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      As Republicans Take Aim at Voting, Democrats Search for a Response

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      A speech by President Biden on Tuesday could be a signal of how hard the Democrats will fight to protect voting rights. WASHINGTON — The Democratic Party pledged millions for it last week, grass-roots groups are campaigning for it nationwide and, as recently as Friday, Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, said the fight for it had only begun.But behind the brave words are rising concerns among voting-rights advocates and Democrats that the counterattack against the aggressive push by Republicans to restrict ballot access is faltering, and at a potentially pivotal moment.President Biden is expected to put his political muscle behind the issue in a speech in Philadelphia on Tuesday. But in Congress, Democratic senators have been unable to move voting and election bills that would address what many of them call a fundamental attack on American democracy that could lock in a new era of Republican minority rule. And in the courts, attacks on voting restrictions face an increasingly hostile judiciary and narrowing legal options.Texas seems poised, absent another walkout by Democratic legislators, to become the latest Republican-controlled state to pass a sweeping legislative agenda placing new barriers to the ability to cast a ballot. That comes on the heels of a major Supreme Court ruling this month further weakening the one enforcement clause of the Voting Rights Act that remained after the court nullified its major provision in 2012. The decision arrived as advocacy groups were pressing lawsuits against restrictive voting laws enacted in roughly a dozen Republican-controlled state legislatures.“One more arrow has been taken out of the quiver of voting-rights plaintiffs to strike down these new laws passed since the 2020 election,” said Nathaniel Persily, an election-law scholar at Stanford. “And it’s not like they had all that many arrows in the quiver to begin with.”Roughly a dozen Republican-controlled states passed laws this past spring restricting voting or significantly changing election rules, ostensibly in response to President Donald J. Trump’s false claims that voter fraud cost him the November election. Many made it harder to vote early or by mail, banned or restricted drop boxes, shortened early or absentee voting periods or gave more leeway to partisan poll watchers. Some laws made it easier to replace local election officials with partisans, something voting rights advocates say might make it possible even to invalidate or sway election results. Atop that, Republican filibuster threats have bottled up the flagship effort by congressional Democrats to counter such restrictions — a sweeping overhaul of federal election laws and a beefed-up revision of the Voting Rights Act. Despite controlling the Senate, Democrats have failed to unite behind a change in filibuster rules that would allow them to pass the legislation with a simple majority vote. That is a painful reversal for Democrats, who had labeled the bills their top priority, and for Mr. Biden, who said a year ago that strengthening the Voting Rights Act would be his first task in the White House. It also has far-reaching ramifications: The election-overhaul bill would set minimum standards for ballot access, potentially undoing some provisions of the newly enacted laws, and ban gerrymandering just as states begin drawing new boundaries for House seats and local political districts.Democrats worry that failing to act will empower states led by Republicans to impose more restrictions before the 2024 presidential election — a genuine concern, they say, given that Mr. Biden carried the Electoral College by fewer than 43,000 votes in three key states, despite outpolling Mr. Trump by seven million votes nationwide. President Biden said a year ago that strengthening the Voting Rights Act would be his first task in the White House.Samuel Corum for The New York TimesAnd some worry that a Republican Party that still refuses to accept the legitimacy of the last presidential vote sets the stage for a constitutional crisis should red states, or even a Republican-led House of Representatives, contest the next close election. “There’s not a caucus meeting that goes by that our leadership doesn’t talk about S. 1 and how our democracy is on the verge of disappearing,” U.S. Representative John Yarmuth, a Kentucky Democrat who has spent 14 years in the House, said in an interview, using shorthand for voting legislation stalled in the Senate. “There’s plenty to be scared about.”Republicans argue that it’s Democrats who are the threat to democracy. “The Democratic Party wants to rewrite the ground rules of American politics for partisan benefit,” Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, said at a hearing on the bill to overhaul voting laws, called the For the People Act. “It’s hard to imagine anything that would erode public confidence in our democracy more drastically.”Mr. McConnell has called the proposal “a craven political calculation” that shows “disdain for the American people.”In the states, Republican legislators have frequently taken a similar tack, charging that Democrats oppose tightening voting rules because they benefit from voter fraud.More common among voting experts, though, is a view that Republicans, facing unfavorable demographic tides, see their future linked to limiting Democratic turnout. “They’re going to do everything they can to hold on to power, and one essential of that is limiting the Democratic vote,” said Larry J. Sabato, a veteran political analyst and director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. Voting-rights advocates and the Biden administration are not without weapons. Under Attorney General Merrick Garland, the Justice Department has already sued to block voting legislation enacted by the Georgia General Assembly this past spring, and more lawsuits are likely.On Thursday, Vice President Kamala Harris said that the Democratic National Committee planned to spend $25 million before the 2022 midterms to organize and educate voters.And a number of voting rights advocates said they believed that the breadth and the audacity of Republican voting restrictions was igniting a backlash that would power a grass-roots voting movement and increase Democratic turnout in the midterms.“It could well have a significant pushback,” said Miles Rapoport, a senior fellow at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance at Harvard. “The extra motivation of ‘You’re not going to take away my vote’ could end up with very, very heavy turnout come 2022 and 2024.”But voting issues could be a motivator for both parties and, in a highly polarized electorate, the moral high ground can be hard to establish. “I think a lot of this from the other side is political theater,” Representative Briscoe Cain, the Republican House Elections Committee chairman in Texas said in a phone interview on Sunday night. The goal, he said, is to “win elections and make Republicans look bad.”Advocacy groups and Democrats also are in the courts. In Georgia alone, eight lawsuits are challenging Republican election laws enacted in the spring. Marc Elias, a longtime lawyer for Democratic Party interests, is opposing new election laws in seven Republican-dominated states.How badly the Supreme Court ruling will hinder such efforts is unclear. The 6-to-3 decision, covering Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, made it much harder to attack a voting restriction based principally on its lopsided impact on a minority group.Mr. Elias called the ruling “a terrible decision,” but added that most election lawsuits claim violations of the Constitution, not the Voting Rights Act.Richard L. Hasen, a leading election-law expert at the University of California, Irvine, was less sanguine, arguing that one part of the ruling has given states wide latitude to defend restrictions as necessary to prevent fraud — even if there is no evidence of fraud. Stopping fraud is by far the leading reason cited by Republican legislators sponsoring curbs on voting.“There’s no question that the road is much tougher for voting rights plaintiffs in federal courts,” he said. “These battles will have to be fought within each state, mustering coalitions among business groups, civil leaders and voters from all parties who care about the sanctity of the right to vote.”Legal options also exist outside the federal judiciary. Mr. Elias recently won a suit claiming discrimination against college-age voters in the New Hampshire Supreme Court. The Southern Coalition for Social Justice is challenging North Carolina’s voter ID requirements in that state’s Supreme Court. Demonstrators gathered in Washington, D.C., in June to protest for equal voting rights.Kenny Holston for The New York TimesAnd Alison Riggs, a voting-rights lawyer and co-executive director of the coalition, noted that Congress could easily address concerns with the court’s ruling in any revision of the Voting Rights Act.Mr. Biden’s speech on Tuesday may signal whether he intends to become involved in pushing that legislation and the overhaul of voting laws to passage. Mr. Biden made voting issues a priority in his campaign, but as president he has emphasized bread-and-butter issues like infrastructure spending and coronavirus relief. He was largely absent in June when Democrats in the Senate tried and failed to bring up the For the People Act for debate — in part, perhaps, because even Democrats realized that it must be stripped down to a more basic bill to have a chance of passing.The president is unlikely to have that option again. Over the weekend, a close ally, Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, told Politico that Mr. Biden must push to modify the filibuster so both voting bills could pass.So did civil rights leaders in a meeting with the president on Thursday. “We will not be able to litigate our way out of this threat to Black citizenship, voting and political participation,” Sherrilyn Ifill, the president of the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said later. “We need legislation to be passed in Congress.”The consequences of doing that — or not — could be profound, said Dr. Sabato. “If there was ever a moment to act, it would be now, because Republican legislatures with Republican governors are going to go even further as we move into the future,” he said.“For years, Democrats will point to this as a missed moment. And they’ll be right.”David Montgomery contributed reporting. More

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      The Voter Fraud Fraud

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      It was March 3, 2020, the day of the Democratic primary in Texas, and Hervis Rogers, a 62-year-old Black man, was intent on making his voice heard at the ballot box. He arrived at the polling place around 7 p.m. and joined the line. More

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      Texas Man Who Waited Hours to Vote Is Arrested on Charges of Illegal Voting

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      Hervis Rogers was ineligible to cast a ballot in the 2020 presidential primary because he was still on parole, according to the state’s attorney general. He now faces four decades in prison.A 62-year-old Texas man who waited hours to cast a ballot in last year’s presidential primary was arrested this week on charges that he had voted illegally.The man, Hervis Earl Rogers of Houston, waited seven hours outside Texas Southern University to vote in the state’s presidential primary in March 2020. On Wednesday, he was arrested and charged with two counts of illegal voting, a felony. According to court documents, the charges stem from ballots that Mr. Rogers cast on March 3, 2020, and on Nov. 6, 2018, while he was still on parole and not legally permitted to vote.Tommy Buser-Clancy, a senior staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas and one of the lawyers representing Mr. Rogers, said that Mr. Rogers thought that he could vote during the primary.“Mr. Rogers’s prosecution really shows the danger of overcriminalizing the election code and the process of participating in a democratic society,” he said. “In particular, it raises the danger that criminal statutes in the election code are being used to go after individuals who at worst have made an innocent mistake. That’s not what any laws should be doing.”Mr. Buser-Clancy said that the A.C.L.U. was conducting its own investigation into the charges.Texas election code states that a person convicted of a felony can register to vote and participate in elections only once his or her sentence — including parole — is fully completed. Texas’ election laws also stipulate that a person must knowingly vote illegally to be guilty of a crime.The Sentencing Project, a criminal-justice nonprofit, estimates that 5.2 million Americans remain disenfranchised because of felony convictions, a disproportionate number of them Black. According to a report the group released last year, over 6.2 percent of the adult African American population is disenfranchised, compared with 1.7 percent of the non-African American population. In Texas, 2.8 percent of voters cannot vote because of felony convictions.Experts say that disparities in sentencing can make felony voting laws inherently discriminatory against minorities and people with low incomes. And the process for former felons to return to the voter rolls can be confusing, with muddled and frequently changing rules, making it difficult for people trying to vote legally to know what to do.Mr. Rogers’s story ricocheted around social media after he was identified as the very last person in line to vote at his polling place. Houston Public Media reported at the time that Mr. Rogers arrived at the polls just before 7 p.m. and waited roughly six hours to vote, long after the polls had closed and many others had left the line.“It is insane, but it’s worth it,” Mr. Rogers told Houston Public Media while waiting in line.Mr. Rogers was being held at the Montgomery County Jail with bail set at $100,000. He could face upward of 40 years in prison — 20 years for each charge, according to Mr. Buser-Clancy, who added that Mr. Rogers’s past criminal record meant that the sentence could be even higher.“He’s facing the possibility of an extremely harsh sentence,” he said. “Second-degree felonies are normally reserved for aggravated assault, and to apply it to Mr. Rogers’s case, it just shows how unjust that is.”Texas’ attorney general, Ken Paxton, who is under investigation for professional misconduct after he challenged President Biden’s win in court, brought the charges against Mr. Rogers. He has made it a mission of his office to prosecute voter-fraud cases, which are very rare in the United States and tend to be minor mistakes when they do happen.“Hervis is a felon rightly barred from voting under TX law,” Mr. Paxton wrote on Twitter. “I prosecute voter fraud everywhere we find it!”Republicans in Texas and other battleground states have been pushing aggressively to restrict voting laws since former President Donald J. Trump began making false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him. On Thursday, Republicans in the Texas Legislature presented plans to overhaul the state’s election apparatus for a second time this year. They outlined a raft of proposed new restrictions on voting access that would be among the most far-reaching election laws passed this year.For some, Mr. Rogers’s case evoked another recent prosecution in the state.In 2017, Crystal Mason was sentenced to five years in prison for casting a provisional ballot in the 2016 presidential election while she was on supervised release for a federal tax fraud felony. Her provisional ballot was not counted, and her case is pending before Texas’ highest criminal appellate court after Ms. Mason filed for an appeal.After she was convicted, Ms. Mason served 10 months in federal prison for violating her supervised release, but she has remained free on a $20,000 bond in her voting case, as she pursues her appeal in state court, her lawyer, Alison Grinter, said. If Ms. Mason loses her appeal, she will have to begin serving her five-year sentence, Ms. Grinter said.Mr. Rogers and Ms. Mason may meet in the coming weeks, Ms. Grinter said.“They share a bond that neither of them wanted at this point,” Ms. Grinter said. “She really feels for him, and knows what it feels like to be made political sport of like this.”On Friday, Ms. Mason expressed support for Mr. Rogers.“I wish this had never happened to you,” Ms. Mason wrote on Twitter. “I’m sorry that you’re going though this. Welcome to the fight.”Michael Levenson More

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      in US Politics

      Texas borderlands too often a photo op for politicians pushing stereotypes

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      Cartas de la fronteraTexasTexas borderlands too often a photo op for politicians pushing stereotypesUbiquitous political border tours fixate on immigration, missing the complex character and needs of the region Carlos SanchezThu 8 Jul 2021 14.54 EDTLast modified on Thu 8 Jul 2021 15.14 EDTEdward Marquez, the father of my classmate when I was growing up, became a border community hero in 1994 when, as a state district judge from El Paso, he initiated a rare legal maneuver that resonated along the Texas-Mexico border. Fed up with a long history of disparate funding and state services to border communities from the state capital in Austin, he convened a court of criminal inquiry – a weapon in the legal arsenal that is available when a judge has evidence that a prosecutor fell short of pursuing a criminal case and justice was not being served.Welcome to the US southern border: same country, different planetRead moreIn this instance, it was evidence of historical neglect for Texas border communities. The unprecedented court of inquiry highlighted funding disparities to border communities such as a $43 per capita allotment to El Paso in state highway funds compared with as much as $220 per capita for other Texas cities. State leaders were subpoenaed to testify about the funding disparities, always with the threat that Judge Marquez had the power to indict them if he found compelling evidence that they had violated the rights of border residents under the state’s equal protection clause.Ultimately, an embarrassed Democratic administration, led by the then governor, Ann Richards, ensured additional funding went to border cities like El Paso and the legacy of Judge Marquez was cemented in history.The political reality that the judge brought to national attention nearly three decades ago, however, continues to plague border communities and has created an uncomfortable political paradox: the communities need the attention of state and national policymakers to highlight massive problems with poverty, health issues and educational attainment. But whenever this region draws international attention, that attention has little to do with these social issues and everything to do with the heated debate over immigration.Unfortunately, this paradox is as old as the border itself and feeds into negative stereotypes about the safety of this region, while acting as an economic drag. In 2016, McAllen, in south Texas, was selected by an amateur sports federation as a two-year venue for a statewide competition that typically attracts thousands of young athletes . Texas cities yearn to host the event because as many as 20,000 or more parents and kids show up to watch and compete – all the while ringing up hefty hotel and food bills that contribute to the local economy.But before the Games of Texas, as it’s called, began that year, south Texas got word that parents in different parts of the state were concerned about border violence. While Mexican drug cartels were often listed as the main source of concern, another immigration surge was well under way. Word got around that some parents were even talking about organizing spinoff games in north Texas to avoid having to expose their families to the treachery of the south Texas borderlands.Community leaders launched a counter-offensive, writing columns for newspapers in other parts of the state and vowing to show off the region’s family spirit. Parents who braved the trip to south Texas left that first year impressed with the local hospitality, and any widespread concern about the dangers of the region seemed to disappear the next year.Virtually every year, the Democratic border congressman Henry Cuellar issues a press statement following the annual release of the FBI Uniform Crime Report to demonstrate the safety of border communities relative to other cities across Texas and the nation.But too often, elected officials seeking a quick photo opportunity politicize the border rather than address the needs of its communities. The local joke is that if you’re a Republican a border tour requires a ride up the Rio Grande on a state-owned, armored plated gunboat (federal vessels are much less ominous looking and rarely make the photo-op cut). But if you’re a Democrat, the border tour entails a must-see-and-be-seen visit to a local facility that provides humanitarian services to migrants.When the then speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, visited the border in 2017, federal authorities approached landowners along the Rio Grande to ask them to keep the media off their property, trying unsuccessfully to make private a huge swath of international boundary.Sometimes it’s best to view these border tours with a sense of levity. One go-to place to visit is the county-owned Anzalduas park, a birdwatching paradise on the banks of the Rio Grande, which provides a magnificent vista overlooking Mexico. When President Trump visited in January 2019, US Customs and Border Protection attended with all its glorious, mechanized immigrant-fighting vehicles on display.But it is the Texas Republican senator John Cornyn (to his credit, a frequent border community visitor) who will live in infamy after he visited the park to decry the dangers of immigration in front of media cameras. His timing was slightly off; as he spoke, journalists witnessed the launching from the Mexican shore of a double-decker party boat touring the beautiful river, accompanied by festive music.Trump’s most recent visit to the border, in June, shows how misleading such tours can be. The newly elected mayor of McAllen was the only local elected official who toured the wall with Trump and the Texas governor, Greg Abbott. Little beyond the wall and the dangers of the migrants were mentioned.For business and political leaders along the border, these visits offer little by way of solution and serve only to further inflame passions about immigration. In a rare moment when a large group of US senators allowed a local elected official to speak about the community, the official urged the members of Congress to overhaul existing immigration laws because the current system is broken.“We can’t do that until we stop these immigrants from crossing,” one senator told the local official. And soon that particular border tour ended – after the senators met with the media and posed for a few photos near the river.Carlos Sanchez is director of public affairs for Hidalgo county, Texas. He was a journalist for 37 years and has worked at the Washington Post and Texas Monthly magazine, as well as eight other newsroomsTopicsTexasCartas de la fronteraUS politicsUS immigrationfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Beto O’Rourke on Texas: ‘I don’t know that we’re a conservative state’

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      Beto O’RourkeInterviewBeto O’Rourke on Texas: ‘I don’t know that we’re a conservative state’Alexandra VillarrealThe former Democratic presidential hopeful discusses the importance of the voting rights fight Sat 3 Jul 2021 04.00 EDTTo Beto O’Rourke, voting rights represent the silver bullet for progress in Texas.If more of the over 7 million Texans who were eligible to vote but didn’t last election could actually make it to the ballot box, the former Democratic presidential hopeful thinks state lawmakers would soon stop going after transgender student athletes and abortion access.Bad strategy? How the Republican attack on voting rights could backfireRead moreInstead, legislators would spend their time fixing Texas’s electric grid, which left millions shivering in the dark and hundreds dead when it failed during a devastating winter storm last February. They would be compelled to expand healthcare coverage in a state with the most uninsured people anywhere in the country, and they would actually address the Covid-19 pandemic, which has killed more than 51,000 Texans.“I don’t know that we’re a red state. I don’t know that we’re a conservative state. I don’t know that we’re a state that is focused on transgender girls’ sports, or telling people what to do with their bodies,” O’Rourke told the Guardian in an exclusive interview.“I think it is a minority really of the people and the voters in this state. It’s just the majority aren’t reflected because they aren’t voting.”A native El Pasoan and one of the country’s foremost Democrats, O’Rourke spent much of June traversing his home state, advocating for voting rights. As he registered eligible voters in 102F (39C) heat or held intimate town halls with as few as 100 people, he was fighting for democracy in Texas – before it’s too late.“If the great crime committed by Republicans was trying to suppress the votes of those who live outside of the centers of power,” he said, “then the great crime of Democrats was to take all of these people for granted.”During his travels, he heard from people who readily admitted they hadn’t been paying attention until he showed up.“You cannot expect people to participate in the state’s politics if you don’t show them the basic respect of listening to them and understanding what’s most important to them and then reflecting that in the campaign that you run,” O’Rourke said.“You can’t do that at a distance, and you can’t do that through a pollster or a focus group. You have to do that in person.”Many Democrats are waiting with bated breath to see if O’Rourke launches a bid to oust Texas’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, in 2022. But for now, he’s mostly brushing off questions about his political future; the voting rights fight could not be more urgent, he said, and he doesn’t have the bandwidth to simultaneously mount a separate campaign.“As this woman at our meeting in Wichita Falls said, you know, it may not matter who the candidates are on the ballot if that vote can be overturned,” he said. “Or if we functionally disenfranchise millions of our fellow Texans.”Texas was already infamous as the hardest place to vote in the United States before this year’s legislative session, when state lawmakers capitalized on false narratives about widespread voter fraud to push for new, sweeping voting restrictions.Democrats in the state House staged a historic walkout at the 11th hour to kill one of the most controversial restrictive voting bills. But Abbott, who still considers “election integrity” an emergency, announced he would convene a special session starting 8 July, teeing up yet another bitter showdown via legislative overtime.As O’Rourke sees it, the special session is one of two fronts in the war for voting rights in Texas. The other is at the federal level, where Democrats are scrambling to protect the polls after Republicans blocked their ambitious For the People Act.Texas special sessions can’t last more than 30 days, and the US Congress has mere weeks before a long August recess.“There is a very tight window within which we’ve gotta do everything we can,” O’Rourke said.At stake are a rash of new provisions that would make it even harder and scarier to vote, in a state with already chronically low voter turnout.In the aftermath of the 2020 election, Texas Republicans proposed barring 24-hour and drive-thru voting, doing away with drop boxes, and subjecting public officials to state felonies for soliciting or distributing unrequested vote by mail applications, among other hardline policies.Many of their suggestions directly targeted innovations to expand voter access last year in Texas’s largest county, Harris, which is both diverse and more left-leaning. And voting rights advocates worry that in general, Texans of color will be disproportionately disenfranchised by the restrictions being advanced.Already, Texas has extremely limited vote-by-mail access, virtually no online voter registration and no same-day registration during early voting or on election day. Voters have to show acceptable forms of identification, which can include a handgun license but not a student ID.The state is a hotbed for gerrymandering, and politicians purposely attenuate the voting power in communities of color. Hundreds of Texas polling stations have shuttered since 2012, with closures concentrated where Black and Latino populations are growing the most.O’Rourke remembers how he used to be baffled by people who didn’t vote. Not any more.“When your voting power has been diminished like that, it is not illogical or irrational to say, ‘I’m not gonna vote. I’m not gonna participate in this one. I’m not gonna get my hopes up,’” he said.Last month, when O’Rourke visited Rains county, Texas, a woman with multiple sclerosis, epilepsy and other illnesses explained how – because she’s disabled and doesn’t drive – she struggled to get identification. An ID cost her $125, a modern-day poll tax, she said.As she told her story, O’Rourke said, even the local GOP chairwoman was seemingly nodding her head, as if the issue was starting to make sense.In Gainesville, where 40 suspected Unionists were hanged during the civil war, a young woman told O’Rourke that she successfully organized to bring down a Confederate statue at the park where his town hall was taking place.But she wasn’t registered to vote, she added.“It’s not for lack of urgency or love for country,” O’Rourke said. “I think it’s because they are acutely aware of how rigged our democracy is at this moment, and nowhere more so than Texas.”From ideological courts to a Republican-controlled legislature and a rightwing executive, conservatives dominate every branch of the state government.Their overpowering dominion makes it nearly impossible for liberals to make inroads in Texas, despite long-held Democratic hopes that rapidly changing demographics will trigger a blue wave.Still, O’Rourke refuses to give up.“If we register in numbers and turn out in numbers, even with a rigged system – and we should acknowledge that it’s rigged – and even with the deck that is stacked, there’s still a way to prevail,” he said.“It’s not gonna be easy. And it’s gonna require a lot of us.”TopicsBeto O’RourkeTexasUS voting rightsUS politicsinterviewsReuse this content More