mail voting — like its exemption from the ID provision — by arguing that it was more secure than in-person voting because it produced a paper trail.Now, after an election year in which Mr. Trump repeatedly and falsely disparaged mail voting as rife with fraud, state Republicans are arguing that mail-in voting needs more restrictions.There is no new evidence supporting that assertion. But one thing did change in 2020: the increase in Black voters who availed themselves of absentee balloting, helping Democrats to dominate the mail-in ballot results during the presidential election.“It’s just really a sad day,” Mr. Small, from the Greater Gaines church, said. “It’s a very challenging time for all of us, just for the inalienable right to vote that we fought so hard for, and right now, they’re trying to turn back the clock to try to make sure it’s difficult,” he said.Pastor Clarke of St. Philip Monumental said the Republican effort to impose more restrictions could backfire, energizing an already active electorate.“Donald Trump woke us up,” he said. “There are more people in the congregation that are more aware and alert and have a heightened awareness to politics. So while we know that and we believe that his intentions were ill, we can honestly say that he has woken us up. That we will never be the same.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Georgia Takes Center Stage in Battle Over Voting Rights

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyGeorgia Takes Center Stage in Battle Over Voting RightsTwo bills moving through the Republican-controlled Legislature would place new restrictions on voting access, in ways Democrats say would have an outsize impact on Black voters.A protest of a bill that would restrict voting access outside the State Capitol in Atlanta on Monday.Credit…Alyssa Pointer/Atlanta Journal-Constitution, via Associated PressRichard Fausset, Nick Corasaniti and March 3, 2021Updated 7:14 a.m. ETATLANTA — After record turnout flipped Georgia blue for the first time in decades, Republicans who control the state Legislature are moving swiftly to implement a raft of new restrictions on voting access, mounting one of the biggest challenges to voting rights in a major battleground state following the 2020 election.Two bills, one passed by the House on Monday and another that could pass the Senate this week, seek to alter foundational elements of voting in Georgia, which supported President Biden in November and a pair of Democratic senators in January — narrow victories attributable in part to the array of voting options in the state.The Republican legislation would undermine pillars of voting access by ending automatic voter registration, banning drop boxes for mail ballots and eliminating the broad availability of absentee voting. The bills would restrict early voting on the weekends, limiting the longstanding civic tradition of “Souls to the Polls” in which Black voters cast ballots on Sunday after church services.Taken together, the new barriers would have an outsize impact on Black voters, who make up roughly one-third of the state’s population and vote overwhelmingly Democratic.Black voters were a major force in Democratic success in recent elections, with roughly 88 percent voting for Mr. Biden and more than 90 percent voting for Senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff in the January runoff elections, according to exit polls.Democrats say that Republicans are effectively returning to one of the ugliest tactics in the state’s history — oppressive laws aimed at disenfranchising voters. “Rather than grappling with whether their ideology is causing them to fail, they are instead relying on what has worked in the past,” Stacey Abrams, the voting rights activist, said, referring to what she said were laws designed to suppress votes. “Instead of winning new voters, you rig the system against their participation, and you steal the right to vote.”The Georgia effort comes as former President Donald J. Trump continues to publicly promote the lie that the election was stolen from him, which has swayed millions of Republican voters. It has also put further pressure on Republican state legislatures across the country to continue drafting new legislation aimed at restricting voting rights under the banner of “election integrity” as a way of appeasing the former president and his loyal base.New restrictions on voting have already passed in Iowa, and multiple other states are lining up similar efforts, while the Supreme Court is hearing oral arguments this week on another challenge to the Voting Rights Act. Should the high court make changes to Section 2 of the act, which allows after-the-fact challenges to voting restrictions that may disproportionately affect members of minority groups, Democrats and voting rights groups could be left without one of their most essential tools to challenge new laws.People waited in line to vote early at a community center in Suwanee, Ga., in October.Credit…Nicole Craine for The New York TimesJustice Elena Kagan, in her questioning on Tuesday, appeared to allude to Georgia’s proposed limitations on Sunday voting.“If a state has long had two weeks of early voting and then the state decides that it is going to get rid of Sunday voting on those two weeks, leave everything else in place, and Black voters vote on Sunday 10 times more than white voters, is that system equally open?” Justice Kagan asked.For decades, Georgia has been at the center of the voting rights battle, with Democrats and advocacy groups fighting back against repeated efforts to disenfranchise Black voters in the state.As recently as 2018, Georgians faced hourslong lines to vote in many majority-Black neighborhoods, and thousands of Black voters were purged from the voting rolls before the election. Now Democrats and voting rights groups are alarmed that Republicans are again trying to change the state’s voting laws ahead of critical Senate and governor’s races in 2022.Though the bills in the Legislature have not been finalized, it is expected they will eventually reach the desk of Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican. Mr. Kemp has not explicitly backed either bill, but he said on Tuesday morning that he was in favor of efforts “to further secure the vote.”“I’m supportive of putting the photo ID requirement on absentee ballots by mail and other things, making sure that there’s a fair process to observe,” Mr. Kemp told the radio host Hugh Hewitt. He said his decision on the bills would depend on “what it is and what’s in it.”Democrats, shut out of power in the Statehouse despite holding both United States Senate seats, are relatively powerless in the legislative process to stop the bills, though they do have avenues through the courts to challenge any final bill signed.In an interview on Tuesday, Ms. Abrams, the former Democratic minority leader in the Georgia House of Representatives, called Monday’s House vote “a sign of fear” over Republicans’ failure to win support from young and minority voters, two of the fastest-growing sectors of the state’s electorate.She added that the measure was also potentially self-defeating for the G.O.P. in that large percentages of rural white voters, a traditionally Republican-leaning bloc, could also be impeded by laws that make it harder for citizens to cast absentee ballots and vote by mail.Asked about restrictions to Sunday voting, Ms. Abrams cited a study by the Center for New Data, a nonprofit group, that found Black voters were more likely to vote on weekends than white voters in 107 of Georgia’s 159 counties. Over all, 11.8 percent of Black voters voted on weekends compared with 8.6 percent of white voters, according to the study.“We know that some version of this bill is likely to pass because Republicans face an existential crisis in Georgia,” Ms. Abrams said, portraying the party as shortsighted in refusing to address the factors that have put its traditional demographic advantages at risk in recent elections.Stacey Abrams, the voting rights activist and 2018 Democratic nominee for governor, may challenge Gov. Brian Kemp again in 2022.Credit…Nicole Craine for The New York TimesAmong the most pressing concerns for Georgia Democrats is the possibility that the House’s bill, H.B. 531, might be amended in the Senate to include provisions that put an end to automatic voter registration and a vote-by-mail system known as “no excuse,” which allows any voters to cast mail ballots if they choose. These proposals were included in a bill that passed out of a Senate committee last week.The automatic registration system, which registers voters when they apply for or renew a driver’s license, was put in place in 2016 under the Republican governor at the time, Nathan Deal.Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, another Republican, has credited the system with drastically increasing voter registration numbers, and Republicans have cited such figures to push back against charges leveled by Ms. Abrams and others that Georgia Republicans want to suppress votes.No-excuse absentee voting was approved by the Republican-controlled Legislature in 2005 and was used by many voters during the pandemic. In December, Mr. Raffensperger supported ending no-excuse absentee voting, saying it “opens the door to potential illegal voting.”Mr. Raffensperger took that stance even as he defended Georgia’s electoral system against accusations by Mr. Trump that the election was somehow rigged; his refusal to support the former president’s baseless claims earned him the enmity of Mr. Trump and Georgia Republicans allied with him.Mr. Raffensperger’s office did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday on the current legislative efforts in the Legislature, including the House bill, which would remove the secretary of state from his role as chair of the State Elections Board.Cody Hall, a spokesman for Mr. Kemp, repeated an oft-used phrase of his, saying that the governor wanted to make it “easy to vote and hard to cheat” in Georgia.Kasey Carpenter, a Republican state representative whose district is a conservative swath of Northwest Georgia, said the House bill included a number of common-sense provisions that Democrats would be supporting if it were not for the intense partisan nature of the times. Changes to mail-in procedures, he said, were particularly important given the sharp increase in people who chose to vote that way because of the restrictions of the pandemic.“I think what you’re seeing is a measured approach,” he said.For example, Mr. Carpenter said, the bill requires voters to put the number of their driver’s license or state identification card on applications for a mail-in ballot, and requires photocopies to be sent in only if the voter is using alternative forms of identification.Mr. Kemp, a Republican, has not explicitly backed either bill, but said he favored efforts “to further secure the vote.”Credit…Dustin Chambers for The New York TimesIf a highly restrictive bill ends up on Mr. Kemp’s desk, he will be faced with a complicated dilemma.On the one hand, the governor must show his Trump-loyal Republican base that he has heard and responded to their concerns about election integrity. Doing so will be particularly important if Mr. Trump, who was incensed that Mr. Kemp did not take steps to overturn his electoral defeat in Georgia, carries out his threat to back a primary challenger on Mr. Kemp’s right flank.On the other hand, if Ms. Abrams chooses to engage Mr. Kemp in a rematch of their 2018 contest, she and her allies are likely to once again make allegations of voter suppression one of their most forceful and incessant attack lines against Mr. Kemp.In an electorate still reeling from the two-month effort to subvert the election result by Mr. Trump, and the rash of lawsuits attacking voting before and after the election, the bills in Georgia have quickly attracted national attention. More Than a Vote, a group founded by LeBron James, the basketball superstar, has vowed to draw attention to the issue during the N.B.A. All-Star game this weekend in Atlanta; his pledge was first reported by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.Voting rights groups note that the severe limitations put on early voting could also have a cascading effect: By limiting the number of hours available for in-person voting, the bottlenecks created during high-volume times and on Election Day would very likely lead to more hourslong lines, like the waits that plagued the Georgia primary in June.“They’re creating a line management problem,” said Aunna Dennis, the executive director of Common Cause Georgia, a voting rights group. In the primary, she noted, “we saw people in line for over six hours. Just imagine if we were losing 108 hours of early voting time, of Sunday voting, access to the drop box, how many of those people are now going to have to wait in line?”Isabella Grullón Paz contributed reporting.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      The Brewing Voting Rights Clash

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyOn PoliticsThe Brewing Voting Rights ClashRepublicans are reuniting — and re-energized — as they pursue a longstanding political goal.March 2, 2021, 6:47 p.m. ETCredit…Antonio de LucaThe 2020 election was a wild one. And under the strange circumstances, Republicans wound up turning against one another on an issue that tends to unite them: voting access and elections.Some Republican officials fought to restrict access to the ballot amid the pandemic, while others endorsed mail-in voting and other methods to make voting easier. After the election, some Republicans backed President Donald Trump’s unfounded claims of election fraud, while a number of state-level officials — such as Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia and his secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger — defended the integrity of their own election systems.But now that the election is behind us, Republicans are reuniting on this issue, leading efforts around the country to restrict access to the vote. And in many cases they’re weaponizing Trump’s fabrications from 2020 to justify doing it. In Georgia this week, the Republican-led state legislature is moving forward with a bill to restrict absentee voting and limit early voting on weekends.The G.O.P. has one big advantage here: a newly cemented 6-to-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court, which is broadly seen as receptive to restrictions on voting, even if it didn’t support Trump’s efforts to overturn the election. The justices heard oral arguments today in a challenge to the Voting Rights Act stemming from policies in Arizona during the 2020 election, and the court appeared sympathetic to the Republican plaintiffs’ arguments.Democrats, meanwhile, are equally unified in their efforts to preserve widespread voting access, particularly in Black and brown communities that are most heavily targeted by restrictive voting laws. The House today held a debate on the For the People Act, known as H.R. 1, which among other things would create a basic bill of rights for voting access. The legislation is expected to pass the chamber tomorrow along party lines.To put this all in perspective, I called Wendy Weiser, who studies these issues as the director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at N.Y.U.’s law school. She took time out of a whirlwind news day on the voting front to answer a few questions for On Politics. The interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.Hi, Wendy. Let’s begin with the news from Georgia. What is the significance of the legislation making its way through the state legislature there, and is it part of a trend?The bill in Georgia is one of the most significant and restrictive voter suppression bills in the country, but it is not unique right now. We’ve been tracking the legislation to restrict and also to expand voting access across the country for over a decade, and right now we have well over 250 bills pending in 43 states across the county that would restrict access to voting. That is seven times the number of restrictive voting bills we saw at the same time last year. So it is a dramatic spike in the push to restrict access to voting.So we’ve seen this is a growing movement. It’s not brand-new this year, it wasn’t invented by Donald Trump, but it was certainly supercharged by his regressive attack on our voting systems. We’re seeing its impact in Georgia, but also across the country.Republicans have been talking about voter fraud, and attempting to limit access to the ballot, for many years. How much is the current surge in restrictive voting legislation related to Donald Trump and the conspiracy theories he pushed last year, during and after the campaign?Many of these bills are fueled by the same rhetoric and grievances that were driving the challenges to the 2020 election. In addition to expressly referencing the big lie about widespread voter fraud and that Trump actually won the election, they’re targeting the methods of voting that the Trump campaign was complaining about. So, for example, the single biggest subject of regressive voter legislation in this session — roughly half the bills — is mail voting.That is new this year. We’ve been tracking efforts to restrict access to voting for a very long time, and absentee voting has not been the subject of legislative attack before. It was the politicization of that issue in the 2020 election, principally by the Trump campaign and allies, that I think helped elevate that issue to a grievance level that would cause it to be the subject of legislative attack.The Supreme Court today heard oral arguments in a challenge to the Voting Rights Act, brought by the attorney general of Arizona. What is at stake in that case?On a narrow level, the case is challenging two provisions of an Arizona law that made it harder for voters of color in Arizona to participate in the election process, but the case’s significance is much broader. The plaintiffs and the Republican National Committee are actually arguing to dramatically scale back the strength of the nationwide protections against voting discrimination in the federal Voting Rights Act.About eight years ago, the Supreme Court gutted the most powerful provision of the Voting Rights Act, the preclearance provision, which applied to states with a history of discrimination. That led to disastrous outcomes across the country, but it did not invalidate the nationwide protections against discrimination in voting, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. So this is the next shoe, which I hope will not drop.At a time when voting rights in America are under significant attack, more than they have been in decades — an attack through racially targeted efforts to restrict access to voting — we need the protections of the Voting Rights Act more than ever. So this is absolutely the wrong direction to go in.With the Voting Rights Act in peril, Democrats in Congress are moving forward with legislation to ensure people’s access to the ballot. What are their proposals?There are two major pieces of voting rights legislation that are moving through Congress. The one that was not voted on today is called the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and it would restore the preclearance provision of the Voting Rights Act, which requires a federal review of changes in certain states to see if they’re discriminatory. It would also make other improvements to the Voting Rights Act to make it more effective.The other bill, which was voted on today, is called the For the People Act, H.R. 1. It would create a baseline level of voter access rules that every American could rely on for federal elections. This one would address almost comprehensively the attacks on voting rights that we’re seeing in state legislatures across the country. So, for example, in many states we’re seeing attempts to eliminate no-excuse absentee voting. H.R. 1 would require all states to offer no-excuse absentee voting. Every state would then offer that best practice of voting access, and it would no longer be manipulated, election by election, by state legislators to target voters they don’t like.On Politics is also available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      We Still Have to Worry About the Supreme Court and Elections

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Campaign to Subvert the 2020 ElectionKey TakeawaysTrump’s RoleGeorgia InvestigationExtremist Wing of G.O.P.AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyWe Still Have to Worry About the Supreme Court and ElectionsThe justices are about to consider whether the Voting Rights Act applies to policies that restrict the vote.Contributing Opinion WriterFeb. 25, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETCredit…Damon Winter/The New York TimesWhen the Supreme Court on Monday rejected Pennsylvania Republicans’ after-the-fact effort to invalidate late-arriving mailed ballots, it was tempting to suppose that the country’s courthouse doors had finally closed on this most litigated of presidential elections.If only it were that simple.True, in denying the Republicans’ petitions, the court didn’t issue an opinion. Of the four votes necessary to accept a case, these two cases (treated by the court as one) garnered only three. So for the official record, the only outcome in Republican Party of Pennsylvania v. DeGraffenreid and in Corman v. Pennsylvania Democratic Party was “denied.”But the three justices who would have accepted the cases — Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch — issued dissenting opinions that provide both a road map and a rationale for the Supreme Court’s future intervention in the quintessentially state matter of how to conduct elections.Remember Bush v. Gore, the case that decided the 2000 presidential election, in which five justices voted to overturn the Florida Supreme Court’s handling of a statewide recount? That decision was based on a theory of equal protection so wacky that the majority opinion insisted that “our consideration is limited to the present circumstances” — that is to say, don’t dare invoke this poor excuse for an opinion as a precedent.That didn’t stop Justice Thomas from citing Bush v. Gore in his dissenting opinion on Monday, and he did so in a particularly shameless fashion. The language he cited wasn’t even from the Bush v. Gore majority opinion, but rather from a separate concurring opinion filed in that case by only three of the majority justices, who argued that the Florida Supreme Court had violated the U.S. Constitution by substituting its will for that of the state Legislature. Justice Thomas invoked that minority portion of the decision to assert that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court was constitutionally out of bounds when, citing both the Covid-19 pandemic and the collapse of the Postal Service as its reasons, it added three postelection days for lawful receipt of mailed ballots.He went on to warn that fraud was “more prevalent with mail-in ballots,” citing as evidence a 1994 Federal District Court case, an article in this newspaper from 2012 and the 2018 Republican ballot-harvesting fraud in North Carolina. Such occurrences, he said, raise “the likelihood that courts will be asked to adjudicate questions that go to the heart of election confidence.” This was the reason, he argued, that the Supreme Court should have taken and decided the Pennsylvania cases before the next election cycle.In his inventory of ballot fraud, Justice Thomas of course could not refer to fraud in the 2020 election, because there wasn’t any. Not a problem:We are fortunate that many of the cases we have seen alleged only improper rule changes, not fraud. But that observation provides only small comfort. An election free from strong evidence of systemic fraud is not alone sufficient for election confidence. Also important is the assurance that fraud will not go undetected.In other words, Justice Thomas would have it both ways: If there was fraud, the court needed to intervene, and if there was no fraud, the court needed to intervene because the fraud might simply be undetected. Despite his disclaimer, the entire structure of his opinion, suggesting that something bad had happened even if no one could prove it, is fairly read as validating the essence of the Trump narrative.Justice Alito, in a separate dissenting opinion that Justice Gorsuch also signed, was more circumspect about the fraud issue. His emphasis was the urgency of stopping state courts from substituting their judgment for that of the legislatures. He said that even though the election was over and late ballots were too few to have made a difference in Pennsylvania’s vote totals, state courts could be expected to behave in the same way in the future unless the Supreme Court used this occasion to stop them.There are several things to note about the Pennsylvania cases. The most obvious is the absence of a fourth vote. In an initial round in the Pennsylvania cases, in mid-October, Justice Brett Kavanaugh had provided Justices Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch with a fourth vote to grant a stay of the state court decision. But a stay requires five votes rather than four. With Amy Coney Barrett not yet confirmed, the eight justices divided 4 to 4, and the stay was denied without opinions. Justice Kavanaugh withheld his vote on Monday, without explanation. Maybe he decided this was a propitious time to offer some cover for Chief Justice John Roberts, who has voted in nearly all the election cases this fall with the three remaining liberal justices.Justice Barrett was also silent. During her confirmation hearing, Senate Democrats had pressed her to promise recusal from any election cases, given that President Donald Trump had said he needed a prompt replacement for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg so that he would have a majority of justices voting his way in any election disputes. Justice Barrett did not recuse herself from the Pennsylvania case. Perhaps her decision not to provide the fourth vote her dissenting colleagues needed was a kind of de facto recusal, in recognition that the optics of voting to hear a last-ditch Trump appeal would be awkward, to say the least.The deeper question raised by Monday’s development is why Justices Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch are so intent on what would seem to be a counterintuitive goal for conservatives: curbing the power of state courts. I’m cynical enough to think it has to do with how these three understand the position of state legislatures and state courts in today’s political climate. It’s been widely reported that Republican-controlled legislatures are rolling out bills by the dozens to restrict access to the polls, aimed at discouraging the kind of turnout that produced Democratic victories in Georgia last month. The vote-suppression effort has become so aggressive that some Republicans are starting to worry about voter backlash, according to a recent Washington Post article.State courts, on the other hand, are capable of standing in the way of this strategy. When state high-court judges are elected, as they are in many states, they typically run in statewide races that are not subject to the gerrymandering that has entrenched Republican power in states that are much more balanced politically than the makeup of their legislatures reflects. What better way to disable the state courts in their democracy-protecting role than to push them to the sidelines when it comes to federal elections.So there is no way the Supreme Court is finished with elections. Next Tuesday, as it happens, the justices will hear a crucial voting rights case. The case, from Arizona, asks the court to decide for the first time how Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 applies to policies that restrict the vote, through such measures as voter ID requirements.Section 2, which pertains nationwide, is the major remaining provision of the Voting Rights Actfollowing the Supreme Court’s dismantling of the act’s Section 5, in the 2013 Shelby County case. That section barred certain states and smaller jurisdictions from making changes in their election procedures without first receiving federal permission, known as “preclearance.” Section 5 provided vital protection in parts of the country where racism had not released its grip on the levers of power.The issue now is whether Section 2 can be deployed to fill that gap. It prohibits any voting practice that “results in a denial or abridgment of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.” It has typically been used to challenge redistricting plans that dilute the electoral power of racial and ethnic minorities. The question of whether it can be useful in challenging the wave of vote-suppression schemes, which can present complex problems of proof, hands the justices arguably the most important civil rights case of their current term.With the country exhausted and still reeling from the turmoil of the 2020 election and its bizarre aftermath, the urge not to think about elections for a while is powerful. I share it. But it’s a luxury the Supreme Court hasn’t given us, not now, not as long as some justices have more to say.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      How Not to Be at the Mercy of a Trumpified G.O.P.

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyHow Not to Be at the Mercy of a Trumpified G.O.P.Barack Obama asked Democrats to kill the filibuster and pass a voting rights bill because it was the right thing to do. There’s a stronger argument.Opinion ColumnistFeb. 23, 2021Credit…Elizabeth Bick for The New York TimesLast year, in his eulogy for Representative John Lewis, President Barack Obama urged Congress to pass a new voting rights act to continue the work of the lifelong civil rights activist.“If politicians want to honor John, and I’m so grateful for the legacy of work of all the Congressional leaders who are here, but there’s a better way than a statement calling him a hero,” Obama said. “You want to honor John? Let’s honor him by revitalizing the law that he was willing to die for.”Obama then called on federal lawmakers to lift as many barriers to voting as they could. “Once we pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, we should keep marching to make it even better,” he said, listing automatic voter registration, felon re-enfranchisement, a national voting holiday, D.C. statehood and curbs on partisan gerrymandering as reforms that would do justice to Lewis’s memory. “And if all this takes eliminating the filibuster,” Obama concluded, “then that’s what we should do.”Although he probably expected them to win in November, Obama said this not knowing whether Democrats would have a majority in the Senate come the start of the next Congress. Well, Democrats have that majority. And thanks in large part to the work of John Lewis and those who followed in his footsteps, it rests on two senators from Georgia, whose political futures rest in turn on whether every voter in the state has equal access to the ballot.The same is true in Arizona, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where slim margins made the difference between Democratic victory and Republican defeat in the last election, and where Republican legislative majorities are determined to keep Democrats as far from power as possible — and not to lose the next presidential election the way they lost the last one. To that end, they have introduced bills to restrict the vote, to make the race for the Electoral College — as well as any race for statewide office — as noncompetitive as possible, by taking as many Democratic voters off the board as they can.Obama asked Democrats to kill the filibuster and pass a voting rights bill because it was the right thing to do. But there’s a stronger argument: that if Democrats don’t do this, they’ll be at the mercy of a Trumpified Republican Party that has radicalized against democracy itself.Democrats have already written the kind of voting rights bill Obama spoke about. It’s the For the People Act, designated as H.R. 1 in the House and S. 1 in the Senate. If passed and signed into law, it would establish automatic, same-day and online voter registration, protect eligible voters from overly broad purges that remove them from the rolls, restore the Voting Rights Act with a new formula for federal preclearance (which would require select cities and localities to submit new voting rules to the Justice Department for clearance), re-enfranchise the formerly incarcerated, strengthen mail-in voting systems, institute nationwide early voting and increase criminal penalties for voter intimidation.House Democrats introduced H.R. 1 in 2019 at the start of the 116th Congress. Mitch McConnell, then the majority leader of the Senate, denounced the bill as a “naked attempt to change the rules of American politics to benefit one party” and told reporters it was dead on arrival. “This is a terrible proposal,” he said that March, “it will not get any floor time in the Senate.”McConnell no longer controls the floor, but with a de facto supermajority requirement in the Senate, the For the People Act is still dead on arrival. That is, unless Democrats kill the legislative filibuster and restore majority rule to the chamber. Right now, Senators Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia are the most vocal Democratic opponents of ending the filibuster. “I want to restore the 60-vote threshold for all elements of the Senate’s work,” Sinema said earlier this month, seemingly mistaking McConnell’s Obama-era innovation for an age-old tradition. Manchin has also been emphatic about keeping the supermajority requirement, telling Politico that he will “not vote in this Congress” to change the filibuster.Manchin, who has been winning elections in West Virginia for the last 20 years, is safe in his seat for as long as he wants it. Sinema, on the other hand, is much more vulnerable. Not the least because Arizona’s Republican state Legislature, to say nothing of its Republican Party, is all-in on “stop the steal” and Donald Trump’s war on mail-in voting. Arizona Republicans have already introduced bills to limit voter registration drives, require notarized signatures for mailed ballots and forbid voters from actually mailing-in completed ballots.Arizona Republicans are not alone. To date, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at N.Y.U.’s law school, Republicans in 33 states have introduced more than 165 bills to restrict voting, part of the national conservative backlash to the results of the 2020 presidential election. A bill in Georgia would put new restrictions on absentee and in-person early voting; four different bills in Pennsylvania would eliminate no-excuse absentee voting less than two years after Republican lawmakers voted it into law.Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 2 Republican in the House, captured the mood of the party when, on Sunday, he refused to say that the election wasn’t stolen from Trump. “Once the electors are counted, yes, he’s the legitimate president,” Scalise said in an interview with Jonathan Karl of ABC News, speaking of Joe Biden. “But if you’re going to ignore the fact that there were states that did not follow their own state legislatively set laws. That’s the issue at heart, that millions of people still are not happy with and don’t want to see happen again.”This is euphemism. There was no issue with the election. State legislatures passed laws, courts interpreted them, and officials put them into action. This was true in states Trump won, like Texas and North Carolina, as much as it was in states he lost. It almost goes without saying that the real issue, the reason Republicans are actually unhappy, is that Biden is president and Democrats control Congress.Devoted to Trump, and committed to his fictions about the election, Republicans are doing everything they can to keep voters from holding them and their leaders accountable. They will restrict the vote. They will continue to gerrymander themselves into near-permanent majorities. A Republican in Arizona has even proposed a legislative veto over the popular vote in presidential elections, under the dubious theory that state legislatures have unconditional, unlimited and unrestricted power to allocate electoral votes.The good news is that Democrats in Congress have it in their power to stop a lot of this nonsense, to pre-emptively weaken the rising tide of voter suppression. All it takes is a simple vote to make the Senate work according to majority rule, as the founding fathers intended.The alternative is to allow the supermajority requirement to stand, to allow endless stagnation, to abdicate the authority of Congress to govern the country and tackle its problems, to deny the party of collective action the ability to act for the public good and to give the party of plutocrats and demagogues free rein to twist the institutions of the American republic against its values.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More