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      Texas lawmakers race against the clock to push through new voting restrictions

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      Texas lawmakers are racing against the clock this month to ram through legislation that would further restrict voting access, leaning on procedural moves to avoid public testimony and keep 11th-hour negotiations behind closed doors.“No rules are going to contain them. No norms are going to protect us. They’re gonna do whatever they want to, and whatever they can, to get these bills through,” said Emily Eby, staff attorney at the Texas Civil Rights Project.Specious talking points about whether last year’s presidential contest was stolen – propagated and disseminated by Texas’s top Republicans –have created an army of voters who falsely believe that widespread election fraud is a real issue.That, in turn, has ostensibly given politicians a pretext for trumped up reforms at the ballot box, in a state already infamous for being the hardest place to vote nationwide.“There’s not really a big problem with election fraud, right? That’s not actually a huge problem that we need to solve. But the public thinks it is, because they’ve been told that it is,” said Clare Brock, an assistant professor of political science at Texas Woman’s University.Texas legislators have used the lightning rod of “election integrity” this year to introduce at least 49 bills with restrictive voting provisions – the most anywhere in the United States, the Brennan Center for Justice reported.Twenty-nine bills “seek to create new barriers to voting while also creating or enhancing criminal penalties attached to them”, according to data compiled by Progress Texas. Among those, more than three-fourths of the penalties are felonies.When Texas businesses and voters pushed back against the hard-line legislation last month, the state representative Kyle Kacal wouldn’t go so far as to explicitly come out against Senate Bill 7 (SB7), one of the two omnibus bills that have taken center stage this cycle.But he did express skepticism about its provisions, seemingly endorsing practices – like extended voting hours during the pandemic – that his colleagues were actively trying to curb.“I don’t know if the measures that are being talked about are necessary,” Kacal admitted. “I don’t know how much fraud there really is, but people need the opportunity to vote.”Both SB7 and the other high-profile, sweeping proposal, House Bill 6 (HB6), spell a harder and scarier voting process for the state’s most vulnerable residents, while outlawing common sense innovations that Houston’s Harris county tried to implement last year.From broadly silencing public officials who want to proactively solicit or distribute vote-by-mail applications to doing away with drive-thru voting and limiting early voting hours, the suggested changes could disproportionately affect elderly and differently abled Texans, as well as voters of color and city dwellers. The new policies would also embolden partisan poll watchers to police voters, stoking concerns over intimidation tactics after a history of vigilantism.“This is targeted legislation at restricting specific voting practices that occurred in specific places, and a lot of those places are places that leaned Democrat,” Brock said. “Which then makes it feel a lot more like voter suppression and a lot less like voter integrity.”After SB7 advanced through the senate while HB6 dragged, house Republicans used a routine elections committee hearing last week to link the two, circumventing outside input from citizens in the process.Democratic lawmakers and voting rights advocates excoriated the move, which they noted was unwontedly sneaky for legislators who supposedly had a mandate from their constituents.“This is a massive overhaul of the election system in Texas, affecting almost every area of our election code,” said Charlie Bonner, communications director at civic engagement nonprofit Move Texas.“That is something that should be well-considered, and that is something that should go through the full process, and the public have every opportunity to speak out.”Instead, the committee gutted the senate’s text for SB7 and replaced it with a copy of HB6, effectively turning one bill into the other.But, if the House passes that version, any differences between the two chambers’ priorities will likely be reconciled in a conference committee. There, appointees could splice the proposals together for one behemoth, rife with restrictions.Voting rights proponents are already alarmed by the mystery that would shroud those talks, where, they explain, the Republican-controlled legislature could check off their wishlist with no accountability.“I think it is extremely undemocratic. It completely lacks transparency. This is not how democracy and open government are supposed to work,” said Carisa Lopez, political director of the Texas Freedom Network.Critics of SB7 are still holding out hope for errors that could make it procedurally dead by the end of the legislative session later this month. But they’re outraged that stakeholders – who had anticipated another platform to voice their opposition before the bill became law – will no longer get that opportunity.For weeks, impassioned outcry from state residents and Texas-based corporations has already bogged down the controversial reforms, stalling their passage longer than some voting rights advocates originally expected. The public provided more than 17 hours of divided testimony on HB6 alone, according to the Texas Tribune.Meanwhile, local businesses, chambers of commerce and major national companies – including Etsy, American Airlines, Warby Parker, Microsoft and many others – have called on Texas’s elected leaders to oppose any changes that would make it harder to vote.“This is a state in which these lawmakers run every lever of government,” Bonner said.“The fact that we’ve been able to delay – and the fact that we have seen amendments that have reduced the harm of these pieces of legislation – is a testament to the work and the people speaking out.” More

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      Florida governor signs new restrictive bill in ‘blatant attack on right to vote’

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      The Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, has signed a bill imposing new limits on voting by mail and using ballot drop boxes, the latest Republican-backed voting restrictions to become law in a US election battleground state.The White House swiftly criticized the law, saying Florida was “moving in the wrong direction”.The new law restricts the use of absentee ballot drop boxes to the early voting period, adds new identification requirements for requesting such ballots, and requires voters to reapply for absentee ballots in each new general election cycle. Previously, Florida voters only had to apply once every two election cycles.The law also gives partisan election observers more power to raise objections and requires people offering voters assistance to stay at least 150ft (45 meters) away from polling places, an increase from the previous 100ft radius.The deputy White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, blamed the new voting restrictions on Donald Trump’s “Big Lie” – the baseless assertion that there was widespread fraud in the presidential election.“There is no legitimate reason to change the rules right now to make it harder to vote,” Jean-Pierre said. “The only reason to change the rules right now is if you don’t like who voted. And that should be out of bounds.”Republican legislators in dozens of states have pursued measures to restrict voting rights in the aftermath of former president Donald Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him through widespread voting fraud. Lawmakers in the Texas house of representatives were poised on Thursday to advance sweeping new voting limits despite opposition from numerous businesses.Minutes after DeSantis signed the law, the League of Women Voters of Florida and two other civil rights groups sued Florida’s 67 counties to try to block the new restrictions. They are represented by Marc Elias, a Democratic lawyer who also sued Georgia over voting limits the state passed in March.The Florida branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Disability Rights Florida and the good government group Common Cause also sued the state on Thursday, arguing the limits would disproportionately hurt Black, Latino and disabled voters.Derrick Johnson, president and CEO of the NAACP, called the move a “blatant and calculated attack on the right to vote” and a “horrifying reminder” of the “fragility of democracy”.Republican lawmakers have cited the unfounded claims made by Trump, a Florida absentee voter himself, after his decisive loss to Joe Biden.Judges rejected such claims in more than 60 lawsuits that failed to overturn the election result. Lawmakers in Republican-controlled states, including Georgia, Texas and Arizona, nevertheless proposed legislation they said was necessary to curb voter fraud, which is extremely rare in the United States.Local news outlets were barred from DeSantis’s signing of the bill on Thursday. The governor, who is expected to soon announce his re-election campaign, instead gave Fox News an “exclusive” of the event.“It was on national TV, it wasn’t secret,” DeSantis told reporters.The governor’s unusual decision to grant only Fox access to the event prompted complaints from journalists that DeSantis was preventing the public from witnessing crucial government business.DeSantis acknowledged in February that Florida had “held the smoothest, most successful election of any state in the country”, but said new limits on absentee ballots were needed to safeguard election integrity.DeSantis, who signed the law in an appearance on the Fox News Channel show Fox & Friends, said, “Me signing this bill here says, ‘Florida, your vote counts, your vote is going to be cast with integrity and transparency.’”Mail-in ballots or absentee ballots were used by Democratic voters in greater numbers than Republicans in the 2020 election, as many people avoided in-person voting during the coronavirus pandemic.Florida Republicans used mail-in voting slightly more than Democrats in the 2014, 2016 and 2018 general elections. But in November, Democrats submitted 2.2m mail-in ballots compared with 1.5m from Republicans, state records show, after Trump falsely asserted for months that mail voting was rife with fraud.In March, Georgia’s Republican governor signed a law that tightened absentee ballot identification requirements, restricted ballot drop-box use and allowed a Republican-controlled state agency to take over local voting operations.Democrats and voting rights advocates sued Georgia over the measure, saying it was aimed at disenfranchising Black voters, who helped propel Biden to the presidency and deliver Democrats two US Senate victories in Georgia in January that gave them control of the chamber. Top US companies also decried Georgia’s law, and Major League Baseball moved its all-star game out of the state in protest. More

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      Florida lawmakers pass new voting restrictions mirroring Georgia and Michigan

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      The Florida legislature has passed tight new voting restrictions, placing the crucial swing state at the forefront of a nationwide wave of Republican efforts to suppress turnout on the back of Donald Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him.The bill, which closely mirrors similar Republican ploys in Georgia and Michigan, is likely to make it more difficult for millions of voters to have their democratic say. The new barriers to voting are expected to particularly impact minority communities.The legislation introduces a plethora of new hurdles to voting by mail in the wake of the surge in mail-in voting by Democrats in the 2020 election. It also imposes restrictions on providing water to citizens standing in line to cast their ballot.Black lawmakers expressed dismay when the bill passed on Thursday night. The Democratic representative Angela Nixon said she was “distraught and disheartened”, the Washington Post reported.“You are making policies that are detrimental to our communities,” she told her Republican peers.Fellow Democratic lawmaker Anna Eskamani told the Miami Herald: “We had, as the Republican governor said, one of the best operated elections in the country, and yet today, the majority party through last minute maneuvers passed a voter suppression bill.”As Eskamani highlighted, the move by Florida Republicans to clamp down on voting is especially awkward, even by the contorted logic that the Republican party has deployed in states across the country. The restrictions were passed in the name of “voter integrity”, following the former president’s false claim that there was widespread fraud in the 2020 election.Yet in Florida, Republicans boasted – and continue to boast – about how well the presidential race was conducted. Trump won the traditional battleground state, which commands a critical 29 electoral college votes, by about 3%.Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, was caught by his own contradictory rationale when he told Fox News on Thursday night that he would now sign the bill into law. “So we think we led the nation,” he said, referring to how the 2020 ballot went in his state, “but we’re trying to stay ahead of the curve to make sure that these elections are run well.”Florida’s attack on voting rights forms part of a staggering assault by Republicans on the heart of American democracy. According to the Brennan Center, which monitors voting rights, about 361 bills containing restrictive provisions have been introduced in what its analysts call “a backlash to 2020’s historic voter turnout, under the pretense of responding to baseless and racist allegations of voter fraud”.The Florida bill focuses especially on voting by mail. It targets the use of drop boxes in which mail ballots can be deposited, and forces voters to reapply for mail ballots every two years rather than four – a move which critics fear will sow confusion and suppress turnout.The attack on mail-in voting is ironic given that the state has a long track-record of using that electoral method without any notable challenges. In several previous cycles, mail-in voting was used predominantly by Republican voters with no objections raised.But in 2020 there was a steep increase in Democratic voters who turned to casting their ballots by mail as a safety measure in the pandemic. Out of a total of more than 11m Floridians who voted in the presidential race, almost 5m did so by mail – about 44%.Suddenly, the practice of voting by mail has become a threat to voter integrity, according to the Republican party. More

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      Why a filibuster showdown in the US Senate is unavoidable

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      Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterHappy Thursday,During Joe Biden’s first 100 days in office, there are few issues more pressing than the escalating attack on the right to vote in America. Democrats may be running out of time to address it.As Republicans have pushed more than 360 bills across the country to restrict access to the ballot, the president and Democrats have strongly condemned those efforts, but they’ve been unable to stop them. Even though Democrats control both chambers of Congress in Washington, they can’t pass a sweeping voting rights bill because they don’t have enough votes to get rid of the filibuster, an arcane senate rule that requires 60 votes to advance legislation. A showdown over the filibuster has loomed over the first 100 days of the Biden administration, but during the next 100 days, it’s clear that a showdown over getting rid of the procedure is unavoidable.Amanda Litman, the executive director of the Run for Something, a group that recruits candidates for state legislative races, told me this week she thinks some Democrats still don’t fully appreciate how dangerous and consequential the GOP’s ongoing efforts are. “This is really an existential crisis. It’s a five-alarm fire. But I’m not sure it’s quite sunk in for members of the United States Senate or the Democratic party writ large,” she told me.“If the Senate does not kill the filibuster and pass voting rights reforms … Democrats are going to lose control of the House and likely the Senate forever. You don’t put these worms back into a can. You can’t undo this quite easily,” she added.Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader in the Senate, last week set August as a deadline for Democrats to pass their sweeping voting rights bill, which would require early voting, automatic and same-day registration, among other measures. Ron Klain, Biden’s chief of staff, said the White House supports that effort.But the window for Democrats to have the most impact with their legislation is rapidly closing. The decennial process of redrawing district lines is set to take place later this year, and a critical portion of the Democratic bill would set new limits to prevent state lawmakers, who have the power to draw the maps, from severely manipulating districts for partisan gain. While it’s probably already too late to set up independent redistricting commissions for this year, Democrats could still pass rules to prevent the most severe partisan manipulation.“You could pass new criteria, including a ban on partisan gerrymandering…require greater transparency in the process,” Michael Li, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center for Justice, told me. “There’s a lot that could be done.”I also asked the Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat who chairs the Senate committee currently considering the bill, what kind of message it would send if Democrats failed to take any action to protect voting rights while they held the reins of government. “Failure is not an option,” she said, adding she wasn’t going to let the filibuster stand in the way.“This is our very democracy that’s at stake,” she said. “I’m not gonna let some old senate rule get in the way of that.”Also worth watching …
      My colleague Tom Perkins and I reported on a particularly anti-democratic effort underway in Michigan, where Republicans have already hinted they plan to utilize a little-used maneuver to get around a gubernatorial veto and enact voting restrictions.
      The Census Bureau announced its long-awaited apportionment totals on Monday that determine which states gain and lose seats in Congress. Colorado, Montana, Oregon, North Carolina, and Florida will all gain a seat and Texas will add two. California, Illinois, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia will all lose a seat. More

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      The next major US voting rights fight is here – and Republicans are ahead

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      Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterThe next major fight over voting rights in the US kicked off Monday: a hugely consequential battle over the boundaries of electoral districts for the next 10 years that will have profound implications for American politics. And Republicans seem to be pulling ahead.Census officials released a decennial tally of people living in the US, a number that’s used to apportion the House’s 435 seats among the 50 states. The Census Bureau announced that Colorado, Montana, Oregon, North Carolina and Florida will all gain an additional seat in the House, while Texas will get two more. Seven states – California, California, Illinois, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia – will lose a seat.The numbers accentuated what many have predicted for months: Republicans are extremely well positioned to draw districts that will give them an advantage both in their effort to reclaim control of the US House in the 2022 midterms, and cement control over congressional seats for the next decade.The constitution gives state lawmakers the power to draw districts and, because of their continued strength in state legislative races, Republicans will dominate the process later this year and can manipulate the lines to their advantage, a process often called gerrymandering.Even though Democrats earned about 4.7m more votes in 2020 House races around the country, Republicans will have control over the drawing of 187 congressional districts later this year (down from 219 in 2011) while Democrats will have complete control over the drawing of 75 districts (up from 44 a decade ago), according to the Cook Political Report.Republicans need to win just five seats to retake control of the US House of Representatives, a gap observers believe they can wipe out with gerrymandering alone. Eric Holder, the former US attorney general, told reporters Wednesday he was concerned Republicans could use their complete control of the redistricting process in Texas, Georgia, Florida, and North Carolina alone to overcome that gap.“What we’re seeing is a Republican party that has shown they’re willing to bend or break the rules of democracy simply to hold on to power,” said Holder, who is leading the Democratic effort to push back on excessive GOP gerrymandering. “If Republicans gerrymander those states, as they have indicated they will, they will have the ability there, almost to take control of the House of Representatives just based on what they do in those four states.”In 2019, the US supreme court said for the first time that federal courts could not do anything to stop severe manipulation of district lines for partisan gain. One lingering uncertainty is whether Democrats in Congress will be able to pass pending federal legislation to place new limits on the practice. Passing that legislation, however, requires getting rid of the filibuster, a Senate rule requiring 60 votes to advance legislation. Democrats do not yet have the votes to get rid of the procedure.“You could pass new criteria, including a ban on partisan gerrymandering … require greater transparency in the process,” said Michael Li, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center for Justice. “There’s a lot that could be done.”Because of a 2013 supreme court ruling, states with a history of voting discrimination, like Texas and North Carolina, will not have to get their maps approved by the federal government before they go into effect. That leaves an opportunity for lawmakers to draw maps that discriminate based on race. Kathay Feng, the national redistricting and representation director at Common Cause, a government watchdog group, warned that voting advocates would be closely monitoring for that kind of discrimination. Much of the America’s population growth over the last decade has come from non-white people.“Our top priority is ensuring that states that are adding congressional seats recognize the population growth fueled by communities of color in the upcoming redistricting process,” Feng said in a statement.As federal legislation stalls, Democrats are already signaling they will move aggressively in court to challenge gerrymandering. Shortly after the apportionment numbers were released, Holder’s group filed three separate lawsuits in Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Louisiana – states where Democrats and Republicans share control of the redistricting process – asking courts to be prepared to step in if lawmakers reach an impasse. Such quick machinations are crucial because the redistricting process is moving on a condensed timeline this year because of delays releasing data due to the Covid-19 pandemic.Marc Elias, a top Democratic election lawyer, said this week more lawsuits are likely to follow.While the Republicans made possible gains, the biggest surprise of the Census Bureau’s Monday’s announcement was that it didn’t result in more of a shift for the party. Projections based on population estimates had predicted Texas would gain three seats and Florida would gain two. Arizona, where districts are drawn by an independent commission, was expected to gain a seat, but ended up not doing so. Minnesota and Rhode Island were both projected to lose seats, and New York could have lost an additional seat.“Overall, the population shifts to the the south will definitely benefit Republicans, but definitely not as much as people were expecting, just because they got fewer seats,” Li said.It’s not unusual for the final tallies to be slightly off from apportionment, but Li said he was surprised to see the kind of variation there was this year. There is some concern that the variation in the data may signal an undercount of Hispanic population, especially after the Trump administration repeatedly tried to tamper with the process. Bureau officials said Monday they are confident in the data.Holder told reporters on Tuesday that it was impossible to separate the upcoming battle over redistricting from an aggressive GOP effort underway in state legislatures to restrict access to the voting booth.“I have no doubt that the same Republican legislators that have pushed these bills will now try and use the redistricting process to illegitimately lock in power for that party, for them, for the next decade,” he said. More

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      Why Michigan Republicans’ attack on voting rights is ‘particularly anti-democratic’

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      Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterOn the surface, the Republican effort to roll back voting rights in Michigan looks similar to what’s happening in states around the country: after Donald Trump narrowly lost a key battleground state where there was record turnout, Republicans are moving swiftly to implement sweeping restrictions to curtail access to the ballot box.But the effort is raising unique concerns. Even though the Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, is likely to veto a package of dozens of pending bills to curb voter access, Republicans are already hinting they will use a loophole to implement the measures anyway. They can take advantage of a quirk in Michigan’s law allowing voters to send a bill to the legislature if just over 340,000 voters sign a petition asking them to take it up. These kinds of bills cannot be vetoed by the governor.“This effort is particularly anti-democratic, not just in substance, but in procedure,” said the Michigan secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat who serves as the state’s top election official.The proposals include measures that are breathtakingly restrictive, even when held up in comparison to other measures states are considering. One bill bans Michigan’s secretary of state not only from mailing out absentee ballot applications to all voters, but also blocks her from even providing a link on a state website to a mail-in ballot application. Another proposal does not allow voters to use absentee ballot drop boxes after 5pm the day before election day. A different measure would require voters to make a photocopy of their ID and mail it in to vote by mail.The effort is being closely monitored in a state known for razor-thin elections and where Donald Trump and allies tried to overturn the result in 2020. Republicans are moving aggressively to put the new voting restrictions in place ahead of the 2022 elections, when there are races for governor, attorney general and secretary of state. Michigan also has several key swing congressional districts that will help determine who controls the US House of Representatives in Washington.The new restrictions are also urgent for Republicans because they are about to lose one of their most powerful advantages in the state legislature. A decade ago, Republicans manipulated the boundaries of electoral districts in such a way that virtually guaranteed they would hold a majority of seats. That manipulation, called gerrymandering, has allowed Republicans to control the legislature since 2011.But in 2018, voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure to strip lawmakers of their ability to draw districts, giving the power to an independent commission. With the commission set to draw new districts later this year, the new restrictions may be Republicans’ last-ditch attempt to distort voting rules to give them an edge in elections.“Everything from January 6 forward is about 2022 and ultimately 2024. I believe we should plan for and anticipate that the very forces that emerged in 2020 to try to undermine democracy will be back in full force, potentially stronger, in more positions of authority, to try again in 2024,” Benson said.In 2018, Michigan voters overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment to expand voting by mail in the state. Now Republicans, more powerful thanks to their manipulated districts, are seeking to undo those reforms, Benson said.“What you have here is legislators, elected through gerrymandered districts, using that power and those seats to reach out to a very small, small portion of Michigan registered voters and use them to justify overturning the will of millions of Michigan citizens who quite clearly want these policies in place and who quite clearly oppose the very policies that the Republicans are promoting,” she said.“It makes it harder for every person and it’s really only supported by 340,000 people,” said Nancy Wang, the executive director of Voters Not Politicians, a civic action group in Michigan that was behind the 2018 anti-gerrymandering effort. “It’s the tyranny of the minority, but in such extreme, it’s shocking.Critics say the proposed laws would put up nearly insurmountable barriers for some residents who are elderly, low-income, disabled or face other challenges. Rachel Rion, 87, lives in Westland, a suburb of Detroit, and has relied on mailing absentee ballots in recent elections.She said the law that would require a photocopy of her identification to be mailed in with her ballot presents a problem because she doesn’t drive, doesn’t understand the rule change and doesn’t know where to get a photocopy made or how to use a copy machine.She also gave the example of a friend who is battling cancer and who is too sick to get out of bed, let alone deal with photocopies.“How would she vote?” Rion asked. “I really hope they don’t push through those laws. It really would be hard for us.”Chris Swope, the city clerk responsible for overseeing elections in Lansing, the state capital, said there was “not much good” in the package of bills Republicans are proposing. Many voters who use drop boxes, he said, return their ballots on election day and the GOP proposal would take away that option entirely.The party has cited a lack of trust in elections as their motivation, but “the lack of confidence was caused by people lying because they lost and couldn’t face that”, he said. “I don’t think you overreact to that by making it harder for everyone to vote when you still had 30% of people who didn’t vote at all.”Republicans have repeatedly used the veto-dodging loophole in recent decades to circumvent opposition from Whitmer and the former GOP governor Rick Snyder. Since 1987, the anti-abortion group Right to Life has used it to push through initiatives to ban public funds from being used to pay for abortions for welfare recipients, require parental consent before a minor can get an abortion, define a legal birth and require women to purchase a health insurance rider for an abortion, dubbed “rape insurance”.Republicans dealt a blow to unions when they used the procedure in 2016 to repeal the state’s prevailing wage law, and in the coming weeks it could be used to strip Whitmer of her emergency order powers used to lock down the state during the pandemic.The Republican party is likely to turn to an activist network developed and still in place from the emergency order initiative, and the state’s loose laws around dark money will allow donors to contribute without fear of blowback.“You need people who are highly motivated, have the ground game, and people who have money, and every indication is, boy, Republicans have those things there in spades,” said Bill Ballenger, a Michigan political analyst.However, the process isn’t foolproof, and Democrats say they plan to use every tool to derail the effort. A 2018 Right to Life campaign would have banned abortions after six weeks, but it failed when the secretary of state found a high number of invalid signatures. Meanwhile, the petition to strip Whitmer’s emergency orders faces a possible legal challenge.If a voting restrictions package moves forward, Democrats would probably first mount a “decline to sign” campaign to drum up opposition during Republicans’ signature-collection process, said Mark Brewer, a state constitutional attorney and former head of the Michigan Democratic party. They would also challenge the signatures turned into the secretary of state, who has already voiced strong opposition to the proposed laws and could slow the process. “There will be a very concerted effort to ensure that any citizen who signs any potential effort like this knows exactly what they’re signing so we eliminate the opportunity for deception, which has been an issue in the past, repeatedly,” Benson said.Democrats could also challenge the laws’ constitutionality in the courts, and a counter ballot initiative is also possible, though the logistics are difficult in terms of timing and language. If both measures are approved, the Michigan supreme court, controlled by a 4-3 Democratic majority, decides which elements of each become law.As lawmakers across the country move hundreds of bills to restrict voter access, stopping the new Michigan restrictions would send a powerful message, Benson said.“If we can overcome this attack on our freedom to vote, and we have many pieces in place to do that, we can be a story of that as opposed to the Georgia story,” where the governor signed a package of restrictions into law in March. “The actions we take now will set the stage for what is attempted in the future.” More

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      Republican lawyer is key player in voter suppression drive across US

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      It was an abrupt end to two decades as a partner at legal giant Foley & Lardner for the influential and conservative election lawyer Cleta Mitchell.Days after Mitchell participated in Donald Trump’s controversial 2 January phone call with Georgia’s secretary of state where the then president pressured him to “find” him more votes to reverse Joe Biden’s win, Mitchell resigned her post in the midst of an internal firm review and mounting criticism.But Mitchell, a combative and top lawyer in the right’s drive to promote unproven charges of sizable voting fraud in 2020 and tighten future voting laws, was not idle for long. She has now emerged in a series of roles that have put her at the heart of what many see as a ferocious Republican push on limiting voting rights that now reaches across America.Last month, Mitchell was tapped by the libertarian FreedomWorks to spearhead a $10m drive in seven key states including Georgia, Arizona and Michigan to change voting laws to curb potential but unproven election fraud, which many Democrats and legal experts view as aimed at limiting minority votes.According to a FreedomWorks spokesman, another key part of Mitchell’s mission leading its “National Election Protection Initiative”, is to rally opposition to a House-passed bill that in part would expand voting rights nationally which its sponsors see as necessary to counter the conservative assaults on voting rights in many states.Georgia last month enacted a law that makes voting tougher with new curbs on absentee ballots and on voters in heavily Democratic urban and suburban areas, sparking lawsuits from civil rights and liberal groups, plus a sharp attack from Biden.FreedomWorks’ president, Adam Brandon, has hailed Mitchell as “an outspoken advocate and voice of reason for improved election laws, especially during the chaotic 2020 election cycle”, and dubbed her “our guide”, chairing its election initiative, which will also include training and deploying activists in the states to monitor election procedures.Likewise, the Trump-allied Conservative Partnership Institute last month recruited Mitchell as a “senior fellow” with a similar mission. Mitchell told the AP she is working to “coordinate” conservative views on voting to bolster opposition to the House passed voting rights legislation that is pending in the Senate.Mitchell’s FreedomWorks and CPI projects come even as a Georgia DA in Fulton county is looking into whether Trump and others broke laws in pressuring Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to find enough votes to block Biden’s win. On that call, Mitchell claimed she had evidence of voting fraud, but officials with Raffensperger’s office disagreed and faulted her data.Some voting rights lawyers say Mitchell could face scrutiny over her role in the call.Gerry Hebert, who spent over two decades as a senior attorney at the Justice Department’s voting rights section, said in an interview Trump’s actions and words constituted “election interference [and] violated both state law and federal law, and he should be held accountable”.Mitchell “reportedly interjected multiple times during the call in which she tried to support Trump’s allegations of fraud”, he said. “Her role in that call may well be part of the investigation” by the Georgia DA. Hebert added the state bar to which Mitchell belongs “has a responsibility to determine if she committed any violation of the legal ethics rules in that state.Reached by phone, Mitchell declined to comment on her work for the two conservative outfits, or the Georgia inquiry into Trump’s call and whether she might face scrutiny.Historically, the 70-year-old Mitchell has done legal work for many key players on the right including the National Rifle Association where she previously was on the board. A former Democrat and member of the Oklahoma legislature, Mitchell in the 1990s switched parties and moved to DC, where she has given legal counsel to many GOP candidates, campaign committees and non-profits.Mitchell’s new roles with FreedomWorks and CPI underscore the right’s goal of swaying future election results with more voting curbs. The conservative blitz to tighten voting laws in which Heritage Action for America is a key player too, is being fueled by tens of millions of dollars, coupled with allegations that Trump as well as Mitchell and conservative allies have spread about unproven widespread voter fraud in the last elections.In post-election radio interviews, Mitchell has escalated her rhetoric charging that Raffensperger is a “pathological liar” and attacking some GOP leaders in Georgia as “morally bankrupt”, according to the watchdog group Documented.In another radio segment, Mitchell said that last September she told Trump and his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, there was a “massive effort to steal the election”.More recently, Mitchell told the AP that she and Trump have been in contact “fairly frequently”, but declined to provide details.Meanwhile, other right leaning groups with which Mitchell has had good ties are engaged in campaigns that seem to overlap those of FreedomWorks and CPI to limit voting rights.For example, Mitchell told the AP: “I’ve been working with state legislatures for several years to get them to pay attention to what I call the political process.”To be sure, Mitchell prior to the election served as outside counsel and helped coordinate a major voting law initiative for the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec), an influential group of conservative state legislators which promotes model bills for states. Alec has reportedly been increasingly active this year in pushing its ideas for changing voting laws.Known as well connected in conservative big money circles, Mitchell also serves on the board of the deep pocketed Lynde & Harry Bradley Foundation, a top donor to many rightwing groups including Alec to which it gave $750,000 dollars in 2020, records show.Further, Mitchell has attended meetings of the famously secretive Council for National Policy, an influential rightwing group that boasts top donors, evangelical leaders and prominent conservatives like FreedomWorks’ Brandon.At a CNP national meeting in mid November one panel featured Mitchell, Christian Adams the president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation (Pilf), and other lawyers discussing “Election results and legal battles: What now?”Mitchell, who also chairs Pilf, which received $300,000 in 2020 from the Bradley foundation, has indicated it could get active in the legal battles over the new Georgia law.To be sure, some conservatives voice doubts about Mitchell’s legal acumen. An ex senior NRA official who knows Mitchell quipped her views are on the “fringe of the fringe”.And one prominent GOP voting rights lawyer said Mitchell “tells clients what they want to hear regardless of law or reality”. The lawyer predicted Mitchell “will get scrutiny, but probably won’t be charged” in the Georgia DA’s inquiry. More

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      Fight to vote: Arizona county’s ‘ludicrous’ election audit

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      Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterHappy Thursday,The baseless conspiracy theories that Donald Trump spread about the 2020 election are about to have some of their starkest real-world consequences to date in Arizona.Republicans in the Arizona state senate are set to begin an unprecedented audit of the presidential vote in Maricopa county, the most populous of the state, this week. Part of the audit will consist of a hand recount of all 2.1m votes cast for president there.Voting rights advocates told me they’re deeply concerned about the audit for a few reasons. First, they said, Maricopa county has already performed two audits of the election and found no irregularities in the vote. Second, the effort is being led by a Florida-based firm with a CEO who voiced support for election conspiracies after the election. Third, the audit will probably only breathe new life into Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 race in Arizona.Republicans in the legislature will likely use that uncertainty to justify new voting restrictions. One expert I spoke with said the entire effort seemed so shoddy that he was hesitant to even call it an “audit”.“It’s ludicrous,” the Arizona secretary of state, Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, told me this week. “We cannot set a precedent where people that are mad can just bring this on every election. It’s just not how we do things.”There are a ton of other important concerns. Private donors, reportedly including rightwing lawyer L Lin Wood, are helping finance the effort. And a spokesman for the audit told a reporter for the Arizona Mirror this week that there would be significant restrictions in place for reporters who covered the event.The Maricopa county board of supervisors, which is controlled by Republicans, isn’t on board with the effort. It agreed to turn over ballots and election equipment after Republicans got a court order, but refused to allow the audit to take place in a county-owned facility. Republicans are now paying to rent out an entire stadium to conduct the audit.“This audit, it seems as if they are seeking a predetermined outcome. They want to find fraud,” said Martin Quezada, a Democrat in the state senate. “They need to find fraud in order to justify all of their actions and in order to keep this radical wing of their constituency happy. They need to find fraud. So they are intent on finding it.”Also worth watching …
      The Senate confirmed Vanita Gupta to be the associate attorney general, placing one of the nation’s leading civil rights lawyers in the number three role at the justice department.
      Florida Republicans are advancing legislation to impose new restrictions on mail-in voting, despite objections from election officials across the state, including Republicans. The move to curtail mail-in voting in Florida is notable because the state has been held up as a national example – including by Trump – of how to successfully run a vote-by-mail system.
      Montana Republicans enacted a law that ends same-day voter registration in the state and another that tightens ID requirements for voting. Democrats are already challenging the measure. More