More stories

  • in

    Jamie Raskin: electoral college is a ‘danger to the American people’

    Jamie Raskin: electoral college is a ‘danger to the American people’Democratic congressman says recent changes to electoral college laws are unlikely to stop another January 6 Recent reforms to the laws governing the counting of electoral college votes for presidential races are “not remotely sufficient” to prevent another attack like the one carried out by Donald Trump supporters at the Capitol on January 6, a member of the congressional committee which investigated the uprising has warned.January 6 report review: 845 pages, countless crimes, one simple truth – Trump did itRead moreIn an interview on CBS’s Face the Nation, the Maryland House representative Jamie Raskin on Sunday renewed calls echoed by others – especially in the Democratic party to which he belongs – to let a popular vote determine the holder of the Oval Office.“We should elect the president the way we elect governors, senators, mayors, representatives, everybody else – whoever gets the most votes wins,” Raskin said. “We spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year exporting American democracy to other countries, and the one thing they never come back to us with is the idea that, ‘Oh, that electoral college that you have, that’s so great, we think we will adopt that too’.”After Trump served one term and lost the Oval Office to Joe Biden in 2020, he pressured his vice-president Mike Pence to use his ceremonial role as president of the session where both the Senate and House of Representatives met to certify the outcome of the race and interfere with the counting of the electoral college votes.Pence refused, as supporters of the defeated Trump stormed the Capitol and threatened to hang the vice-president on the day of that joint congressional session in early 2021. The unsuccessful attack was linked to nine deaths, including the suicides of traumatized law enforcement officers who ultimately restored order.Raskin was one of nine House representatives – including seven Democrats – who served on a panel investigating the January 6 uprising.The committee recently released an 845-page report drawing from more than 1,000 interviews and 10 public hearings that, among other findings, concluded Trump provoked the Capitol attack by purposely disseminating false allegations of fraud pertaining to his defeat as part of a plot to overturn his loss. Committee members also recommended that federal prosecutors file criminal charges against Trump and certain associates of his.Hundreds of Trump’s supporters who participated in the Capitol attack have been charged, with many already convicted.Raskin said the US insistence on determining presidential winners through the electoral college facilitated the attempt by Trump supporters to keep him in power.“There are so many curving byways and nooks and crannies in the electoral college that there are opportunities for a lot of strategic mischief,” Raskin told Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan, adding that the institutions which prevented the Trump-fueled Capitol attack “just barely” did so.As part of a government spending package passed Friday, Congress updated existing federal election laws to clarify that the vice-president’s role in the proceedings to certify the results of a race is just ceremonial and merely to count electoral votes. It also introduced a requirement for 20% of the members of both the House and Senate to object to a state’s electoral college vote outcome when it had previously taken just one legislator from each congressional chamber to do so.Raskin on Sunday said those corrective measures are “necessary” yet “not remotely sufficient” because they don’t solve “the fundamental problem” of the electoral college vote, which in 2000 and 2016 allowed both George W Bush and Trump to win the presidency despite clear defeats in the popular vote.Another House Democrat – Dan Goldman of New York – went on MSNBC’s the Sunday show and made a similar point, saying that US lawmakers “need to be thinking about ways that we can preserve and protect our democracy that lasts generations”.Many Americans are taught in their high school civics classes that the electoral college prevents the handful of most populated areas in the US from determining the presidential winner because more voters live there than in the rest of the country combined.‘Hatred has a great grip on the heart’: election denialism lives on in US battlegroundRead moreStates generally determine their presidential electoral vote winner by the popular vote.But most give 100% of their electoral vote allotment to the winner of the popular vote even if the outcome is razor-thin. Critics say that, as a result, votes for the losing candidate end up not counting in any meaningful way, allowing for situations where the president is supported only by a minority of the populace.Meanwhile, such scenarios are preceded by a convoluted process that most people don’t understand and whose integrity can be assailed in the court of public opinion by partisans with agendas. That happened ahead of the Capitol attack even though Trump lost both the popular and electoral college votes to Biden handily.“I think,” Raskin said, “that the electoral college … has become a danger not just to democracy, but to the American people.”TopicsUS politicsElectoral reformUS Capitol attackDonald TrumpDemocratsRepublicansUS voting rightsnewsReuse this content More

  • in

    Congress has a massive voting rights bill in its grasp. It must pass it, now | Dennis Aftergut

    OpinionUS politicsCongress has a massive voting rights bill in its grasp. It must pass it, nowDennis AftergutThe Freedom to Vote Act rivals the 1965 Voting Rights Act as the greatest expansion of ballot access in our history Wed 22 Sep 2021 06.25 EDTLast modified on Wed 22 Sep 2021 07.00 EDTImagine it’s November 2020, and you are 59-year-old Laura Roundine, living on tribal lands in Montana. Days before the election, you’re home-bound after open heart surgery. The reservation has no at-home mail delivery.Your right to vote is saved by Renee LaPlante, a Blackfeet community organizer. She drives your ballot to a distant election office as part of her job.In 2021, that no longer works. Montana Republicans’ new voter-suppression law forbids such delivery of ballots.These barriers to voting on reservations are part of a larger Republican power grab. In 2018, the Democratic senator Jon Tester carried seven out of eight Montana counties containing the headquarters of a federally recognized Native American tribe. He won the state by a single point.The constitution’s elections clause points the way to protecting Laura Roundine and millions of other voters in the 18 conservative states with new state laws making it harder to vote. The clause gives Congress authority to override such measures in federal elections.On 14 September, Senator Joe Manchin and colleagues introduced the new Freedom to Vote Act. It rivals the 1965 Voting Rights Act as the greatest expansion of ballot access in our history.If the bill is adopted, 16-year-olds applying for a driver’s license will be automatically registered to vote at 18. That is huge. Similarly, the act guarantees ballot access in federal elections for citizens who were once imprisoned.As a result, 2022 could be the first time a man convicted 20 years ago, at age 18, for selling a bag of marijuana in Birmingham will be able to vote. Alabama is one of 13 states that enacted Jim Crow statutes from 1865 to 1880 disenfranchising former convicts with the aim of keeping black people from the polls. In Florida, Kentucky, Mississippi, Tennessee, Virginia, Alabama and Wyoming, more than one in seven African Americans are without a right to vote.The Freedom to Vote Act will transform voting in America. For in-person voters, 15 days of early voting are guaranteed. Election day becomes a holiday. The bill makes it a felony to communicate election lies or to interfere with citizens’ access to the polls.The act also stops Georgia’s inhumane ban on providing food or water to people standing in line to cast ballots. There were 10-hour lines in Georgia last year.Meanwhile, absentee voting will become available universally. States such as Georgia have been reducing the number of drop-box locations, but the bill will set a floor on absentee ballot drop-boxes, more than tripling the number of locations in counties in and around Atlanta – where 51% of the population is black. And to help voters like Laura Roundine, the act allows tribes to designate local buildings where anyone can drop off a ballot.The bill also helps level the campaign finance playing field. It requires disclosures of “dark money” and creates an option for states to implement “small donor” funding for candidates who choose it, with a sixfold match for contributions under $200.There are curbs on gerrymandering and on “fraudits” like the one currently under way in Arizona.To combat Republicans’ attempts to manipulate election results in states such as Georgia by imposing partisan vote-counters, the act allows removals of election officials only for misconduct and gives them a right to sue for wrongful removal. As Tom Stoppard, the Czech-born playwright who escaped from Nazism, once put it: “It’s not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting.”The right to vote protects all our other freedoms. Electing responsible public officials helps to free us from Covid-19, to reduce child poverty, to expand infrastructure, to ensure a living wage. The 2020 election of two Georgia senators in January 2021 allowed the Senate to pass bills giving families $1,400 in pandemic relief checks, expanding unemployment payments, and creating temporary protections from eviction.What was the main compromise that Senator Manchin engineered to obtain Republican support? States that already required voters to validate their identities may continue to do so. But now a utility bill, bank statement or school ID will be accepted as ID – rather than only a driver’s license, which some voters don’t have. That is progress.Because Manchin is sponsoring the new Senate compromise, it has the best chance of any bill to secure his critical swing vote to revise Senate filibuster rules. Multiple pathways are on the table, including restoring the “talking filibuster”. If senior senators must stand and deliver for hours, a filibuster would be short-lived.Ultimately, passage of the bill depends on the people. A 15 September poll by ALG Research shows that a whopping 72% of the American public supports policies in the Freedom to Vote Act. Citizens should write, email and phone their representatives in support.As Howard Zinn, the activist and the author of the bestselling People’s History of the United States, put it: “Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can quietly become a power no government can suppress, a power that can transform the world.”Our freedom depends on exercising that power now.
    Dennis Aftergut is a former federal prosecutor and chief assistant city attorney who argued an elections law case at the US supreme court. He is currently of counsel at the Renne Public Law Group in San Francisco
    TopicsUS politicsOpinionUS CongressElectoral reformcommentReuse this content More