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      The fight for voting rights in the US: Politics Weekly Extra podcast

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      As Republicans continue to pass bills that would restrict voting rights for many, and as the Democrats try to fight back on the federal level, Jonathan Freedland speaks to Janai Nelson of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund about the importance of the battle for minority voters across the country

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      As Democrats accuse Republicans of trying to pass laws that would lead to voter suppression, Jonathan and Janai discuss the long struggle for voting rights for millions of voters since the passing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Follow the work of the NAACP LDF here Send us your questions and feedback to podcasts@theguardian.com Help support the Guardian by going to gu.com/supportpodcasts More

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      Outrage as Georgia Republicans advance bill to restrict voting access

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      Georgia lawmakers have advanced a measure that would significantly curtail voting access after a record number of voters propelled Democratic victories in the 2020 race.The measure scraped through 29-20 in the GOP-controlled Georgia senate, which was the absolute minimum number of votes Republicans needed. Four Republicans, including some in competitive races, sat out the vote, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.The bill, SB 241, would end the right to vote by mail without having to provide an excuse, a policy that Georgia Republicans implemented in the state in 2005. More than 1.3 million people voted by mail in the 2020 general election in the state. Under the bill only people age 65 and older, or who have one of a handful of state-approved excuses, would be allowed to vote by mail. Just 16 other states currently require a voter to give an excuse to vote by mail.The legislation also would require voters to provide identification information, such as a driver’s license number, both when they apply to vote by mail and when they return the ballot.Republicans have frequently held up the specter of voter fraud to justify such restrictions, though there were several vote recounts in Georgia in the 2020 race, as well as audits, and officials found no such wrongdoing.Mike Dugan, the Republican state senator who sponsored the bill, said the lack of widespread fraud should not be an impediment to changing election rules.“You don’t wait until you have wholesale issues until you try to meet the need,” he said. “You do it beforehand.”He also said on the senate floor Monday that the bill was needed to reduce the burden on local election officials and to ensure that voters were not disenfranchised.State senator Elena Parent, a Democrat, said the justification for the bill was a “weaponization of Trump’s lies” about the election.“It is a willingness and embrace of damage to American democracy,” she said. “The numbers to stop this bill may not be here in this chamber today. But I assure you there are many thousands of Georgians right now whose political spirit is awakened by disgust at modern-day voter suppression.”A stream of Democrats criticized the measure as a thinly veiled effort to suppress Black and other minority voters in Georgia. Those groups contributed to record turnout in the state in 2020 and helped propel Joe Biden, as well as Democrats senatorial candidates Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, to stunning victories in the state.“I know racism when I see it,” said Gail Davenport, a Democrat who recalledwatching the Ku Klux Klan marching on Saturdays in Jonesboro, just south of Atlanta. “This is not about the process. This is about suppressing the vote of a certain group of people, especially me, and people who look like me, and I take it personally.”The bill will now go to the Georgia House of Representatives, which last week approved its own set of voting restrictions, including new limits on early voting and dropboxes. It remains unclear which proposals will ultimately be sent to the governor’s desk once each chamber fully considers the opposite chamber’s bill.Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterLawmakers have until 31 March to send the bills to Governor Brian Kemp’s desk, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.“In the last two election cycles, we saw a dramatic increase in the number of voters of color who voted by mail, the number of young people who used early voting, the number of African Americans who voted on Saturday and Sunday,” Stacey Abrams, the former Georgia gubernatorial candidate, told Mother Jones.“We saw unprecedented levels of turnout across the board. And so every single metric of voter access that has been a good in Georgia is now under attack.”Top Republicans in the state, including Lt Gov Geoff Duncan, have said they oppose efforts to get rid of no-excuse absentee voting and Duncan refused to preside over the senate on Monday as it considered the measure to do just that.At several points during the debate, which stretched around three hours on Monday afternoon, Democrats connected the policies under consideration to those in the Jim Crow south. They noted that some members of the legislature had lived through those policies. Harold Jones II, another Democratic state senator, urged his colleagues to pay attention to Black lawmakers who spoke out against the bill.“It’s because that most basic right was denied to us. It’s not 1800, it’s not [the] 1850s, it’s right here in this room. Many of the senators that sit here lived through that process,” he said. “Let me tell you, it is not theater. It is not a performance. It is real because we live with it every single day.” More

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      Top House Democrat Jim Clyburn: 'No way we'd let filibuster deny voting rights'

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      One of the most powerful Democrats in Washington has issued a frank warning to members of his own party, saying they need to find a way to pass major voting rights legislation or they will lose control of Congress.The comments from Jim Clyburn, the House majority whip, came days after the House of Representatives approved a sweeping voting rights bill that would enact some of the most dramatic expansions of the right to vote since the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Even though Democrats also control the US Senate, the bill is unlikely to pass the chamber because of a procedural rule, the filibuster, that requires 60 votes to advance legislation.In an interview with the Guardian this week, Clyburn called out two moderate Democratic senators, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who have opposed getting rid of the filibuster. Republicans across the country are advancing sweeping measures to curtail voting rights and letting expansive voting rights legislation die would harm Democrats, Clyburn said.“There’s no way under the sun that in 2021 that we are going to allow the filibuster to be used to deny voting rights. That just ain’t gonna happen. That would be catastrophic,” he said. “If Manchin and Sinema enjoy being in the majority, they had better figure out a way to get around the filibuster when it comes to voting and civil rights.”If Manchin and Sinema enjoy being in the majority, they had better figure out a way to get around the filibuster when it comes to voting and civil rightsClyburn issued that warning ahead of the 56th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, the day in 1965 when law enforcement officers brutally beat voting rights activists in Selma, Alabama.Clyburn and other House Democrats have been hoping the early days of Joe Biden’s administration will be marked by passage of a bill named after the late congressman John Lewis of Georgia, a civil rights hero who was nearly killed on Bloody Sunday. That measure would restore a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, gutted by the supreme court in 2013, that required places with a history of voting discrimination to get election changes cleared by the federal government before they took effect.“Here we are talking about the Voting Rights Act he worked so hard for and that’s named in his honor and they’re going to filibuster it to death? That ain’t gonna happen,” Clyburn said.But the likelihood of that bill becoming law is doubtful under current procedures. Democrats expect Republicans to find a reason to filibuster it after its expected passage through the House of Representatives and consideration in the Senate. Thus Clyburn is calling for some kind of workaround of the filibuster in the current legislative climate, in which the Senate is split 50-50 and use of the legislative obstructing mechanism is all too common.“I’m not going to say that you must get rid of the filibuster. I would say you would do well to develop a Manchin-Sinema rule on getting around the filibuster as it relates to race and civil rights,” Clyburn said.Clyburn said he has not discussed changing the filibuster with Biden, who has expressed support for keeping the filibuster in place.The reality of their slim majority and the regularity of legislation dying through filibuster has caused Democrats to opt to pass the Biden administration’s Covid relief package through a budgetary process called reconciliation, which is not subject to the filibuster-proof 60-vote threshold. Clyburn wants to see the same thing with civil rights.“You can’t filibuster the budget,” Clyburn said. “That’s why we have reconciliation rules. We need to have civil and voting rights reconciliation. That should have had reconciliation permission a long, long time ago.”He noted: “If the headlines were to read that the John R Lewis Voting Rights Act was filibustered to death it would be catastrophic.”Clyburn’s comments underscore the difficulty the federal government has in moving any bill because of arcane legislative roadblocks. Broadly popular proposals like a minimum wage increase or a voting rights bill seem dead on arrival. And that has left veteran Senate Democrats skeptical that even a bill protecting Americans’ rights to vote has a chance. First, the filibuster would have to go, and that seems unlikely at the moment.“The short-term prospects of doing away with the filibuster seem remote just because there aren’t the votes to do that,” said Luke Albee, a former chief of staff to the Democratic senators Mark Warner of Virginia and Pat Leahy of Vermont. “My gut is it will take six months, eight months, a year of total obstructionism on the Republican side for senators who are skeptical now of getting rid of the filibuster to at least have a more open mind about it.”Albee also said it was possible that a Voting Rights Act could face strong Republican opposition, despite Clyburn’s confidence.“There’s no one that hopes it passes more than me but I just worry it’s a toxic environment,” Albee added. More

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      Biden's no LBJ but he must protect voting rights. What else is the presidency for? | Robert Reich

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      In 1963, when the newly sworn in Lyndon Baines Johnson was advised against using his limited political capital on the controversial issue of civil and voting rights for Black Americans, he responded: “Well, what the hell’s the presidency for?”The US is again approaching a crucial decision point on the most fundamental right of all in a democracy: the right to vote. The result will either be the biggest advance since LBJ’s landmark civil rights and voting rights acts of 1964 and 1965, or the biggest setback since the end of Reconstruction and start of Jim Crow in the 1870s.The decisive factor will be President Joe Biden.On one side are Republicans, who control most state legislatures and are using false claims of election fraud to enact an avalanche of voting restrictions on everything from early voting and voting by mail to voter IDs. They also plan to gerrymander their way back to a US House of Representatives majority.After losing the Senate and the presidency, they’re determined to win back power by rigging the rules against Democrats, disproportionately Black and brown voters. As a lawyer for the Arizona Republican party put it baldly before the supreme court, without such restrictions Republicans are “at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats”.On the other side are congressional Democrats, advancing the most significant democracy reform legislation since LBJ – a sprawling 791-page For the People Act, establishing national standards for federal elections.The proposed law mandates automatic registration of new voters, voting by mail and at least 15 days of early voting. It bans restrictive voter ID laws and purges of voter rolls, changes studies suggest would increase voter participation, especially by racial minorities. It also requires that congressional redistricting be done by independent commissions and creates a system of public financing for congressional campaigns.The legislation sailed through the House last week, on a party line vote. The showdown will occur in the Senate, where Republicans are determined to kill it. Although Democrats possess a razor-thin majority, the bill doesn’t stand a chance unless Democrats can overcome two big obstacles.The first is the filibuster, requiring 60 votes to pass regular legislation. Notably, the filibuster is not in the constitution and not even in law. It’s a rule that has historically been used against civil rights and voting rights bills, as it was in the 1960s when LBJ narrowly overcame it.Democrats can – and must – finally end the filibuster now, with their 51-vote majority.But if they try, they face a second obstacle. Two Democrats – Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona – have said they won’t vote to end the filibuster, presumably because they want to preserve their centrist image and appeal to Republicans in their states. A few other Democrats are lukewarm to the idea.Well, I’m sorry. The stakes are too high. If Democrats fail to enact the For the People Act, Republicans will send voting rights into retreat for decades. There’s no excuse for Manchin and Sinema or any other Senate Democrat letting Republicans pull America backwards towards Jim Crow.And no reason Biden should let them. It’s time for him to assert the kind of leadership LBJ asserted more than a half-century ago on civil and voting rights.Johnson used every tool at his disposal, described by the journalist Mary McGrory as “an incredible, potent mixture of persuasion, badgering, flattery, threats, reminders of past favors and future advantages”.He warned the Georgia senator Richard Russell, a dedicated segregationist: “Dick, I love you and I owe you. But … I’m going to run over you if you challenge me on this civil rights bill.” He demanded his allies join him in pressuring holdouts. Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, later Johnson’s vice-president, recalled: “The president grabbed me by my shoulder and damn near broke my arm.”Historians say Johnson’s importuning, bribing and threatening may have shifted the votes of close to a dozen senators, breaking the longest filibuster in history and clearing the way for passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965.We are once again at a crucial juncture for civil rights and voting rights that could shape America for a half-century or more. Joe Biden is not LBJ, and the times are different from the mid-1960s. But the stakes are as high.Biden must wield the power of the presidency to make senators fall in line with the larger goals of the nation. Otherwise, as LBJ asked, “what the hell’s the presidency for?” More

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      Fight to vote: the woman who was key in 'getting us the Voting Rights Act'

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      [embedded content]
      Happy Thursday,
      During the final week of Black History Month, I wanted to continue to look at the people who helped shape the Voting Rights Act, the powerful 1965 law that offered unprecedented protection for voting rights in America. As the country faces another surge of efforts to make it harder to vote, it’s a reminder of how hard Black Americans had to fight to gain and protect the rights to vote that are in place now.
      Last week, I wrote about Bloody Sunday, the March 1965 protest that led directly to the Voting Rights Act. The heroes of that march – people like John Lewis, Hosea Williams and Martin Luther King Jr – have become lions of American history. But until recently, one of the most overlooked people in the march was Amelia Boynton (later Amelia Boynton Robinson), who had been organizing in Selma for years before Bloody Sunday and was the one who called in King to bring national attention to the voter suppression in the now historic city.
      “She got us the Voting Rights Act,” said Carol Anderson, a historian at Emory University.
      “It’s one of the ‘failings’, and I’ll put that in quotes, of the writings of the civil rights movement, is that women who are key in organizing are written out,” she added. “The grassroots work of Mrs Boynton just didn’t get the kind of respect and honor that it deserved.”
      By the time Lewis, King and others arrived in Selma, Boynton was already one of the most well-known and respected people in its Black community. She came to the city in 1929 when she got a job with the US Department of Agriculture, traveling around the state to show African Americans how to improve their farming, but also talking to them about voting. She and her then husband, Samuel Boynton, held meetings in homes and churches, showing people how to register to vote as they faced literacy tests and poll taxes, Jim Crow era obstacles that prevented Black people from registering to vote. More

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      Fight to vote: activism works – just look at the 1965 Voting Rights Act

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      Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterHappy Thursday,This week, midway through Black History Month, I wanted to open up the archives and look at some of the history that helped shape the Voting Rights Act, the powerful 1965 law that offered some of the most significant protections for voting rights in US history. As I’ve covered the struggle over voting rights over the last several years, and amid a push for sweeping new federal voting protections, I’ve often found myself turning back to the fight over the act to understand how efforts to restrict the vote today mirror what has occurred before.I was struck recently by these two telegrams, exchanged days apart in March 1965, between Martin Luther King Jr and Lyndon B Johnson. King sent the telegram the morning after Johnson gave a speech to Congress introducing the law – a speech that has since been described as one of the greatest speeches by a sitting US president.The horrific images of Bloody Sunday – the 7 March 1965 voting rights march in Selma, Alabama, where law enforcement brutally beat protesters as they demonstrated for voting rights – had galvanized the country, and Johnson, to move quickly to embrace the legislation.In his speech, Johnson linked what had happened in Selma to some of the most well-known battles in US history, tying the struggle for voting rights to the historical battle for American freedom.“At times history and fate meet at a single time, in a single place, to shape a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama,” Johnson opened his speech.King praised Johnson’s speech.“Your speech to the joint session of Congress last night was the most moving eloquent unequivocal and passionate plea for human rights ever made by any president of this nation,” King wrote from Selma. “You evidenced amazing understanding of the depth and dimensions of the problems that we face in our struggle, your tone was sincere throughout and your persuasive power never more forceful.”Days later, Johnson wrote back, saying he appreciated the comments from the civil rights leader.“I sincerely believe the that the mood of the country and the Congress offers us an opportunity to secure legislation which will provide a direct, quick, effective and constitutional means of ensuring all citizens will be able to register and vote,” he wrote. “I fully appreciate the pressures and tensions under which you are laboring and I am confident you will continue to offer a course of leadership that will permit us to move towards our goal of universal suffrage.”The telegrams underscore just how significantly Selma had changed the calculus on pushing voting rights legislation. In a 2015 essay, Julian Zelizer, a historian at Princeton University, wrote that Johnson was hesitant about moving the bill so early in the year, as King and other civil rights leaders pressured him to move quickly. In choosing to give the speech after Selma, Johnson signaled he was embracing the activists. It was an example of how activism can work.“Delivering that speech was a courageous decision,” he wrote. “Despite strong opposition in Washington to the federal government committing itself to the protection of African American voters, Johnson delivered a powerful speech that left no doubt of where he stood in this debate,” he wrote.Less than five months after the telegram, Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law.Also worth watching …Georgia advanced two measures in the state legislature that would make it harder to vote by mail. One measure would eliminate a provision in state law that allows anyone to vote by mail without an excuse, while another would require each voter to provide a copy of their voter ID during the vote by mail process.
      A Republican in the Arizona legislature broke with his party to vote down a measure that would allow the state to remove people from a list of people who automatically receive a mail-in ballot each election.
      The US supreme court is set to hear a case from Arizona that could have major implications for the Voting Rights Act. The court, if it wants to, could choose to narrow a section of the Voting Rights Act and make it harder to challenge discriminatory voting laws in the future. More

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      Fight to vote: civil rights are making a comeback at the DoJ – here’s why

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      Happy Thursday,For the four years that Donald Trump was president, the Department of Justice (DoJ) did little to enforce America’s federal voting rights laws – though it’s the federal agency with the most power to do so. The department’s voting section, which is well-staffed with some of the best voting rights attorneys in the country, got involved in almost no cases. And when they did get involved in major cases in Texas and Ohio, the department chose to defend voting restrictions.“It just seems like there’s nobody home, which is tragic,” William Yeomans, a former DoJ official, told me back in June.That’s set to change in a big way.Last month, Joe Biden nominated Vanita Gupta and Kristen Clarke, two longtime civil rights lawyers, to top positions at the justice department.Gupta, who previously led the civil rights division, is Biden’s pick to be the associate attorney general, the number three official at the department.Clarke is Biden’s pick to lead the civil rights division, and would be the first Black woman to hold that role if she is confirmed. Over the last four years, she has been one of the people most raising alarm that DoJ wasn’t doing enough to enforce voting rights.Reminder– > This Justice Dept. hasn’t brought a SINGLE case under the Voting Rights Act despite the era of widespread voter suppression that we face across the country.— Kristen Clarke (@KristenClarkeJD) August 19, 2019
      I am not aware of a single Voting Rights Act case brought by this administration under AG Jeff Sessions.Secy Wilbur Ross’ claim that a citizenship question on the #2020Census is needed to help with VRA enforcement is as false as it is laughable.https://t.co/jcp5gGjFh7— Kristen Clarke (@KristenClarkeJD) March 29, 2018
      New prioritiesCivil rights activists and former department officials this week said they expected more aggressive enforcement on policing and voting rights, among other issues (in a sign of how quickly priorities are changing, DoJ withdrew a case challenging affirmative action policies at Yale on Wednesday). There are probably a stack of cases that have been pending in the pipeline that could be near ready to file, Bryan Sells, a former justice department attorney, told me last week.“You’re going to have someone in that office that really wants to make sure that the division to use the powers it has to enforce the voting rights laws,” said Ezra Rosenberg, co-director of the Voting Rights Project at the Lawyers’ Committee.Cautious optimismBut don’t expect a quick change and a new flurry of cases. The justice department picks its cases carefully, and unlike outside civil rights groups that often file groundbreaking cases, the department is much more conservative. The lawyers at the justice department are also facing a federal judiciary that is much more conservative than it was four years ago after Donald Trump appointed an unprecedented number of judges. That could also affect the calculus in choosing what cases to bring. Much of the voting section’s work has traditionally been reviewing cases submitted under section five of the Voting Rights Act – a provision that was gutted by the US supreme court in 2013.Still, advocates say it will be refreshing to once again have an ally in the justice department.“It’s going to be really important and energizing and exciting to be able to be in conversation and discussion with people who understand the department’s role in civil rights enforcement,” said Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. “But it’s also going to be exciting, and as a matter of resources, to have the department actually do civil rights enforcement.”Also worth watching …I was struck by a story in the Advocate that highlighted a library board in Lafayette, Louisiana, that rejected a $2,700 grant for voting rights programming over concerns some of the speakers were too “far left”. The board apparently wanted the library to find someone to present the other side of the issue.
      Thirty-one counties in Florida agreed to provide Spanish-language election materials, including ballots and lawsuits as part of a settlement in a federal lawsuit. In 2018, civil rights groups sued 32 counties in the state, arguing they were failing to comply with a provision of the Voting Rights Act that guarantees access to the ballot for non-English speakers. The groups filed the lawsuit after a surge in Puerto Rican immigrants to Florida following Hurricane Maria. The one county that didn’t settle was Charlotte county in south-west Florida.
      Arkansas Republicans are advancing a measure that would eliminate a part of the state’s voter ID law that allows people to vote without ID if they sign an affidavit. These affidavit provisions are often included in voter ID laws as a safeguard to prevent people from being disenfranchised.
      Missouri Republicans are also advancing a new voter ID measure, citing “questions”about the 2020 election.
      Wisconsin election officials are seeing the sky high turnout from last year’s election carry over to 2021 contests that are typically lower profile. On election official in Madison said they’ve already sent out 20,000 absentee ballots so far. More

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      Republicans are going all-out to limit voting rights. We know why | Jill Filipovic

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      It’s been less than a month since rightwing insurrectionists stormed the Capitol building in a deadly riot incited by the former president and his false claims of mass voter fraud. In the riot’s wake, many prominent Republicans have tried to distance themselves from the attackers and those who spurred them on. “The mob was fed lies,” said the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell. “They were provoked by the president and other powerful people.”Those “other powerful people” were powerful members of the Republican party and leading voices in conservative media, who are now either claiming we simply need to move on for the sake of healing, or saying that actually, the riot was the left’s fault. But while some Republicans are positioning themselves as honest and reasonable by condemning the riot and recognizing that it was sparked by lies about voter fraud, their party’s actions and policy priorities tell a very different story. Because as our nation remains rocked by an attack on the heart of our democracy, Republicans are using the same baseless lies that fueled it to push a staggering number of laws to scale back voting rights.A new report from the Brennan Center for Justice shows just how effectively Republicans have been talking out of both sides of their mouths, at once decrying the violence over false allegations of election rigging, and at the same time using false allegations of voter fraud to make it harder for people to vote. In 2021 legislative sessions (which six states haven’t even yet begun), lawmakers in 28 states have pushed a whopping 106 bills that would restrict voting access – and we’re not even a month into the year. According to the Brennan Center, that’s three times the number of restrictive voting laws that were introduced by 3 February last year. These laws are clearly responsive to widespread conspiracy theories on the right – conspiracy theories started by the Republican party and the former president.Each one of these 106 bills aims to make voting harder, either by scaling back vote-by-mail, imposing stricter voter identification laws, limiting policies that successfully registered large numbers of voters, or allowing states to more easily and aggressively purge their voter rolls.None of these laws actually correct an existing problem – because, as we learned through a great many court cases brought by the Trump administration, there simply was no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election. And there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud in elections before that one, either.So why, then, would Republicans waste their time and taxpayer dollars so aggressively battling a problem that doesn’t exist? It’s because Republicans do have a voting problem – or rather, a voter problem. Many of their policies aren’t actually that popular, and the more eligible voters turn out for elections, the less Republicans win. Their clearest path to staying in power is limiting the number of people who are able to cast a ballot – and particularly limiting the number of Democrats: people of color (and Black people in particular), people in cities and college students. The sharper members of the Republican party rely on claims of “election security” and voter fraud to justify limiting what is perhaps the most sacred duty of any individual living in a democracy. The duller just flat-out admit that making it easier for people to vote would hurt the Republicans. Former president Donald Trump, for example, told Fox & Friends that Democratic appeals for wider use of absentee ballots and vote-by-mail would cause “levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again”.Republicans trying to restrict voting rights is not new – the conservative justices of the US supreme court even sided with them in overturning key provisions of the Voting Rights Act, which is why so many new anti-voting laws have flooded the nation in recent years.But the context after the Capitol riot is different: Republicans now cannot deny the serious, deadly and democracy-threatening costs of exploiting lies about voting fraud to the advantage of Republican politicians. And yet, across the nation, they’re choosing to do it anyway. Until they drop this dangerous farce and quit using the big election fraud lie to strip Americans of our right to vote, no one should believe a word they say about defending democracy, admonishing those who physically attacked it, or aspiring to national healing.It’s not all bad news on the voting front, though. Appalled by conservative malfeasance, newly emboldened by the success of mail-in voting during Covid, and heartened by hard-won wins in Georgia, more Democrats are latching on to what leaders and organizers like Stacey Abrams have been doing for years: fighting for expanded voting rights. Legislators in 35 states have introduced a total of 406 bills that would make voting easier for more people. The most common new laws seek to expand mail-in and early voting, methods of casting a ballot that enable far more people to participate in the democratic process – people who are ill, elderly or disabled and find it challenging to vote in person; people who work demanding jobs, or several jobs, or jobs without predictable schedules, and don’t get the first Tuesday in November off of work; people who are caring for small children or the elderly or the infirm and can’t easily sneak away to stand in line for what can turn into hours. Other proposed laws would make it easier for citizens to register to vote, allowing same-day, online, or automatic registration so no one shows up on election day only to learn that, despite being a US citizen, they can’t cast a ballot. And still other laws would allow people who have served time and paid their debt to society to regain their right to vote.It’s easy for anyone to say all the right things about valuing democracy, especially in the aftermath of a stunning attack on it. But words are free. The real question is what both parties are actually doing to strengthen American democracy and ensure that all American citizens have a say in our governance. And while Democrats are pushing for expansion, Republicans are using the same dangerous lies that caused an anti-democratic insurrection on 6 January in the service of their own anti-democratic policies. The visuals aren’t as shocking. But the damage to the nation is just as severe. More