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      Fight to vote: why US democracy is at a tipping point – video

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      The new Georgia voting rights law makes it harder to vote, especially for communities that tend to vote for Democrats – and that’s what Republicans want. But it’s not just Georgia: these restrictive voting laws are being considered in nearly every state in America, from Arizona to Texas to Florida.
      These efforts come on the heels of the 2020 presidential election, which Republicans lost by slim margins in several states. Many Republicans claimed they lost because of voter fraud – because people who were ineligible to vote found a way to skirt the rules and cast ballots. Election officials around the nation said there was no widespread fraud, but Republicans are using this argument to push for a wide array of laws that will skew election in their favor.
      If enacted, Americans will have to ask a hard question: is the US still a democracy?
      Alvin Chang and Sam Levine explain this Republican effort to suppress voting rights as part of the Guardian’s Fight to Vote series More

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      Clyburn offers Manchin history lesson to clear Senate path for Biden reforms

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      Jim Clyburn, the House majority whip, said on Sunday he intends to give Joe Manchin a lesson in US history as he attempts to clear a path for Joe Biden on voting rights and infrastructure.Manchin, a moderate Democratic senator from West Virginia, has emerged as a significant obstacle to the president’s ambitious proposals by insisting he will not vote to reform or end the Senate filibuster, which demands a super-majority for legislation to pass, to allow key measures passage through the 50-50 chamber on a simple majority basis.His stance has drawn praise from Republicans: Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, hailed Manchin as the politician “almost singlehandedly preserving the Senate”.But Democrats appear to be losing patience – and none more vociferously than Clyburn.“I’m going to remind the senator exactly why the Senate came into being,” Clyburn, from South Carolina, told CNN’s State of the Union, refreshing criticism of Manchin that has included saying he feels “insulted” by his refusal to fully embrace voting rights reform.“The Senate was not always an elective office. The moment we changed and made it an elective office [was because] the people thought a change needed to be made.“The same thing goes for the filibuster. The filibuster was put in place to extend debate and give time to bring people around to a point of view. The filibuster was never put in place to suppress voters … It was there to make sure that minorities in this country have constitutional rights and not be denied.”Clyburn has assailed Manchin for promoting a bipartisan approach to voting rights and refusing to endorse the For the People Act, a measure passed by the US House and intended to counter restrictive voting laws targeting minorities proposed by Republicans in 47 states and passed in Georgia last month.“You’re going to say it’s more important for you to protect 50 Republicans in the Senate than for you to protect your fellow Democrat’s seat in Georgia? That’s a bunch of crap,” Clyburn told Huffpost this month, referring to Senator Raphael Warnock’s 2022 re-election battle that supporters feel has become much harder due to the new voting laws.On Sunday Clyburn also reached into history to repeat his contention that the Georgia law is “the new Jim Crow”, a claim repeated by Biden but which Republicans say is unfair.“When we first started determining who was eligible to vote and who was not,” Clyburn said, “they were property owners. They knew that people of colour, people coming out of slavery did not own property.“…And then they went from that to having disqualifiers. And they picked those offences that were more apt to be committed by people of colour to disqualify voters.“The whole history in the south of putting together those who are eligible to vote is based upon the practices and the experiences of people based upon their race. So, I would say to anybody, ‘Come on, just look at the history … and you will know that what is taking place today is a new Jim Crow. It’s just that simple.”Despite the urging of Clyburn and others, Manchin remains steadfast in his belief bipartisanship is Biden’s best path to implementing his agenda. In a CNN interview last week, the senator said the 6 January insurrection at the US Capitol “changed me”, and said he wanted to use his power as a swing vote in the 50-50 Senate “to make a difference” by working with Republicans and Democrats.“Something told me, ‘Wait a minute. Pause. Hit the pause button.’ Something’s wrong. You can’t have this many people split to where they want to go to war with each other,” he said, of watching a riot mounted by supporters of Donald Trump seeking to overturn his election defeat on the grounds it was caused by voter fraud – a lie without legal standing.Manchin said he had a good relationship with the White House and wanted to meet Warnock and Georgia’s other Democratic senator, Jon Ossoff, to discuss voting rights.On Sunday, Clyburn said the riot also had “a tremendous effect” on him.“When I saw that Capitol policeman complain about how many times he was called the N-word by those people, who were insurrectionists out there, when I see [the civil rights leader] John Lewis’s photo torn to pieces and scattered on the floor, that told me everything I need to know about those insurrectionists, and I will remind anybody who reflects on 6 January to think about these issues as well,” he said.Clyburn was among the first major figures to endorse Biden last year, helping nurse him through bleak times after rejections in early primaries.The congressman has Biden’s ear and in an interview with the Guardian in December promised to keep pressure on his friend to fulfill a promise in his victory speech directed to African Americans: “They always have my back, and I’ll have yours.”“I think he will,” Clyburn said. “I’m certainly going to work hard to make sure that he remembers that he said it.” More

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      ‘Putin-style democracy’: how Republicans gerrymander the map

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      Republicans believe they have a great chance to win control of the US House of Representatives in 2022, needing a swing of about six seats to depose Nancy Pelosi as speaker and derail Joe Biden’s agenda.To help themselves over the top, they are advancing voter suppression laws in almost every state, hoping to minimize Democratic turnout.But Republicans are also preparing another, arguably more powerful tool, which experts believe could let them take control of the House without winning a single vote beyond their 2020 tally, or for that matter blocking a single Democratic voter.That tool is redistricting – the redrawing of congressional boundaries, undertaken once every 10 years – and Republicans have unilateral control of it in a critical number of states.“Public sentiment in 2020 favored Democrats, and Democrats retained control of the House of Representatives,” said Samuel Wang, a professor of neuroscience and director of the Princeton gerrymandering project. “[But] because of reapportionment and redistricting, those factors would be enough to cause a change in control of the House even if public opinion were not to change at all.”While redistricting gives politicians in some states the opportunity to redraw political boundaries, reapportionment means there are more districts to play with. After each US census, each of the 50 states is awarded a share of the 435 House seats based on population. States gain or lose seats in the process.The threat of extreme gerrymandering is more acute today than it has ever beenOwing to population growth, Republican states including Texas, Florida and North Carolina are expected to gain seats before 2022, although the breakdown has not been finalized, with the 2020 census delayed by the coronavirus pandemic.Republican-controlled legislatures will have the power to wedge the new districts almost wherever they see fit, with a freedom they would not have enjoyed only 10 years ago, owing to a pair of controversial supreme court rulings.“The threat of extreme gerrymandering is more acute today than it has ever been because of the combination of an abandonment of oversight by the courts and the Department of Justice, combined with new supercomputing powers,” said Josh Silver, director of Represent.us. The non-partisan group issued a report this month warning that dozens of states “have an extreme or high threat of having their election districts rigged for the next decade”.“Frankly,” Silver said, “what we’re seeing around gerrymandering by the authoritarian wing of the Republican party is part of the Putin-style managed democracy they are promoting – that combination of voter suppression and gerrymandering.”Rules for who controls redistricting vary from state to state. The process can involve state legislatures acting alone, governors or independent commissions. Maps are meant to stand for 10 years, although they are subject to legal challenges that can result in their being thrown out.The new Republican gerrymandering efforts are expected to focus on urban areas in southern states that are home to a disproportionate number of voters of color – meaning those voters are more likely to be disenfranchised.In Texas, mapmakers could try to add districts to the growing population centers of Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth without increasing representation of the minority and Democratic voters who account for that growth. In Florida they might add Republican voters to a growing Democratic district north of Orlando. In North Carolina, where the Democratic governor is shut out of the process, Republican mapmakers might seek to add a district in the Democratic-leaning Research Triangle, in a way that elects more Republicans.Republicans could also seek to repay voters of colors in Atlanta who boosted Biden to victory and drove the defeat of two Republican senators in special elections in Georgia in January, by cracking and packing those voters into new districts.“Republicans could net pick up one seat by rearranging the lines around Black people and other Democrats in the Atlanta area,” Wang said.Racial gerrymandering – or using race as the central criterion for drawing district lines, as opposed to party identification or some other signifier – remains vulnerable to federal court challenges, unlike gerrymandering along partisan lines, which was declared “beyond the reach of the federal courts” by the supreme court chief justice, John Roberts, in 2019.A separate decision by Roberts’s court, in Shelby County v Holder from 2013, is seen as adding to the likelihood of gerrymandering. The ruling released counties with acute histories of racial discrimination against voters from federal oversight imposed by the 1965 Voting Rights Act. That means that in 2021, some southern legislators will draw district boundaries without such oversight for the first time in 50 years.‘Much more national awareness’Potential legal challenges aside, the success of Republican mapmakers is not a given. Turnout in future elections – higher or lower – could foil expectations based on historic patterns. The partisan mix of voters in any district can change unpredictably. And stretching a map to wring out an extra seat could leave incumbents vulnerable.Public awareness of such anti-democratic efforts has grown, said Wang, since a 2010 Republican effort called Redmap harvested dozens of “extra” seats.“There’s much more national awareness of gerrymandering,” Wang said. “And citizen groups are now much more in the mix than they were 10 years ago.”Silver said the gerrymandering threat has redoubled the urgency of advancing voting rights legislation that passed the US House but has stalled in the Senate.“This is why we have to pass the For the People Act, which is federal legislation that with one pen stroke by the president would create independent commissions in all 50 states, end voter suppression and restore representative democracy in the United States,” he said.“We have to stop gerrymandering, or there will be no representative democracy in America, period – only preordained and symbolic election results.” More

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      Republican ‘attacks’ on corporations over voting rights bills are a hypocritical sham | Robert Reich

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      For four decades, the basic deal between big American corporations and politicians has been simple. Corporations provide campaign funds. Politicians reciprocate by lowering corporate taxes and doing whatever else corporations need to boost profits.The deal has proven beneficial to both sides, although not to the American public. Campaign spending has soared while corporate taxes have shriveled.In the 1950s, corporations accounted for about 40% of federal revenue. Today, they contribute a meager 7%. Last year, more than 50 of the largest US companies paid no federal income taxes at all. Many haven’t paid taxes for years.Both parties have been in on this deal although the GOP has been the bigger player. Yet since Donald Trump issued his big lie about the fraudulence of the 2020 election, corporate America has had a few qualms about the GOP.After the storming of the Capitol, dozens of giant corporations said they would no longer donate to the 147 Republican members of Congress who objected to the certification of Biden electors on the basis of the big lie.Then came the GOP’s wave of restrictive state voting laws, premised on the same big lie. Georgia’s are among the most egregious. The chief executive of Coca-Cola, headquartered in the peach tree state, calls those laws “wrong” and “a step backward”. The chief executive of Delta Airlines, Georgia’s largest employer, says they’re “unacceptable”. Major League Baseball decided to take its annual All-Star Game away from the home of the Atlanta Braves.The basic deal between the GOP and corporate America is still very much aliveThese criticisms have unleashed a rare firestorm of anti-corporate Republican indignation. The Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, warns corporations of unspecified “serious consequences” for speaking out. Republicans are moving to revoke MLB’s antitrust status. Georgia Republicans threaten to punish Delta by repealing a state tax credit for jet fuel.“Why are we still listening to these woke corporate hypocrites on taxes, regulations and antitrust?” asks the Florida senator Marco Rubio.Why? For the same reason Willie Sutton gave when asked why he robbed banks: that’s where the money is.McConnell told reporters corporations should “stay out of politics” but then qualified his remark: “I’m not talking about political contributions.” Of course not. Republicans have long championed “corporate speech” when it comes in the form of campaign cash – just not as criticism.Talk about hypocrisy. McConnell was the top recipient of corporate money in the 2020 election cycle and has a long history of battling attempts to limit it. In 2010, he hailed the supreme court’s Citizens United ruling, which struck down limits on corporate political donations, on the dubious grounds that corporations are “people” under the first amendment to the constitution.“For too long, some in this country have been deprived of full participation in the political process,” McConnell said at the time. Hint: he wasn’t referring to poor Black people.It’s hypocrisy squared. The growing tsunami of corporate campaign money suppresses votes indirectly by drowning out all other voices. Republicans are in the grotesque position of calling on corporations to continue bribing politicians as long as they don’t criticize Republicans for suppressing votes directly.The hypocrisy flows in the other direction as well. The Delta chief criticized the GOP’s voter suppression in Georgia but the company continues to bankroll Republicans. Its Pac contributed $1,725,956 in the 2020 election, more than $1m of which went to federal candidates, mostly Republicans. Oh, and Delta hasn’t paid federal taxes for years.Don’t let the spat fool you. The basic deal between the GOP and corporate America is still very much alive.Which is why, despite record-low corporate taxes, congressional Republicans are feigning outrage at Joe Biden’s plan to have corporations pay for his $2tn infrastructure proposal. Biden isn’t even seeking to raise the corporate tax rate as high as it was before the Trump tax cut, yet not a single Republicans will support it.A few Democrats, such as West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, don’t want to raise corporate taxes as high as Biden does either. Yet almost two-thirds of Americans support the idea.The basic deal between American corporations and American politicians has been a terrible deal for America. Which is why a piece of legislation entitled the For the People Act, passed by the House and co-sponsored in the Senate by every Democratic senator except Manchin, is so important. It would both stop states from suppressing votes and also move the country toward public financing of elections, thereby reducing politicians’ dependence on corporate cash.Corporations can and should bankroll much of what America needs. But they won’t, as long as corporations keep bankrolling American politicians. More

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      Georgia governor claims MLB All-Star voting rights move hurts Black voters

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      The Republican governor of Georgia stepped up his attack on Major League Baseball on Saturday, over its decision to pull its All-Star Game from the state in response to a new voting law.“It’s minority-owned businesses that have been hit harder than most because of an invisible virus, by no fault of their own,” Brian Kemp said. “And these are the same minority businesses that are now being impacted by another decision that is by no fault of their own.”The Fox News host Sean Hannity thundered this week that MLB “has now cost the people of Georgia almost $100m in revenue”.“Every person in Georgia should be furious,” he added.But experts dispute that losing the All-Star game will have so heavy an impact.Victor Matheson, an economics professor at the College of the Holy Cross, told the Guardian this week: “There is some loss, so it’s not zero, but it’s a whole lot closer to zero than the $100m number Atlanta was throwing around.”On Saturday Kemp spoke alongside the Georgia attorney general, Chris Carr, also a Republican, at a seafood restaurant miles from the stadium in the Atlanta suburbs where the game would have been held. He said he didn’t think the business was minority-owned.The game will now be played in Denver. Jared Polis, the Democratic governor of Colorado, has claimed the city will receive an economic boost of $190m.Matheson said: “There’s no real reason that you should believe economic impact numbers that are commissioned by people who are made to look good by big economic impact numbers.”Kemp noted that Denver has a much smaller percentage of African Americans than Atlanta.Critics say the Georgia voting law will disproportionately affect communities of color. Aklima Khondoker, state director of the voting rights group All Voting is Local, said Kemp’s news conference was an attempt to deflect from that as he gears up to try to win a second term.“He’s pivoting away from all of the malicious things that we understand that this bill represents to people of color in Georgia,” she said.Elsewhere in the state, about two dozen protesters turned out near Augusta National as the Masters golf championship continued, holding signs that said “Let Us Vote” and “Protect Georgia Voting Rights”.The MLB commissioner, Rob Manfred, has said he made the decision to move the All-Star game after discussions with players and the Players Alliance, an organization of Black players formed after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis last year, and that the league opposed restrictions to the ballot box.On Saturday an MLB spokesman said the league had no immediate additional comment.Several groups have filed lawsuits over the Georgia voting measure, which includes strict identification requirements for voting by mail. It expands weekend early voting but limits the use of ballot drop boxes, makes it a crime to hand out food or water to voters waiting in line and gives the state election board new powers to intervene in county election offices and to replace local officials.That has led to concerns the Republican-controlled board could exert more influence over elections, including the certification of county results.The rewrite of Georgia’s election rules – signed by Kemp last month – follows Donald Trump’s repeated lies about electoral fraud after his loss to Joe Biden. The Democratic candidate won Georgia, before two Democrats won Senate runoffs there in January, tipping control of the chamber.Democrats have assailed the Georgia law as an attempt to suppress Black and Latino votes, with Biden calling it “Jim Crow in the 21st century”. Carr and Kemp blasted that comparison.“This made-up narrative that this bill takes us back to Jim Crow – an era when human beings were being killed and who were truly prevented from casting their vote – is preposterous,” Carr said. “It is irresponsible, and it’s fundamentally wrong.” More

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      How Republicans are trying to prevent people from voting after ‘stop the steal’

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      At campaign rallies, Donald Trump specialized in crafting political slogans whose catchiness obscured the lack of actual policy behind them: lock her up, America First, build the wall, drain the swamp.But there was one Trump slogan that turned out to have a shocking amount of policy behind it – hundreds of pieces of legislation nationwide in just the last three months, in fact, constituting the most coordinated, organized and determined Republican push on any political issue in recent memory.The slogan was “stop the steal,” a tendentious reference to Trump’s big lie about the November election result.And the policy behind it was aggressive voter suppression, targeting people of color, urbanites, low-income communities and other groups whose full participation in future elections is seen by Republicans as a threat.For decades, conservatives have made limited government, lower taxes, “family” values, religious freedom, public safety, national security and restrictions on abortion the centerpiece of their pitch to voters.In 2021, those issues have been joined on the party platform by – and sometimes seem to be eclipsed by – a bold new policy proposal: prevent voting.“What’s different now is the absolute overt nature of this,” said the political analyst Lincoln Mitchell, an author and international elections observer.“In fairness to the Republicans, voter suppression has a long history in the United States that is not located in one party, but it’s located in one ideology, and that ideology is white supremacy,” Mitchell continued. “So for much of the post-Reconstruction period, until say 1970 or 1980 or so, that was either primarily the Democratic party – think of the old Dixiecratic south – or in both parties.”“It is only in the last 40ish years that it has become a Republican issue.”Since the November election, Republican state legislatures across the country have introduced more than 250 bills creating barriers to voting, cutting early voting, purging voter rolls, limiting absentee options and now, in Georgia, outlawing giving someone stuck in a 10-hour line a bottle of water.John Kavanagh, a Republican state representative from Arizona, articulated the underlying thinking in an interview last month on CNN. “Everybody shouldn’t be voting,” he said. The lawmaker later clarified that he thinks “all legally eligible voters should vote, but I do not want to register people who are disinterested and do not want to be registered to vote.”The same, less subtle message was delivered by Trump himself at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) this past February. In his speech, the former president unraveled a 10-minute-long list of proposed suppression tactics, all of which state legislatures have since attempted to make into law, with some success.It’s not a coincidence that these bills are being introduced after a free and fair and secure election with record turnout“We should eliminate the insanity of mass and very corrupt mail-in voting,” Trump said, additionally calling for strict new voter ID laws, signature matching and citizenship verification at polling stations.Sylvia Albert, national voting and elections director of the government watchdog group Common Cause, called Republicans’ voter suppression efforts “shameless”.“These bills are shameless, partisan efforts to silence us,” Albert said in a media briefing last week. “And it’s not a coincidence that these bills are being introduced after a free and fair and secure election with record turnout. Americans exercised their right to vote and, in response, these politicians are saying, ‘actually, we didn’t really want you to vote’.”In Georgia, the Republican governor signed a law last month making it harder to vote by mail, nearly eliminating ballot drop boxes and giving the state legislature more power over elections. In the Pennsylvania state general assembly, Republicans have introduced more than 50 voter suppression bills. A Texas bill would require proof of disability if voting by mail.The Michigan legislature is set to consider 39 bills targeting voting rights, especially voting by mail. Arizona Republicans have introduced vote-by-mail restrictions, the purge of more than 100,000 people from a permanent early voting list with little notice, and a bill making it a potential felony to forward a ballot to a relative.“The Republican party is aware that in their current ideological formation, that if American democracy is modernized so that people have voting rights comparable to other democracies, they will lose control for a generation,” said Mitchell. “They will basically be out of national politics.”Quentin Turner, Michigan program director for Common Cause, said that Republican suppression efforts in the state targeted communities of color, particularly a proposal to restrict access to absentee ballot drop boxes after 5pm.“A lot of working-class people in Michigan, in Detroit especially, may not be out or done with their day by 5pm,” said Turner. “So they may not be able to go to a drop box that’s close to them.“While it doesn’t specifically say in the bill that it’s targeting Black and brown voters, the nature of the specifications of the prohibition would have a larger adverse impact in those communities.”The overtly racist nature of voter suppression has created what could be a political hazard for Republicans. Under pressure from activists, corporations have begun to condemn the laws, with American Airlines announcing on Thursday that it was “strongly opposed” to suppression legislation in Texas. Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines and Home Depot face a boycott call for what activists say was too little action, too late, against voter suppression in Georgia.Voter suppression efforts could also backfire on Republicans if they limit the participation of an unintended group of voters – for example elderly voters no longer able to vote by mail – or increase the turnout of targeted groups galvanized by the assault on the franchise, as in Georgia’s two Senate runoff elections this past January.“African Americans in the south have gone through a lot to vote, historically,” Mitchell said. “This is an undemocratic, racist barrier, but it’s a barrier put in front of a people that are used to undemocratic, racist barriers. And they are not afraid of that. And we saw that, twice, in Georgia.“‘They’re trying to stop us from voting? Screw them, let’s get even more people out.’” More

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      The next Georgia: Texas and Arizona emerge as voting rights battlegrounds

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      Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterAs Georgia Republicans face backlash over new sweeping voting restrictions, activists in other states are escalating efforts to oppose similar restrictions advancing in other states.Texas and Arizona have emerged as two of the next major battlegrounds over voting rights. Texas Republicans last week advanced legislation that would limit early voting hours, prohibit drive-thru voting and give partisan poll workers the ability to record voters at the polls, among other measures. In Arizona, Republicans are moving ahead with an audit of ballots from the presidential race while also advancing legislation that would make it harder to vote by mail.Nationally lawmakers have introduced 361 bills to limit access to the ballot in some way, according to a tally by the Brennan Center for Justice. Fifty-five of those bills are advancing in legislatures.After companies like Delta and Coca-Cola faced criticism for waiting too long to speak out against the Georgia legislation, advocates have been heartened by swift corporate condemnation of the Texas measure. American Airlines, which is based in Texas, said on Thursday it was “strongly opposed” to the Texas legislation. Microsoft and Dell also spoke out against the measures. Major League Baseball announced on Friday it was moving the All-Star Game out of Atlanta in response to Georgia’s sweeping new law.Joe Straus, the former speaker of the Texas house of representatives, also came out against the measures on Thursday, tweeting that businesses had “good reason” to oppose the bill. “Texas should not go down the same path as Georgia. It’s bad for business and, more importantly, it’s bad for our citizens,” he said.Anthony Gutierrez, the executive director of the Texas chapter of Common Cause, a government watchdog group, said those statements were significant and could help sway lawmakers, including Dade Phelan, the speaker of the Texas house of representatives. Gutierrez has been involved in fights over voting rights for more than a decade and said he could not recall another instance where there was the kind of broad opposition to the bills that exists now.“A lot of us are thinking that Texas is the next Georgia, but I think the big difference is all these prominent voices weighing in are coming in much earlier,” he said.Attention on Texas, one of the lowest-ranking states for voter turnout in 2020, escalated this week after lawmakers advanced a measure that appears squarely aimed at preventing local officials in urban areas from taking creative measures to expand voting access. In addition to blocking drive-thru and 24-hour voting, two popular options offered in Harris county, home to Houston, in 2020, the law also prevents officials from mailing absentee ballot applications to voters. In addition the bill imposes new requirements on people who assist voters and gives local election officials less flexibility in allocating election equipment.The measures would clearly empower partisan poll watchers. One measure allows poll watchers to record voters at the polls if they “reasonably believe” they are receiving illegal assistance. Another provision makes it harder for local officials in charge of an election precinct to remove poll watchers during voting.“It is a huge deal because of how many incidents we see in Texas of poll watchers misbehaving and needing to be disrupted for a good reason,” Gutierrez said.Texas has, as far as I’m concerned, the most disturbing bill that I have seen“This is an invasion of privacy, it’s an invasion of ballot secrecy, it could be potentially very intimidating,” said David Becker, the executive director of the Center for the Election Innovation and Research, who works with Republican and Democratic election officials across the country. “Texas has, as far as I’m concerned, the most disturbing bill that I have seen.”In Arizona, a state Joe Biden won by just over 10,000 votes in 2020, activists are also pushing a slew of anti-voting measures. One priority is a bill that would make changes to a list voters can join to automatically receive a mail-in ballot each election. About 75% of Arizona voters are on the list, according to the Associated Press (AP), but lawmakers want to enable the state to remove voters from the list if they don’t vote by mail in at least two consecutive elections. About 200,000 voters who didn’t vote by mail in 2018 or 2020 would be removed from the list, according to the AP.“This is a really important piece of our election system. It’s been in place just like it is for more than a decade. People trust it, they love using it,” said Emily Kirkland, the executive director of Progress Arizona, which is lobbying against many of the proposed changes. “This year, obviously fueled by all the conspiracy theories we saw going into and after the election, Republicans in the state legislature are attacking it.”Advocates are also concerned about another bill that would require voters to provide either their driver’s license or voter registration number along with their birthday when they return a mail-in ballot (Arizona currently uses signature comparison to verify the identity of mail-in voters). Those requirements would pose difficulties for many Native American voters, said Torey Dolan, a Native vote fellow at Indian law clinic at Arizona State University.Dolan said that it can be difficult to find out a voter registration number online and noted that the bill currently did not allow for the use of tribal identification cards as a form of identification. Many Indigenous elders, she noted, were not born in hospitals and have delayed birth certificates, and therefore have approximate birthdays.“Arizona election law, before this cycle, was not equally accessible to Native Americans,” she said. “As more barriers go up, it only exacerbates that gap from access.”Aside from legislation, Arizona Republicans are also moving ahead with more efforts to stoke uncertainty about the results of the 2020 election. The state senate, controlled by Republicans, is moving ahead with a recount and audit of 2.1m ballots in Maricopa county, the state’s most populous, months after the state certified the election. The county has already completed an audit of its voting equipment, which found ballots were counted correctly.One of the four firms the senate hired to lead the audit is led by Doug Logan, who has publicly said he believes there was widespread voter fraud in 2020 and advanced other conspiracy theories about the election, according to the Arizona Mirror.“Can you imagine the outcry if Democrats in Pennsylvania, Michigan or Wisconsin in 2016 in a state senate, had decided they wanted to, six months after an election, start an audit of the ballots of an election that was already certified and the people were already in office?” Becker said.“And then they hired the consultant, someone from out of state who had publicly argued that Hillary won the election and the election was fraudulent? That’s a mirror image of what’s happening in Arizona right now.” More

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      McConnell tells CEOs critical of voting restrictions to ‘stay out of politics’

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      Republicans’ standing as the party of corporate America appears to be under threat after Mitch McConnell, the minority leader in the Senate, told chief executives critical of voting restrictions to “stay out of politics”.Last week Coca-Cola, Delta and dozens of other companies condemned a new election law in Georgia while Major League Baseball announced it would move the All-Star Game from the state in protest.“I found it completely discouraging to find a bunch of corporate CEOs getting in the middle of politics,” McConnell told a press conference in his home state of Kentucky on Monday. “My advice to the corporate CEOs of America is to stay out of politics. Don’t pick sides in these big fights.”He warned companies against giving into advocacy campaigns. “It’s jaw-dropping to see powerful American institutions not just permit themselves to be bullied, but join in the bullying themselves,” he said.McConnell also issued a written statement that claimed Georgia’s new law has been portrayed unfairly and bemoaned “a coordinated campaign by powerful and wealthy people to mislead and bully the American people”.Railing against the “Outrage-Industrial Complex”, the senator went on: “Americans do not need or want big business to amplify disinformation or react to every manufactured controversy with frantic leftwing signaling.“From election law to environmentalism to radical social agendas to the second amendment, parts of the private sector keep dabbling in behaving like a woke parallel government. Corporations will invite serious consequences if they become a vehicle for far-left mobs to hijack our country from outside the constitutional order.”He did not elaborate on the warning, but the comments imply a significant rupture after decades in which big business tended to favour Republicans and give them the lion’s share of campaign contributions, enjoying the benefits of low taxes and limited government regulation.Now, however, companies face greater pressure to show they are socially responsible actors and take stand on political issues. The new restrictions in Georgia and elsewhere are widely expected to have a disproportionate impact on voters of colour.The White House denied McConnell’s claim of a coordinated campaign to mislead the public. The press secretary, Jen Psaki, said: “We’ve not asked corporations to specific actions; that’s not our focus here.“Our focus is on continuing to convey that it’s important that voting is easier, not harder, that when there are laws in place that make it harder, we certainly express an opposition to those laws.”Former president Donald Trump spent months falsely claiming that his 2020 election defeat was the result of widespread voter fraud. He failed in dozens of court challenges and his own attorney general, William Barr, reported no significant irregularities.Even so, legislators in 47 states this year have introduced 361 bills imposing new restrictions on voting, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Georgia, which Joe Biden won narrowly, will strengthen identification requirements for absentee ballots and make it a crime to offer food or water to voters in a queue.Coca-Cola and Delta Air Lines, both major employers in Georgia, were condemned by activists for remaining silent on the issue there but eventually yielded. Ed Bastian, the chief executive of Delta, said: “The entire rationale for this bill was based on a lie: that there was widespread voter fraud in Georgia in the 2020 election.”James Quincey, the head of Coca-Cola, described the law as “unacceptable” and a “step backwards”.Some Republicans have suggested embracing a new identity as a party of the working class. Trump issued an angry email statement on Saturday denouncing “WOKE CANCEL CULTURE” and calling for a boycott of Major League Baseball, Coca-Cola, Delta and other companies.“Never submit, never give up!” he wrote. “The Radical Left will destroy our Country if we let them. We will not become a Socialist Nation. Happy Easter!” More