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Senate Republicans again poised to block sweeping voting rights bill
The fight to voteUS voting rightsSenate Republicans again poised to block sweeping voting rights billObstructionist effort to stop Freedom to Vote Act likely to increase pressure on Democrats to do away with filibuster The fight to vote is supported byAbout this contentSam Levine in New YorkWed 20 Oct 2021 05.00 EDTLast modified on Wed 20 Oct 2021 05.02 EDTSenate Republicans are again poised to block a sweeping voting rights bill on Wednesday, a move that will significantly escalate pressure on Democrats to do away with the filibuster, a Senate rule that has stymied the most significant priorities in Congress.Texas Republicans pass voting maps that entrench power of whitesRead moreThe bill, the Freedom to Vote Act, would impose significant new guardrails on the American democratic process and amount to the most significant overhaul of American elections in a generation. It would require every state to automatically register voters at motor vehicle agencies, offer 15 consecutive days of early voting and allow anyone to request a mail-in ballot. It would also set new standards to ensure voters are not wrongfully removed from the voter rolls, protect election officials against partisan interference, and set out clear alternatives people who lack ID to vote can use at the polls.It also included a slew of new campaign finance regulations and outlaws the pervasive practice of manipulating district lines for severe partisan advantage, a process called gerrymandering.The provisions are a pared-back version of an earlier voting rights bill that Republicans blocked from a vote in June. Republican senators are likely to block the bill using the same filibuster rule, which requires 60 votes to advance the legislation to a final vote. Meanwhile, there have been demonstrations outside the White House in recent weeks, and several activists have been arrested while speaking out in favor of the bill, including 25 arrests on Tuesday.Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterWhile most Democrats in the Senate favor getting rid of the filibuster, at least for voting rights legislation, the blockade will put immense pressure on two of the most significant remaining Democratic holdouts, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. There will be particular scrutiny on Manchin, who personally helped write the revised bill and has been seeking GOP support for it. It’s not yet clear if a lack of Republican support for any kind of compromise could force Manchin to finally support some kind of change to the filibuster but activists have been heartened by a letter he issued earlier this year in which he said “inaction is not an option” around voting rights.Democrats are pushing the reforms at a particularly perilous moment for American democracy. Nearly three dozen bills were enacted in 19 states from January until the end of September, according to a tally by the Brennan Center for Justice. There have been more than 425 bills introduced with provisions that make it harder to vote. There are also growing concerns about Republican efforts to wield more influence over local election officials in certain states, which could wreak havoc in future elections.There is pressure to immediately pass voting rights legislation because states are currently in the middle of the once-per-decade process of redrawing district maps. Absent new protections, new congressional and state legislative districts across the country could be unfairly tilted towards Republicans for the next decade. The GOP is also well positioned to take control of the US House of Representatives in 2022.The bill is one of two critical pieces of voting rights legislation Democrats have championed. The other is the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would set a new formula that would restore federal oversight of elections to certain places and specific practices. That bill has also passed the House and is waiting for a vote in the Senate.Joe Biden has offered full-throated support for both bills, but has not been willing to publicly pressure Manchin or Sinema on the filibuster. The White House is facing pressure from some civil rights groups who believe it is not being aggressive enough in pushing for the bills.The White House released a statement supporting passing the bill on Monday, but said little about what it would do if Republicans blocked it.“The administration is continuing to press for voting rights legislation to safeguard our democracy from these historic threats to constitutional freedoms and the integrity of elections through legislation, executive actions, outreach, the bully pulpit, and all other means available,” the White House said in a statement on Monday.TopicsUS voting rightsThe fight to voteUS CongressUS SenateUS politicsnewsReuse this content More
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Voting rights veterans share lessons with new generation of activists: ‘Build on the foundation’
US voting rightsVoting rights veterans share lessons with new generation of activists: ‘Build on the foundation’ Freedom Summer registered hundreds of Black people to vote in Mississippi in 1964 in defiance of Jim Crow lawsCarlisa N JohnsonMon 18 Oct 2021 06.00 EDTLast modified on Mon 18 Oct 2021 11.35 EDTIn the early 1960s, Charles McLaurin served as a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), laying the groundwork for a massive voter registration drive in Mississippi known as Freedom Summer. That historic summer of 1964, young people from across the country poured into the state to help register Black people to vote, a campaign that energized the US civil rights movement and exposed Mississippi’s racial terrors.“In 1962, there was not a single Black elected official in the whole state and Mississippi only had about 5% of the Black population registered to vote,” said McLaurin, flanked by his former SNCC colleagues Freddie Biddle and Hollis Watkins at a recent conference commemorating the organization’s founding in 1960.Today, Mississippi has Black elected officials, but it also has some of the most restrictive voter laws in the nation in a state that has the largest proportion of Black voters at 38%. While SNCC is no longer active, the conference’s goal was to share organizing lessons from the past to further the fight to vote today as states across the country enact voter suppression laws that are undoing the gains, earned in blood, of the civil rights movement.Then, as now, youth are key, Watkins said.“One of the things, based on what I saw in the early phases of the civil rights movement is, if we, the older ones, will step over to the side and become ones that help, the young people will get it done. And the reason I know is because I used to be a young person,” Watkins said during a panel on the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP).The Freedom party sought to unseat the state’s ruling, all-white Democratic party at a time when Black Mississippians faced a litany of tactics to prevent them from voting, from outright intimidation to impossible literacy tests.“The white supremacists would like to make it seem like it’s different [today], what they put us up against, all those years until the Voting Rights Act [of 1965],” said Judy Richardson, a former secretary at the national SNCC headquarters who helped organize the conference. “Saying that you can’t give water to someone in a line after you have closed umpteen voting locations. It’s no different from somebody at a poll saying, ‘How many bubbles in a bar of soap?’ The tactics are very similar in terms of what the aim is: to nullify our vote and ultimately stop from sharing power, because it is all about power.”Today, Black Voters Matter, Fair Fight, Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda, the New Georgia Project and other voting rights groups are tapping the organizing framework used by SNCC and other civil rights organizations to develop a grassroots campaign to register and educate voters. Invigorating Black political power through in-depth civic and voter education was the root of SNCC’s approach. During Freedom Summer, SNCC established schools to teach civics, but also reading, math and other subjects. The organization’s work was grounded in speaking to the issues of individual communities.Nsé Ufot, CEO of the New Georgia Project, who participated in the SNCC conference, says in Georgia, like Mississippi in the 1960s, her group is training organizers to go into communities and educate voters in preparation for the election season. Nearly 1,000 Georgians are under investigation for violating five new voting-related laws in the state.Part of what made SNCC so effective was coalition building with local leaders, Ufot said in an interview after the conference. “I subscribe to the gospel choir theory of organizing. The reason they can hold a note for so long, so powerfully, is that each individual vocalist is doing what they can when they can. They are doing their part,” she said.In the 1960s, however, building interest within Black communities was not always easy, SNCC veterans said.“We got the NAACP, CORE, SNCC, SCLC and all of these organizations and put them under an umbrella called COFO,” McLaurin explained, naming the leading civil rights groups of the time. COFO, or the Council of Federated Organizations, was an easier way to organize Mississippi’s Black citizens around voting rights. “Over the years, white people and the power structure had stigmatized our organizations to the point a lot of Blacks were afraid to identify with it.”Through COFO, organizations were able to pool resources for several civil rights causes, including voting. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was founded through this coalition, which eventually brought the necessary national attention to the state to move the needle closer to equal voting rights for Black residents.Richardson, who supported the organization’s voting rights efforts in Lowndes county, Mississippi, said coalition building was critical. “It was about having a coalition. Having allies in place, the good-intentioned white people, the community leaders, and the everyday Black people down in Mississippi. That is how we kept pushing forward and achieving our goals,” Richardson told the Guardian.What most inspired Richardson was the everyday people who took a stand, despite losing their livelihoods and having their lives threatened.“For me, it wasn’t the March on Washington. It was going to Hattiesburg [Mississippi] and these small communities and seeing you’ve got 80,000 Black folks who say we really do want to vote,” said Richardson. “Eighty thousand Black folks who have seen their sisters and nephews, neighbors and all these folks beaten, killed and all kinds of violence throughout their community. And yet still 80,000 of them saying, ‘We don’t care; we are going to try and register to vote.’”While the names of some organizers have become more well known, they did not set out to garner recognition. Fannie Lou Hamer, who famously said at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, ‘I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired’, got her start as an organizer when she applied to vote. At the time, she was living on a plantation in Mississippi.“The plantation owner told Fannie Lou Hamer that if she wouldn’t go back to the courthouse and withdraw her application to vote that she would have to leave,” said McLaurin. “So, Fannie Lou Hamer left the plantation and came into Ruleville, and she became one of the most important leaders in the effort to register to vote.”Ufot says she is part of that legacy.“I am in a long unbroken chain of freedom fighters. I am excited to make sure the America, and the world our ancestors fought for is something we haven’t given up on,” she said. “I think that there are so many opportunities for us to lead in this moment, for us to build upon the foundation our SNCC veterans have laid for us.”TopicsUS voting rightsUS politicsMississippifeaturesReuse this content More
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Republicans’ 2020 recount farce steams ahead despite lack of evidence
Fight to voteUS newsRepublicans’ 2020 recount farce steams ahead despite lack of evidenceEfforts in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Texas to review last year’s results are ‘delegitimizing democracy’, critics say The fight to vote is supported byAbout this contentSam Levine in New YorkThu 7 Oct 2021 10.00 EDTLast modified on Thu 7 Oct 2021 11.51 EDTRepublicans in several states are advancing partisan reviews of the 2020 election results, underscoring how deeply the GOP has embraced the myth of a stolen election since 2020.The investigations in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Texas are advancing even after an extensive similar effort in Arizona, championed by Donald Trump and allies, failed to produce evidence of fraud. All three inquiries come as Trump has called out top Republicans in each state and pressured them to review the 2020 race. He is also backing several candidates who have embraced the myth in their races for statewide offices in which they would oversee elections.Republicans leading the efforts in all three states have said little about the scope and details of their unusual post-election investigations. But experts worry they signal a dangerous new normal in American politics in which the losers of elections refuse to accept the outcome and continue to undermine the results of electoral contests months after they have been decided.“They have slight differences tactically, but they all share the same strategic goals, which are primarily to continue to sow doubt about the integrity of American elections overall,” said David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, and an election administration expert who has denounced the reviews. “I don’t know that there’s a word to describe how concerning it is.”In Wisconsin, a state where Joe Biden narrowly defeated Trump by 20,000 votes, there are three different efforts to review the election results. In February, Republicans in the state legislature authorized the non-partisan legislative audit bureau to review the election. Representative Janel Brandtjen, a Republican who chairs the elections committee in the state assembly and travelled to Phoenix to observe the Arizona investigation, unsuccessfully sought to subpoena voting equipment and ballots earlier this summer.Wisconsin Republicans also hired Michael Gabelman, a retired state supreme court justice to serve as a special counsel to investigate the election, which will be funded by $680,000 in taxpayer money. Gabelman took his most significant step on Friday when he issued subpoenas to at least five cities in the state and the administrator of the statewide body that oversees elections. The subpoenas request a large range of documents related to the 2020 election. Gabelman requested that the election officials appear at a 15 October hearing that will focus in part on “potential irregularities and/or illegalities related to the Election”, according a subpoena seen by the Guardian.Republicans are about to lose Texas – so they’re changing the rules | The fight to voteRead moreThere is no evidence of fraud or any other kind of wrongdoing in Wisconsin. Even though Trump’s campaign had an opportunity to request a recount of the entire state, it did so only in Milwaukee and Dane counties last year, two of the state’s most populous and liberal counties. Both recounts affirmed Biden’s win.Gabelman has said little publicly about the details of his effort, but released a video last month pledging it would be fair and that it was not designed to overturn the 2020 vote. “This is not an election contest. We are not challenging the results of the 2020 election; rather we are holding government officials accountable to the public for their actions surrounding the elections,” he said in the video.But Gabelman has already expressed support for the idea that the election was stolen, telling a pro-Trump crowd last November: “Our elected leaders – your elected leaders – have allowed unelected bureaucrats at the Wisconsin Elections Commission to steal our vote.” Gabelman has since defended those comments, saying in a July interview: “I didn’t say it was a stolen election. I cannot – and I defy you to – think of anything more unjust than a corrupt or unlawful election in a democracy. Whether that occurred here is very much a question to be examined.”On Tuesday, Gabelman said he was not an expert in elections. “Most people, myself included, do not have a comprehensive understanding or even any understanding of how elections work,” he told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. In August, he traveled to a forum on election irregularities hosted by Mike Lindell, a Trump ally and MyPillow CEO, who has voiced some of the most baseless conspiracy theories about the election. Gabelman also reportedly consulted with Shiva Ayyadurai, a failed US Senate candidate who has spread false information about the 2020 election and the Covid-19 vaccine, including a wildly misleading and inaccurate report about ballots in Maricopa county.Gabelman’s effort has already been hobbled by a series of errors. One subpoena on Friday was sent to the city clerk in Milwaukee, who does not oversee elections, according to the Washington Post. A cover letter for a subpoena sent to Claire Woodall-Vogg, the executive director of the Milwaukee election commission, requested documents about Green Bay. Gabelman’s review also sent out an email to local election officials from a Gmail account under the name “John Delta”. The message landed in the spam folders of several county clerks. And it included a document asking the local clerks to preserve records related to the 2020 election that was written by Andrew Kloster, a former Trump administration official. Kloster published a blogpost in April that said “the 2020 presidential election was stolen, fair and square,” according to the Associated Press.Kathy Bernier, a Republican who chairs the elections committee in the Wisconsin state senate, has resisted efforts to spread election misinformation, even holding a training last month to educate lawmakers on how elections work. But in an interview, she said she was supportive of the review in her state, and said the idea it would undermine confidence in the election was “pish-posh”.She said Democrats were to blame for uncertainty around the election because some refused to accept Trump’s electoral victory in 2016, claiming Russian interference. (Trump was seated in 2016 without serious objections in Congress, and there were no similar partisan post-election reviews.)“If there are things called into question, and there is not full confidence in the electoral process, providing audits and research and evidence that in fact these processes and procedures and the election results you can have confidence in, only supports that position where you can have confidence and here is why,” she said.Bernier added that she was concerned that undermining elections could hurt Republicans in the future.“At some point we have to accept the election results and move on,” she said. “If the middle thinks the left is bonkers and the right is bonkers, they will stay home. I’m concerned about the middle.”The details of the review in Pennsylvania, where Biden defeated Trump by more than 80,000 votes, are still murky. Last month, senate Republicans voted to subpoena information on every registered voter in the state, including sensitive details such as the last four digits of their social security number. Cris Dush, the Republican senator overseeing the effort, said last month the legislative committee overseeing the investigation said “there have been questions regarding the validity of people … who have voted, whether or not they exist,” according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. He added the committee was seeking to determine whether the allegations were factual. Dush also traveled to Arizona to observe the Maricopa review. (A spokesman for senate Republicans said Dush was unavailable for an interview.)Democrats in the Pennsylvania state senate as well as the attorney general, Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, are suing to block the subpoenas. Senate Democrats argue the request amounts to an effort to contest the election and Shapiro has said it would violate voters’ rights.Perhaps the most perplexing post-election review is happening in Texas. Hours after Trump requested an audit of the 2020 election results, state officials announced they had already begun one in Dallas, Harris, Tarrant and Collin counties, respectively the two largest Democratic-leaning and Republican-leaning counties.When the secretary of state’s office released details of the review days after the announcement, its first phase included several measures counties were already required to perform after the election, the Texas Tribune reported. The second phase of the review, set for spring 2022, includes an examination of several election records, including voter registration lists, chain of custody logs and rejected provisional ballots.Texas Republicans are also advancing a separate piece of legislation that would allow partisan county officials to request an audit of the 2020 election in their county as well as of future election results.Becker, the elections administration expert, said those who backed the audit were making an “outrageous insinuation” that elections don’t matter.“It is delegitimizing democracy as a form of government,” he said. “The election was not close by any historical measure. And these grifters are continuing to sell the story to Trump supporters that you cannot trust elections, that you cannot trust democracy.”TopicsUS newsFight to voteUS voting rightsUS elections 2020RepublicansUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More
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‘They don’t include Native voices’: tribes fight to ensure their votes count
The fight to voteNative Americans‘They don’t include Native voices’: tribes fight to ensure their votes countAs the Native American population grows to the largest in modern history, groups say it’s vital that they organize to make sure they’re not left out of the redistricting process The fight to vote is supported byAbout this contentK More
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How Democrats could actually pass their new voting rights bill | The fight to vote
Fight to voteUS voting rightsHow Democrats could actually pass their new voting rights billDespite the huge obstacle that the filibuster poses, this new bill is significant – Democrats aren’t willing to let voting reform go The fight to vote is supported byAbout this contentSam LevineThu 16 Sep 2021 10.00 EDTLast modified on Thu 16 Sep 2021 13.16 EDTSign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterHappy Thursday,My inbox quickly filled up with statements of support on Tuesday morning after Democrats unveiled the latest iteration of a federal bill that would drastically expand voting rights.The bill, the Freedom to Vote Act, has been described as a “compromise”, hashed out over the summer by a group of Senate Democrats after Republicans filibustered an earlier version of it. But while the bill does get rid of some key things from the initial version, it still is pretty expansive. It would require states to offer at least 15 days of early voting, along with same-day registration, as well as automatic and online registration. It would enshrine new protections for local election officials and poll workers amid growing concerns about intimidation and partisan interference in their work. And it sets new criteria that states have to follow when they draw electoral districts to curb the practice of severely manipulating districts for partisan gain.We’ve been here before. It’s no secret that the bill is probably dead on arrival in the US Senate as long as the filibuster, the rule that requires 60 votes to advance legislation, remains in place. A handful of Democrats, led by Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have vocally supported keeping the measure in place.As I read through the cascade of statements praising the new bill, I was struck by how many of them coupled their enthusiasm with calls to eliminate the filibuster. It was a grim recognition of the quagmire Democrats have confronted since taking control of Congress in January: voting reform is impossible while the filibuster is in place.So where do things go from here?Despite the huge obstacle that the filibuster still poses, I do think this new bill is significant. First, it shows that Democrats aren’t willing to let voting reform go; by coming back so quickly with a new bill, they’re signaling that they are prepared to force a fight over the filibuster.Second, Democrats are showing Republicans that they are willing to make concessions in their signature piece of legislation. They dropped a provision from the earlier version that would have required officials to send absentee ballot applications to all registered voters. They also got rid of a provision that would have required every state to set up independent commissions to draw districts. The new legislation also allows states to require identification to vote while also setting up a process for people who lack ID to vote. These will all up the ante on Republicans to negotiate in good faith.Third, it’s significant that Manchin played an active role in crafting the bill and is now the one shopping it around to get Republican support. That support seems unlikely (“It is a solution in search of a problem, and we will not be supporting that,” Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, said on Tuesday). If Manchin is unable to personally persuade Republicans to sign on, despite the concessions from Democrats, it will only increase pressure on him to revise his stance on the filibuster.Joe Biden also has indicated a new willingness to pressure reluctant Democrats on their filibuster position.‘All options are on the table’Manchin said this week “the filibuster is permanent”. But there are a number of things Democrats could do short of getting rid of the rule entirely. They could carve out voting rights legislation from the filibuster, or lower the threshold needed to advance legislation down from 60 votes. They could also require anyone who wants to filibuster legislation to actually speak continuously on the Senate floor to delay legislation, an idea Biden has endorsed.Whatever Democrats ultimately do, one thing is clear: it needs to happen quickly (Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, has vowed to hold a vote on the measure as soon as next week). States are already beginning the once-a-decade process of redrawing district lines, making it all the more urgent to get the anti-gerrymandering provisions of the bill in place.“We are giving him the opportunity to do that with a bill that he supports and that he modified,” Schumer said of Manchin on Tuesday. “If that doesn’t happen, we will cross that bridge when we come to it. As I’ve said, all options are on the table.”Reader questionsThank you to everyone who wrote in last week with questions. You can continue to write to me each week at sam.levine@theguardian.com or DM me on twitter at @srl and I’ll try and answer as many as I can.Q: I’m originally from France, and don’t get me wrong, I’m not in support of any voting restrictions, however, we’ve always had to show our IDs in order to be able to vote in France, and it’s never really been a problem (I don’t think). So I’m wondering why ID requirements are such a big deal in the US to vote.Unlike many European countries, the US doesn’t automatically issue a free identification card to its citizens. There are some experts I’ve spoken with who believe that if the US did automatically issue free ID cards, a voter ID requirement would be more tolerable. (You can read more on this idea in this recent piece in the Atlantic.)Academic research on voter ID has shown mixed things on the effect it has on overall turnout. Nonetheless, courts in Texas and North Carolina have found in recent years that lawmakers have specifically enacted voter ID requirements intending to discriminate against minority voters.In many cases, the key part of a voter ID measure is not whether ID is required, but what kinds of IDs are acceptable and how easy it is for someone to prove their identity and vote if they don’t have an acceptable ID. In Texas, for example, lawmakers infamously allowed people to vote using a state gun permit, but not a student ID. In North Carolina, lawmakers excluded IDs they knew Black people were more likely to possess from those acceptable to vote.One last point: states often justify ID measures by saying they will offer free ID to anyone who cannot afford one. But that’s somewhat misleading. Even if there is no dollar amount attached to an ID, there’s a time cost for people to gather the documents they need to prove their identity and take the time to go to the DMV to do that.Q: I’m an ignorant Brit with a simple question: how come fair and equally accessible voting isn’t guaranteed in the US constitution?A lot of people are really surprised to learn there’s no guaranteed right to vote in the constitution. The Founding Fathers initially limited voting to a small group of people.Later amendments to the constitution protect access to voting by outlining the reasons why government can’t block people from the ballot box. The 15th amendment, for example, says that government can’t block someone from voting “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude”. As concerns over voter discrimination rise, some scholars believe there should be a renewed push to add an affirmative right to vote to the constitution.TopicsUS voting rightsFight to voteUS politicsDemocratsRepublicansUS SenatefeaturesReuse this content More
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Al Sharpton calls on Biden to fight the filibuster: ‘If we can’t depend on you here, when can we?’
US politicsAl Sharpton calls on Biden to fight the filibuster: ‘If we can’t depend on you here, when can we?’ The veteran civil rights leader is determined to dismantle the centuries-old Senate tool in the battle for voting rights – will Biden join him?Lauren Gambino in Washington@ More
