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      Democrats, Voting Rights Are Not the Problem

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      With their legislative agenda stymied for now, Democrats reportedly are hoping to take another crack at election reform. The Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, and President Biden have both identified voting rights legislation as a top priority.But the approach that Democrats are contemplating is largely misdirected and risks further undermining public confidence in elections without achieving much of practical significance.There is a narrower set of reforms that could actually solve some of the very real problems with elections in this country — and attract support from both parties.It would begin from the fact that the most intense concerns about election administration on both the left and the right increasingly involve not voting itself but what happens after the voting is done.Some Republicans insist that the process of counting and certifying the vote in some states was corrupt in 2020. There is no evidence — none — to support any specific claims on this front. But greater care and transparency about postelection administration would serve us well regardless and could render such claims easier to test and refute in ways that would build public confidence.Some Democrats insist that Republicans are preparing to manipulate the certification process in elections in some states. So far, this mostly looks like Trump supporters running for offices with authority over election administration, which is no crime in a democracy. But requiring accountability and transparency and setting some boundaries on what can happen after an election would help ease these concerns and avert the dangers that Democrats have warned about.And all of us saw just a year ago that Congress’s role in certifying presidential elections could be clarified and rid of opportunities for confusion and mischief.Reforms focused on these themes would be a more productive path than what we’ve seen so far, which are efforts focused mostly on voting itself — on who can cast a ballot, when and by what means.Democrats want fewer constraints and more time for more people to vote in more ways. They say that broader participation is essential to a stronger democracy and that restrictions on some modes of voting amount to suppression. They also assume that higher turnout will help the left win more elections, and some of the practices they want to enshrine (like ballot harvesting, in which other people collect ballots for delivery to polling places), frankly, reek of the corrupt practices that political machines have long employed.Republicans want more safeguards and boundaries around voting. They say that greater security is essential to making sure only eligible people vote and that long voting periods and different methods to cast ballots risk enabling fraud and distorting the meaning of elections. They also assume that lower turnout will help the right win more elections, and some of the restrictions they want to impose (like limiting Sunday voting), frankly, reek of the racist practices long used to deny the vote to Black Americans and other minorities.If we take both parties’ most high-minded arguments at face value, they are worried about problems that barely exist. It is easier than ever to vote: Registration has gotten simpler in recent decades, and most Americans have more time to vote and more ways to do so. Voter turnout is at historic highs, and Black and white voting rates now rise and fall together. These trends long predate the pandemic, and efforts to roll back some state Covid-era accommodations seem unlikely to meaningfully affect turnout.Meanwhile, voter fraud is vanishingly rare. The most thorough database of cases, maintained by one of the staunchest conservative defenders of election integrity, suggests a rate of fraud so low, it could not meaningfully affect outcomes.Even judged by the parties’ more cynical motives, their reform priorities don’t make sense. It is just not true that higher turnout helps Democrats and hurts Republicans. In their 2020 book “The Turnout Myth,” the political scientists Daron R. Shaw and John R. Petrocik review half a century of evidence decisively refuting that common misperception. That’s not to say that turnout doesn’t shape particular election outcomes, but it doesn’t systematically benefit one party or the other.The parties’ emphasis on voting itself also isn’t conducive to bipartisan action, which is essential to public trust. Democrats in Washington should see that using one of the narrowest congressional majorities in American history to nationalize election rules in ways opposed by every Republican official — even if it’s well intentioned — would undermine public confidence in elections. Republicans should recognize that state laws restricting the times and methods of voting over the objections of every elected Democrat will be perceived as an attack on the voting rights of Democrats, even if they aren’t.Each party is telling its supporters not to trust our elections unless its favored bills are passed while implicitly persuading its opponents that those bills are illegitimate and dangerous. The result amounts to an assault on public trust that’s worse than any actual problem with American elections.That is why Democrats and Republicans should turn to narrowly tailored legislation focused on postelection administration. Such a bill could, for instance, limit the ability of state officials to remove local election administrators without cause, and prohibit the harassment of election workers (as happened, for example, in Georgia after the 2020 election). It could mandate a mechanism for postelection audits while requiring a clear standard for rendering election results final.It could provide for uniform transparency procedures and codify the role of election monitors. It could prescribe an oath for all election administrators committing to transparently and impartially obey the law. And it could modernize and simplify the Electoral Count Act of 1887, which still governs Congress’s and the vice president’s roles in certifying presidential elections.Some of these ideas are already included in the Freedom to Vote Act, sponsored by Democratic senators, including Joe Manchin. But that bill also includes extraneous measures (like changes in voter registration and eligibility, campaign finance and redistricting) that render it unacceptable to Republicans. A less sweeping bill focused on addressing some shared concerns about what happens after the people vote would stand a better chance of attracting bipartisan champions.Our debates about election reform this past year have been misdirected in ways that have rendered them more divisive than they have to be. By beginning from shared concerns and real dangers and from a proper understanding of the strengths of our system and not just its weaknesses, Congress can do better in the year to come.Yuval Levin is a contributing Opinion writer and is the editor of National Affairs and the director of social, cultural and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of “A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream.”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. More

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      The Republican Party Is Succeeding Because We Are Not a True Democracy

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      The Jan. 6 attack would not have happened in a genuine democracy.The attack was the most acute symptom — so far — of the political crisis that Donald Trump incited by refusing to admit defeat in the 2020 election. But the roots of the crisis run deep into the undemocratic features of our constitutional system.The arcane scheme that Mr. Trump’s lawyers hatched to disrupt congressional certification of the vote and perhaps persuade Republican state legislatures to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in states like Pennsylvania was conceivable only because the Electoral College splinters presidential elections into separate contests in each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia and skews the totals toward small states. In a simple system of majority rule, Mr. Biden’s thumping margin of more than seven million votes would have been the last word. For that matter, so would Hillary Clinton’s national margin of nearly three million votes in 2016: Mr. Trump would not have had a 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue address in which to barricade himself in 2020.Would Mr. Trump’s big lie about election fraud have sent the rioters to the Capitol anyway, even without his lawyers and fixers trying to overturn the results? Maybe. But there would have been no constitutional machinery to jam. And even the big lie received a huge constitutional assist. Thanks to the Electoral College, Mr. Trump could have tied Mr. Biden and forced the election into the House of Representatives by flipping just 43,000 votes in three close states, a gap narrow enough that any number of toxic fables can claim to bridge it.At a more basic level, today’s Republican Party succeeds only because the Electoral College, the Senate and the Supreme Court all tilt in its favor. That system has handed conservatives a 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court, despite the fact that only one Republican has won the presidential popular vote after 1988. A party doesn’t have to persuade majorities that it has the best vision for the country. It only has to persuade a selective minority that the other side is a mortal threat. Its grasp on power may be too tenuous for the party to govern effectively, but it has offered conservatives a fine perch to weaken economic and environmental regulation, appoint conservative judges and launch attacks on the democratic system itself.In a more democratic system, the Republican Party’s extreme elements would have been sent packing long before they stormed the Capitol because they couldn’t muster enough votes to win a national election. Instead, they have perfected minority rule as a path to political success. An antidemocratic system has bred an antidemocratic party. The remedy is to democratize our so-called democracy.James Madison boasted that the Constitution achieved “the total exclusion of the people, in their collective capacity.” Its elaborate political mechanics reflect the elite dislike and mistrust of majority rule that Madison voiced when he wrote, “Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.” Madison’s condescension has never gone away. Walter Lippmann, perhaps the most prominent intellectual of the short American Century, reckoned that citizens were ignorant, confused and emotional. Democracy brought “an intensification of feeling and a degradation of significance” to whatever it touched. If Madison and Lippmann could have seen the “QAnon Shaman” break into the Capitol, then meander around like a tourist whose phone has lost its signal, they would have muttered, “This is what democracy looks like.”Democracy receded from the popular imagination during the blandly optimistic decades that followed the Cold War’s end around 1989. American leaders predicted that the world would inevitably come to embrace some combination of elections, capitalism and personal freedom. Serious thinking about what democracy meant, and what could threaten it, seemed more like intellectual history than practical politics. We live in the shipwreck of that unearned optimism.Jan. 6 and the four years before it were a forcible reminder that democracy is a task, not a birthright. Having rediscovered that we must take democracy seriously, we should now put it first in our politics.Majorities of the people, not the Electoral College, should be able to pick the president and decide who controls the House and Senate. All who make their lives in the United States — including the incarcerated, people convicted of felonies and noncitizens — should be allowed to vote.This might sound alarming to inland Republican voters who imagine themselves besieged by a permanent coastal majority. But in a working democracy, there are no permanent majorities or minorities. Forging partnerships in a truly democratic system, inland conservatives would soon find new allies — just not ones determined to break democracy itself.Some of these changes probably require amending the Constitution. Hard changes have come through constitutional amendment before: Shortly before World War I, activists successfully pressed state legislatures to ratify an amendment giving up their power to choose U.S. senators. Maybe we can revive mass movements for amendments, starting with one that would make the amendment process itself more democratic. If the public supports a constitutional amendment to limit money in politics, restrict gerrymandering or enshrine a core abortion right, a committed majority should be able to say what our fundamental law is by popular vote, rather than having to go through the current, complicated process of ratifying amendments through state legislatures or dozens of constitutional conventions.This may sound wild-eyed. But it would not always have. James Wilson, one of the most learned and thoughtful of the Constitution’s framers, believed that as a matter of principle, “the people” may change the Constitution “whenever and however they please. This is a right of which no positive institution can ever deprive them.” Even Madison conceded that if we thought of the Constitution as a national charter rather than a federal arrangement among sovereign states, “the supreme and ultimate authority” would reside with the majority, which had the power to “alter or abolish its established government.” It is hard to deny that, since 1789, the Constitution has become a national charter in the minds of most Americans.Do we really think that establishing fundamental law is too much for us, something only revered (or reviled) ancestors could do? More likely we are afraid of one another and the decisions majorities would make. Thinkers like Madison associated democracy with majority tyranny, but history tells a different story. Even our terribly flawed legacy is rich in examples of majoritarian emancipation: New Deal programs, the Civil Rights Acts and the Voting Rights Act and Medicare. Majorities can change the world for the better, when they have the chance. Giving one another that chance, over and over, is how equals share a country.But are we willing to give, and take, that chance? Maybe more than fearing majority tyranny, we suspect that the country is already too divided and mistrustful to make basic choices together at all. One thing Democrats and Republicans share is the belief that, to save the country, the other side must not be allowed to win. Every election is an existential crisis. In our current political climate, any proposal to democratize the system would immediately be coded as partisan, and half the country would reject it from the start. In such an anxious and suspicious country, the current system can be seen as a kind of peace treaty. Maybe that was what Mr. Biden meant when, just after taking his oath of office two weeks after the Capitol riot, in a Washington guarded by 26,000 troops, he praised “the resilience of our Constitution.”But the Constitution is not keeping the peace; it is fostering crises. Far from being resilient, it is adding to our brittleness.Resilience would come from a shift to more constructive politics. Majorities should be able to choose parties and leaders to improve their everyday lives, starting with child care, family leave, health care and the dignified work that still evades many even at a time when employers are complaining of difficulty hiring workers and there is upward pressure on wages after decades of stagnation. Democracy matters not because there is something magical about 50-percent-plus-one in any given vote but because it gives people the power to decide how they will live together. If we don’t claim that power, the market, a court or a minority government will always be pleased to take it off our hands.Aristotle called democracy “the rule of the poor,” and he was onto something. Democracy, when it works, puts the ultimate political power in the hands of the people who work, worry and wish they could promise their loved ones more than they can. It gives us back a bit of our world.Of course, we must not make the perfect the enemy of the good. Our Constitution deserves to be defended against lies about election fraud and antidemocratic schemes to double down on minority rule. But it also deserves cleareyed efforts to make it better.If Jan. 6 was a symptom of a crisis of democracy, the best answer we can give is more democracy. We might not be capable of that, in which case the future is bleak. But the only way to find out is by trying.Democracy’s vitality is not handed down from on high. It comes from actually ruling and being ruled in turn and learning to live with both. It comes from the constant search for new majorities, new coalitions, new ways to avoid disaster and even make life better. That is how we learn to believe, with Walt Whitman, that “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” The way to save democracy is to make it more real.Jedediah Britton-Purdy is a professor at Columbia Law School and the author of six books, most recently, “This Land Is Our Land: The Struggle for a New Commonwealth.” His next book, on American democracy, will be published this fall.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. More

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      Voting Rights Should Not Be the Focus of Election Reform

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      With their legislative agenda stymied for now, Democrats reportedly are hoping to take another crack at election reform. The Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, and President Biden have both identified voting rights legislation as a top priority.But the approach that Democrats are contemplating is largely misdirected and risks further undermining public confidence in elections without achieving much of practical significance.There is a narrower set of reforms that could actually solve some of the very real problems with elections in this country — and attract support from both parties.It would begin from the fact that the most intense concerns about election administration on both the left and the right increasingly involve not voting itself but what happens after the voting is done.Some Republicans insist that the process of counting and certifying the vote in some states was corrupt in 2020. There is no evidence — none — to support any specific claims on this front. But greater care and transparency about postelection administration would serve us well regardless and could render such claims easier to test and refute in ways that would build public confidence.Some Democrats insist that Republicans are now preparing to manipulate the certification process in future elections in some states. So far this mostly looks like Trump supporters running for offices with authority over election administration, which is no crime in a democracy. But requiring accountability and transparency and setting some boundaries on what can happen after an election would help ease these concerns and avert the dangers that Democrats have warned about.And all of us saw just a year ago that Congress’s role in certifying presidential elections could be clarified and rid of opportunities for confusion and mischief.Reforms focused on these themes would be a more productive path than what we’ve seen so far, which are efforts focused mostly on voting itself — on who can cast a ballot, when, and by what means.Democrats want fewer constraints and more time for more people to vote in more ways. They say broader participation is essential to a stronger democracy and that restrictions on some modes of voting amount to suppression. They also assume that higher turnout will help the left win more elections, and some of the practices they want to enshrine (like ballot harvesting, in which other people collect ballots for delivery to polling places) frankly reek of the corrupt practices that political machines have long employed.Republicans want more safeguards and boundaries around voting. They say greater security is essential to making sure only eligible people vote and that long voting periods and different methods to cast ballots risk enabling fraud and distorting the meaning of elections. They also assume that lower turnout will help the right win more elections, and some of the restrictions they want to impose (like limiting Sunday voting) frankly reek of the racist practices long used to deny the vote to Black Americans and other minorities.If we take both parties’ most high-minded arguments at face value, they are worried about problems that barely exist. It is easier than ever to vote: Registration has gotten simpler in recent decades, and most Americans have more time to vote and more ways to do so. Voter turnout is at historic highs, and Black and white voting rates now rise and fall together. These trends long predate the pandemic, and efforts to roll back some state Covid-era accommodations seem unlikely to meaningfully affect turnout.Meanwhile, voter fraud is vanishingly rare. The most thorough database of cases, maintained by one of the staunchest conservative defenders of election integrity, suggests a rate of fraud so low it could not meaningfully affect outcomes.Even judged by the parties’ more cynical motives, their reform priorities don’t make sense. It is just not true that higher turnout helps Democrats and hurts Republicans. In their 2020 book “The Turnout Myth,” the political scientists Daron R. Shaw and John R. Petrocik review half a century of evidence decisively refuting that common misperception. That’s not to say that turnout doesn’t shape particular election outcomes, but it doesn’t systematically benefit one party or the other.The parties’ emphasis on voting itself also doesn’t lend itself to bipartisan action, which is essential to public trust. Democrats in Washington should see that using one of the narrowest congressional majorities in American history to nationalize election rules in every state in ways opposed by every Republican official — even if it’s well intentioned — would undermine public confidence in elections. Republicans should recognize that state laws restricting the times and methods of voting over the objections of every elected Democrat will be perceived as an attack on the voting rights of Democrats, even if they aren’t.Each party is telling its supporters not to trust our elections unless its favored bills are passed while implicitly persuading its opponents that those bills are illegitimate and dangerous. The result amounts to an assault on public trust that’s worse than any actual problem with American elections.That is why Democrats and Republicans should turn to narrowly tailored legislation focused on postelection administration. Such a bill could, for instance, limit the ability of state officials to remove local election administrators without cause, and prohibit the harassment of election workers (as happened, for example, in Georgia after the 2020 election). It could mandate a mechanism for postelection audits while requiring a clear standard for rendering election results final.It could provide for uniform transparency procedures and codify the role of election monitors. It could prescribe an oath for all election administrators committing to transparently and impartially obey the law. And it could modernize and simplify the Electoral Count Act of 1887, which still governs Congress’s and the vice president’s roles in certifying presidential elections.Some of these ideas are already included in the Freedom to Vote Act, sponsored by Democratic senators including Joe Manchin. But that bill also includes extraneous measures (like changes in voter registration and eligibility, campaign finance and redistricting) that render it unacceptable to Republicans. A less sweeping bill focused on addressing some shared concerns about what happens after the people vote would stand a better chance of attracting bipartisan champions.Our debates about election reform this past year have been misdirected in ways that have rendered them more divisive than they have to be. By beginning from shared concerns and real dangers, and from a proper understanding of the strengths of our system and not just its weaknesses, Congress can do better in the year to come.Yuval Levin is a contributing Opinion writer for The New York Times and is the director of social, cultural and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute and the editor of National Affairs. He is the author of “A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream.”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. More

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      Jan. 6 Panel Faces Difficult Questions as Anniversary of Capitol Riot Approaches

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      Decisions about subpoenas and a Supreme Court ruling loom as lawmakers, staff members and Capitol employees plan to commemorate the day.WASHINGTON — The anniversary of the Jan. 6 riot arrives this week with the congressional committee investigating the attack confronting a series of difficult questions, including how forcefully to flex its subpoena power and whether the Supreme Court will stymie a major element of its inquiry.As the nine-member panel continues to examine the events leading up to the worst attack on Congress in centuries, it is waiting to see whether the Supreme Court will refuse a request from former President Donald J. Trump to block the committee’s access to White House records related to the riot. The committee also has not ruled out moving to subpoena members of Congress, or Mr. Trump and former Vice President Mike Pence.Thursday will mark a year since a mob of Trump supporters stormed the building, determined to disrupt the formal certification of President Biden’s electoral victory. At least seven people died in connection with the riot, dozens more were injured and hundreds of workers in the Capitol were shaken and traumatized, further fracturing an increasingly partisan Congress.The committee, aiming to release a final report before the November midterm elections, is planning for a more public stage of its investigation in the coming weeks as lawmakers work to trace the planning of the attack and expand the scope of the investigation. Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California and a member of the panel, said on Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that public hearings could begin “in a matter of weeks, if not a couple of months from now.”But as the inquiry continues, the first anniversary will draw even more attention as lawmakers, staff members, Capitol employees and journalists commemorate the day. Both Mr. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are scheduled to give speeches marking the anniversary.While the House is not scheduled to return for legislative work until Jan. 10, Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California has mapped out events for lawmakers to participate in on Thursday, either in Washington or virtually from their districts, in what she described as “an observance of reflection, remembrance and recommitment.”The House will hold a moment of silence before Dr. Carla Hayden, the librarian of Congress, moderates a discussion with historians “to establish and preserve the narrative of Jan. 6,” Ms. Pelosi wrote in a letter to her caucus. Lawmakers will give speeches reflecting on the day, and lawmakers will hold an early evening prayer vigil on the center steps of the Capitol.Understand the U.S. Capitol RiotOn Jan. 6, 2021, a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol.What Happened: Here’s the most complete picture to date of what happened — and why.Timeline of Jan. 6: A presidential rally turned into a Capitol rampage in a critical two-hour time period. Here’s how.Key Takeaways: Here are some of the major revelations from The Times’s riot footage analysis.Death Toll: Five people died in the riot. Here’s what we know about them.Decoding the Riot Iconography: What do the symbols, slogans and images on display during the violence really mean?Unlike the House, the Senate is scheduled to be in session this week as Democrats continue confirming Biden administration nominees and seek to revive their party’s stalled legislative agenda. Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, is expected to invoke the riot and efforts by Trump loyalists to overturn the 2020 election as he pushes to pass a voting rights overhaul and try to change Senate rules to overcome a Republican filibuster against that legislation.The Senate Rules Committee will hold an oversight hearing with J. Thomas Manger, the Capitol Police chief, on Wednesday. On Thursday, however, it is likely that some senators may be in Atlanta to attend an afternoon memorial service for former Senator Johnny Isakson, a Georgia Republican who died in December.Some lawmakers have questioned whether it was appropriate for Congress to be in session, given the lingering trauma from the day.“It was a sad day in our nation’s history, and a terrible day, and I don’t think bringing a lot of attention to the day is a great idea,” said Senator Susan Collins of Maine, one of seven Republicans who voted to convict Mr. Trump after he was impeached for his role in inciting the mob that day. “For some of the staffers,” she added, “for some of the Capitol Police officers, it brings back a lot of trauma, and I just think it’d be better if we aren’t here.”A majority of Republicans, however, have sought to downplay the attack. They have largely refused to acknowledge their party’s complicity in failing to quash Mr. Trump’s lies about the election and cut ties with the former president, who continues to peddle conspiracy theories rather than accept his electoral loss.Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, called former President Donald J. Trump’s inaction on Jan. 6 “a dereliction of duty.”Jason Andrew for The New York Times“Our party has to choose,” Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the vice chairwoman of the Jan. 6 committee and one of two Republican panel members, said Sunday on “Face the Nation.” “We can either be loyal to Donald Trump or we can be loyal to the Constitution, but we cannot be both. And right now there are far too many Republicans who are trying to enable the former president.”In a series of separate televised appearances on Sunday, Ms. Cheney and Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the committee’s chairman, pointedly did not rule out making criminal referrals to the Justice Department.Key Figures in the Jan. 6 InquiryCard 1 of 10The House investigation. More

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      Every Day Is Jan. 6 Now

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      One year after from the smoke and broken glass, the mock gallows and the very real bloodshed of that awful day, it is tempting to look back and imagine that we can, in fact, simply look back. To imagine that what happened on Jan. 6, 2021 — a deadly riot at the seat of American government, incited by a defeated president amid a last-ditch effort to thwart the transfer of power to his successor — was horrifying but that it is in the past and that we as a nation have moved on.This is an understandable impulse. After four years of chaos, cruelty and incompetence, culminating in a pandemic and the once-unthinkable trauma of Jan. 6, most Americans were desperate for some peace and quiet.On the surface, we have achieved that. Our political life seems more or less normal these days, as the president pardons turkeys and Congress quarrels over spending bills. But peel back a layer, and things are far from normal. Jan. 6 is not in the past; it is every day.It is regular citizens who threaten election officials and other public servants, who ask, “When can we use the guns?” and who vow to murder politicians who dare to vote their conscience. It is Republican lawmakers scrambling to make it harder for people to vote and easier to subvert their will if they do. It is Donald Trump who continues to stoke the flames of conflict with his rampant lies and limitless resentments and whose twisted version of reality still dominates one of the nation’s two major political parties.In short, the Republic faces an existential threat from a movement that is openly contemptuous of democracy and has shown that it is willing to use violence to achieve its ends. No self-governing society can survive such a threat by denying that it exists. Rather, survival depends on looking back and forward at the same time.Truly grappling with the threat ahead means taking full account of the terror of that day a year ago. Thanks largely to the dogged work of a bipartisan committee in the House of Representatives, this reckoning is underway. We know now that the violence and mayhem broadcast live around the world was only the most visible and visceral part of the effort to overturn the election. The effort extended all the way into the Oval Office, where Mr. Trump and his allies plotted a constitutional self-coup.We know now that top Republican lawmakers and right-wing media figures privately understood how dangerous the riot was and pleaded with Mr. Trump to call a halt to it, even as they publicly pretended otherwise. We know now that those who may have critical information about the planning and execution of the attack are refusing to cooperate with Congress, even if it means being charged with criminal contempt.For now, the committee’s work continues. It has scheduled a series of public hearings in the new year to lay out these and other details, and it plans to release a full report of its findings before the midterm elections — after which, should Republicans regain control of the House as expected, the committee will undoubtedly be dissolved.This is where looking forward comes in. Over the past year, Republican lawmakers in 41 states have been trying to advance the goals of the Jan. 6 rioters — not by breaking laws but by making them. Hundreds of bills have been proposed and nearly three dozen laws have been passed that empower state legislatures to sabotage their own elections and overturn the will of their voters, according to a running tally by a nonpartisan consortium of pro-democracy organizations.Some bills would change the rules to make it easier for lawmakers to reject the votes of their citizens if they don’t like the outcome. Others replace professional election officials with partisan actors who have a vested interest in seeing their preferred candidate win. Yet more attempt to criminalize human errors by election officials, in some cases even threatening prison.Many of these laws are being proposed and passed in crucial battleground states like Arizona, Wisconsin, Georgia and Pennsylvania. In the aftermath of the 2020 election, the Trump campaign targeted voting results in all these states, suing for recounts or intimidating officials into finding “missing” votes. The effort failed, thanks primarily to the professionalism and integrity of election officials. Many of those officials have since been stripped of their power or pushed out of office and replaced by people who openly say the last election was fraudulent.Thus the Capitol riot continues in statehouses across the country, in a bloodless, legalized form that no police officer can arrest and that no prosecutor can try in court.This isn’t the first time state legislatures have tried to wrest control of electoral votes from their own people, nor is it the first time that the dangers of such a ploy have been pointed out. In 1891, President Benjamin Harrison warned Congress of the risk that such a “trick” could determine the outcome of a presidential election.The Constitution guarantees to all Americans a republican form of government, Harrison said. “The essential features of such a government are the right of the people to choose their own officers” and to have their votes counted equally in making that choice. “Our chief national danger,” he continued, is “the overthrow of majority control by the suppression or perversion of popular suffrage.” If a state legislature were to succeed in substituting its own will for that of its voters, “it is not too much to say that the public peace might be seriously and widely endangered.”A healthy, functioning political party faces its electoral losses by assessing what went wrong and redoubling its efforts to appeal to more voters the next time. The Republican Party, like authoritarian movements the world over, has shown itself recently to be incapable of doing this. Party leaders’ rhetoric suggests they see it as the only legitimate governing power and thus portrays anyone else’s victory as the result of fraud — hence the foundational falsehood that spurred the Jan. 6 attack, that Joe Biden didn’t win the election.“The thing that’s most concerning is that it has endured in the face of all evidence,” said Representative Adam Kinzinger, one of the vanishingly few Republicans in Congress who remain committed to empirical reality and representative democracy. “And I’ve gotten to wonder if there is actually any evidence that would ever change certain people’s minds.”The answer, for now, appears to be no. Polling finds that the overwhelming majority of Republicans believe that President Biden was not legitimately elected and that about one-third approve of using violence to achieve political goals. Put those two numbers together, and you have a recipe for extreme danger.Political violence is not an inevitable outcome. Republican leaders could help by being honest with their voters and combating the extremists in their midst. Throughout American history, party leaders, from Abraham Lincoln to Margaret Chase Smith to John McCain, have stood up for the union and democracy first, to their everlasting credit.Democrats aren’t helpless, either. They hold unified power in Washington, for the last time in what may be a long time. Yet they have so far failed to confront the urgency of this moment — unwilling or unable to take action to protect elections from subversion and sabotage. Blame Senator Joe Manchin or Senator Kyrsten Sinema, but the only thing that matters in the end is whether you get it done. For that reason, Mr. Biden and other leading Democrats should make use of what remaining power they have to end the filibuster for voting rights legislation, even if nothing else.Whatever happens in Washington, in the months and years to come, Americans of all stripes who value their self-government must mobilize at every level — not simply once every four years but today and tomorrow and the next day — to win elections and help protect the basic functions of democracy. If people who believe in conspiracy theories can win, so can those who live in the reality-based world.Above all, we should stop underestimating the threat facing the country. Countless times over the past six years, up to and including the events of Jan. 6, Mr. Trump and his allies openly projected their intent to do something outrageous or illegal or destructive. Every time, the common response was that they weren’t serious or that they would never succeed. How many times will we have to be proved wrong before we take it seriously? The sooner we do, the sooner we might hope to salvage a democracy that is in grave danger.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. More

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      Michigan’s New Congressional Maps Undo Years of Gerrymandering

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      A citizen ballot initiative took redistricting out of the hands of partisan legislators. The result: competitive political districts — and an example of how to push back against hyperpartisanship.One of the country’s most gerrymandered political maps has suddenly been replaced by one of the fairest.A decade after Michigan Republicans gave themselves seemingly impregnable majorities in the state Legislature by drawing districts that heavily favored their party, a newly created independent commission approved maps late Tuesday that create districts so competitive that Democrats have a fighting chance of recapturing the State Senate for the first time since 1984.The work of the new commission, which includes Democrats, Republicans and independents and was established through a citizen ballot initiative, stands in sharp contrast to the type of hyperpartisan extreme gerrymandering that has swept much of the country, exacerbating political polarization — and it may highlight a potential path to undoing such gerrymandering.With lawmakers excluded from the mapmaking process, Michigan’s new districts will much more closely reflect the overall partisan makeup of the hotly contested battleground state.“Michigan’s a jump ball, and this is a jump-ball map,” said Michael Li, a senior counsel who focuses on redistricting at the Brennan Center for Justice. “There’s a lot of competition in this map, which is what you would expect in a state like Michigan.”The commission’s three new maps — for Congress, the State House and the State Senate — restore a degree of fairness, but there were some notable criticisms. All of the maps still have a slight Republican advantage, in part because Democratic voters in the state are mostly concentrated in densely populated areas. The map for the State House also splits more than half of the state’s counties into several districts, despite redistricting guidelines that call for keeping neighboring communities together.The maps may also face a legal challenge from Black voters in the Detroit area, to whom the commission tried to give more opportunities for representation by unpacking them, or spreading them among more legislative districts.Redistricting at a GlanceEvery 10 years, each state in the U.S is required to redraw the boundaries of their congressional and state legislative districts in a process known as redistricting.Redistricting, Explained: Answers to your most pressing questions about redistricting and gerrymandering.Breaking Down Texas’s Map: How redistricting efforts in Texas are working to make Republican districts even more red.G.O.P.’s Heavy Edge: Republicans are poised to capture enough seats to take the House in 2022, thanks to gerrymandering alone.Legal Options Dwindle: Persuading judges to undo skewed political maps was never easy. A shifting judicial landscape is making it harder.Detroit’s State Senate delegation will jump to nine members from five, and its State House delegation to 15 representatives from nine. But local Black elected officials and civil rights groups contend that while the intention may have been noble, the result actually dilutes Black voting strength, not only in general elections but also in primaries, in which elections for Black legislators are almost always decided.The reduced percentages of Black voters in some of the new districts may prevent candidates from winning primary elections on the strength of the Black vote alone, those critics say.“The goal of creating partisan fairness cannot so negatively impact Black communities as to erase us from the space,” said Adam Hollier, a state senator from the Detroit area. “They think that they are unpacking, because that is the narrative that they hear from across the country, without looking at what that means in the city of Detroit.”Republicans were also discussing possible challenges to the new maps.“We are evaluating all options to take steps necessary to defend the voices silenced by this commission,” Gustavo Portela, a Michigan G.O.P. spokesman, said in a statement Wednesday, without elaborating on whose voices he meant.The G.O.P. advantage in Michigan’s Legislature has held solid for years even as Democrats carried the state in presidential elections and won races for governor and U.S. Senate. In 2014, Senator Gary Peters, a Democrat, won the seat formerly held by Carl Levin by more than 13 percentage points. Yet in the same year, Republicans in the State Senate expanded their supermajority, winning 27 of 38 seats.So great a divergence between statewide and legislative elections is often a telltale sign of a gerrymandered map. And a lawsuit in 2018 unearthed emails in which Republicans boasted about packing “Dem garbage” into fewer districts and ensuring Republican advantages “in 2012 and beyond.”But the new State Senate map would create 20 seats that President Biden would have carried in 2020 and 18 that former President Donald J. Trump would have carried, giving Democrats new hopes of competitiveness.The new maps offer no guarantee that Democrats will win either chamber, however. And in a strong year for the G.O.P., which 2022 may be, Republicans could retain their advantage in the Legislature and could also come away with a majority of the state’s new 13-seat congressional delegation.The congressional map includes three tossup seats where the 2020 presidential margin was less than five points, and two more seats that could be competitive in a wave year, with presidential margins of less than 10 points. Two current Democratic representatives, Haley Stevens and Andy Levin, were drawn into the same district, setting up a competitive primary in the 11th District. Both declared their intention to run on Tuesday.The State House will also feature at least 20 competitive districts.Preserving such competition, election experts say, is one of the key goals in redistricting reform.“This is the quintessential success story of redistricting,” said Sam Wang, director of the Princeton Gerrymandering Project. “These maps treated the two parties, Democrats and Republicans, about as fairly as you could ever imagine a map being. In all three cases, whoever gets the most votes statewide is likely to control the chamber or the delegation. And there’s competition in all three maps.”Understand How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More

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      Voting Rights Tracker: What to Know About the U.S. Elections Fight

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      Since the 2020 election, Republicans have pursued a host of new voting restrictions across the country. Here’s where things stand.The current battle over voting rights — who gets to vote, how votes are cast and counted, who oversees the process — has turned what was once the humdrum machine room of United States democracy into a central partisan battlefield with enormous stakes for the future of American democracy.Since the 2020 election, and spurred in large part by former President Donald J. Trump’s oft-repeated lie that a second term was stolen from him, the Republican Party has made a concerted new effort to restrict voting and give itself more power over the mechanics of casting and counting ballots.In 2021, Republican-led legislatures in dozens of states enacted wide-ranging laws overhauling their election systems, and G.O.P. lawmakers are planning a new wave of such laws in 2022.Here is a quick rundown of those efforts, Democratic pushback and why it all matters.Why are voting rights an issue now?The 2020 election saw a sea change in voting habits. Driven largely by the pandemic, millions of Americans embraced voting early in person and voting by mail.Forty-three percent of voters cast ballots by mail in 2020, making it the most popular method, and 26 percent voted early in person, according to the Census Bureau. Just 21 percent voted on Election Day.Democrats in particular flocked to the two forms of early voting, far outpacing Republicans in some states — a trend that raised alarms among Republicans.Mr. Trump denounced voting by mail for months during the campaign. Once defeated, he attacked mailed-in ballots in hopes of overturning the election’s result.Since then, Republican-led legislatures have justified new restrictions on voting by citing a lack of public confidence in elections.What are Republicans trying to do?Broadly, the party is taking a two-pronged approach: Imposing additional restrictions on voting (especially mail voting), and giving Republican-controlled state legislatures greater control over the administration of elections.Republicans have often sought to limit absentee-ballot drop boxes by claiming without evidence that they are susceptible to fraud. Other new laws tighten identification requirements for voting by mail, bar election officials from proactively sending out ballot applications or shorten the time frame during which absentee ballots can be requested.Some legislatures have also taken aim at how elections are overseen, stripping election officials like secretaries of state of some of their powers, exerting more authority over county and local election officials or pursuing partisan reviews of election results.In the 2020 presidential election, Georgia was decided by fewer than 13,000 votes.Elijah Nouvelage/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhy are these legislative efforts important?They have fueled widespread doubts about the integrity of American elections and brought intense partisan gamesmanship to parts of the democratic process that once relied largely on orderly routine and good faith.Some are also likely to affect voters of color disproportionately, echoing the country’s long history of racial discrimination at the polls, where Black citizens once faced barriers to voting including poll taxes, literacy tests, intimidation and impossible hurdles, like guessing the number of butter beans in a jar.The newest restrictions are not so draconian, but could have outsize effects in racially diverse, densely populated areas. In Georgia, the four big counties at the core of metropolitan Atlanta — Fulton, Cobb, DeKalb and Gwinnett — will have no more than 23 drop boxes in future elections, down from the 94 available in 2020.The stakes are enormous: In battleground states like Georgia and Arizona, where the 2020 presidential margins were less than 13,000 votes, even a slight curtailment of turnout could tilt the outcome.Are there more extreme efforts?Yes. In Arkansas, Republicans enacted new legislation that allows a state board of election commissioners — composed of six Republicans and one Democrat — to investigate and “institute corrective action” when issues arise at any stage of the voting process, from registration to the casting and counting of ballots to the certification of elections.In Texas, Republicans tried to make it easier for the Legislature to overturn an election, but were held up when Democratic lawmakers staged a last-second walkout, and later dropped the effort.Many of the most extreme bills have not made it past state legislatures, with Republicans often choosing to dial back their farthest-reaching proposals.How are Democrats pushing back?Through Congress and the courts, but with limited success.In Congress, Democrats have focused their efforts on two sweeping bills, the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. But Republicans in the 50-50 Senate have blocked both. That leaves many Democrats pressing for a change to the Senate’s filibuster rules, but some moderates, including Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, are opposed.The Justice Department has filed lawsuits challenging Republican voting laws in Georgia and Texas, and has also doubled the size of its civil rights division, which oversees voting litigation.Still, any major judicial ruling on a recently enacted voting law is unlikely to arrive before the 2022 elections.Can the courts do anything about voting laws?Yes — but far less than they once could.The Supreme Court has greatly weakened the Voting Rights Act over the last decade, deeply cutting into the Justice Department’s authority over voting and giving states new latitude to impose restrictions. Voting-rights advocates can still challenge voting laws in federal court on other grounds, including under the 14th and 15th Amendments. They can also cite state constitutional protections in state courts.Democrats, civil-rights groups and voting-rights organizations have filed more than 30 lawsuits opposing new voting laws. But the legal process can sometimes take years.Democrats in Congress have proposed the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act to defend voting rights.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesWait, back up. What is the Voting Rights Act?Passed in 1965, it was one of the most important legacies of the civil rights movement. It contained several provisions protecting the right to vote; required states with a history of discrimination at the polls to obtain clearance from the Justice Department before changing their voting laws, and banned racial gerrymandering and any voting measures that would target minority groups.The Voting Rights Act set off a wave of enfranchisement of Black citizens, with more than 250,000 registering to vote before the end of 1965.But the law was hollowed out by a 2013 Supreme Court decision that lifted the requirement for preclearance, paving the way for many of the restrictions enacted in 2021.Where does President Biden stand?He did not mince words, warning in July that “there is an unfolding assault taking place in America today — an attempt to suppress and subvert the right to vote in fair and free elections.” He called it “the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War.”But in his first year, he did not make voting rights a top priority. As his administration battled to pass infrastructure and economic-relief programs, voting rights groups have grown frustrated, calling for a more aggressive White House push on federal voting legislation.Which states have changed their voting laws?Nineteen states passed 34 laws restricting voting in 2021, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Some of the most significant legislation was enacted in battleground states.Texas forbade balloting methods introduced in 2020 to make voting easier during the pandemic, including drive-through polling places and 24-hour voting. It also barred election officials from sending voters unsolicited absentee-ballot applications and from promoting the use of vote by mail; greatly empowered partisan poll watchers; created new criminal and civil penalties for poll workers, and erected new barriers for those looking to help voters who need assistance.Georgia limited drop boxes, stripped the secretary of state of some of his authority, imposed new oversight of county election boards, restricted who can vote with provisional ballots and made it a crime to offer food or water to voters waiting in lines. It also required runoff elections to be held four weeks after the original vote, down from nine weeks.Florida limited the use of drop boxes; added to the identification requirements for people requesting absentee ballots; required voters to request an absentee ballot for each election, rather than receive them automatically through an absentee-voter list; limited who can collect and drop off ballots; and bolstered the powers of partisan observers in the ballot-counting process.Some states, however, have expanded voting access. New Jersey and Kentucky added more early-voting days and an online registration portal. Virginia created a state-level preclearance requirement and made Election Day a holiday, and New York restored voting rights for some felons.So, will these new voting laws swing elections?Maybe. Maybe not. Some laws will make voting more difficult for certain groups, cause confusion or create longer wait times at polling places, any of which could deter voters from casting ballots.In some places, the new restrictions could backfire: Many Republicans, especially in far-flung rural areas, once preferred to vote by mail, and making it more difficult to do so could inconvenience them more than people in cities and suburbs.The laws have met an impassioned response from voting rights groups, which are working to inform voters about the new restrictions while also hiring lawyers to challenge them.Democrats hope that their voters will be impassioned enough in response to the new restrictions that they turn out in large numbers to defeat Republicans in November. More

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      7 Political Wish Lists for the New Year

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      What do the president, vice president, former president and party leaders want in 2022? We made our best guess.Sign up here to get On Politics in your inbox on Tuesdays and Thursdays.Given that this is the last On Politics newsletter before Christmas, and of 2021 for that matter, it seems like a good time to take stock and reflect on what a wish list might be for the nation’s leaders.Today, Democrats control both the White House and Congress. But the party’s hold on power is so slim — the 50-50 split in the Senate means that Vice President Kamala Harris must break tied votes — that the entire Biden agenda is dependent on every single Democrat’s falling into line. And they aren’t all doing so.History bodes poorly for the party of the president in a first midterm election, and many Democrats are bracing for a rout in 2022. Here is what we think the nation’s leaders are looking for in the New Year:President Biden: He won the Democratic nomination after making two early bets in the primary that paid off big: that he would be seen as the most electable Democrat and that Black voters would be a loyal base. Both bets paid off. Similarly, Biden made an early two-pronged bet about the midterms: that a surging economy and a waning threat from the coronavirus would deliver victory to the Democrats.Right now, neither is happening.The omicron variant is bringing rising caseloads and fresh fears despite the widespread availability of vaccines. Meanwhile, monthly economic reports tell the story of the fastest inflation in decades, the kind of in-your-face figures that can swamp other positive economic indicators like the unemployment rate.Wish list: a stronger economy, shrinking inflation and a disappearing virus.Mitch McConnell: The Senate Republican leader has an excellent shot at returning to the majority in 2023 — after only two years in the minority. But while the overall political landscape appears rosy for the Republicans, McConnell’s party must navigate a series of primary races next spring and summer that he and his allies worry could result in extreme and unelectable nominees.Former President Donald J. Trump is an added X-factor. He has provided early endorsements for candidates who are not exactly prototypical McConnell recruits, including in North Carolina, Georgia and Pennsylvania, where the first Trump endorsee already dropped out. These days, Trump has even taken to insulting McConnell by name.Wish list: mainstream nominees in swing states for 2022; a toning down of Trump’s attacks. (The latter is probably more pipe dream than wish.)Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi: The Senate majority leader and House speaker want mostly the same thing: to successfully negotiate passage of an enormous social policy bill, the Build Back Better Act, that would remake the social safety net and environmental policy.But there is precious little maneuvering room when you need the votes of liberal firebrands as well as the most conservative members of the caucus, like Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia.Schumer has literally no votes to spare, which means every Democratically aligned senator holds de facto veto power. He also needs all 50 of those senators to stay healthy and present, not just for the Build Back Better bill but also other priorities like confirming judges and an attempt to pass voting-rights legislation.Wish list: Democratic health and unity; passage of the Build Back Better Act.Joe Manchin: The Senate’s most conservative and consequential Democrat recently declared on Fox News — yes, Fox News — that he was a no on the Build Back Better Act. It sent the White House scrambling and delivered a potentially fatal setback to the party’s signature legislation.Wish list: If Democrats knew for sure, it would already be in the bill.Kevin McCarthy: The House Republican leader has already started to be cast as the next speaker — presuming his party retakes the chamber — but his ascent would depend on more than just a Republican majority in 2022. Mr. McCarthy had to abandon his speakership ambitions in 2015. To succeed in 2023, he faces what Politico recently described as a “vexing speaker math problem”: a cohort of members yearning for an alternative, including some floating Trump himself. That may be far-fetched. But it is a sign of how hard it would be for McCarthy to navigate a majority as narrow as the one Pelosi has.Wish list: winning a big enough G.O.P. majority in 2022 to lead and run the House.Kamala Harris: The history-making vice president has faced a rash of negative media coverage in her first year and discovered, as Mark Z. Barabak of The Los Angeles Times put it, that the “vice presidency is an inherently subordinate position and one that sits ripe for ridicule.” Some of her most senior communications advisers are departing, and 2022 offers the chance at a reset, especially given the uncertainty — despite the White House’s public proclamations otherwise — that Biden will seek re-election in 2024, the year he will turn 82.Wish list: greater staff stability and a more positive portrayal in the press.Donald J. Trump: The former president may be off social media, but he has not receded from the political scene. He has been issuing statements from his new PAC at Twitterlike speed, endorsing a raft of candidates and continuing to raise money online by the bucketload, all while he is under investigation in New York for his business practices.He is talking out loud about running for president again. But for a politician who wants relevance, why would he say anything else?Wish list: vengeance on the few Republicans who voted for his impeachment; continued dominance of the Republican Party.Happy Holidays from the On Politics team! We’re off next week, but we have exciting news: On Politics, which is also available as a newsletter, is relaunching in the new year with new authors, Blake Hounshell and Leah Askarinam. 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. More