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    Greg Abbott and Dan Patrick Steer Texas Far to the Right

    Different in style and background, Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick have come together, for different reasons, to push an uncompromising conservative agenda.One is a former State Supreme Court justice who acts with a lawyer’s caution; the other a Trumpist firebrand who began his political career in the world of conservative talk radio. They have sparred at times, most recently this winter over the deadly failure of their state’s electrical grid.But together, Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, the two most powerful men in Texas, are the driving force behind one of the hardest right turns in recent state history.The two Republicans stand united at a pivotal moment in Texas politics, opposing Democrats who have left the state for Washington in protest of the G.O.P.-controlled Legislature’s attempt to overhaul the state’s election system — blocking Republicans from advancing any bills to Mr. Abbott’s desk. Any policy differences between the governor and lieutenant governor have melted away in the face of the realities of today’s Republican Party, with a base devoted to former President Donald J. Trump and insistent on an uncompromising conservative agenda.“The lieutenant governor reads off the playbook of the far right, and that’s where we go,” said State Senator Kel Seliger, a moderate Republican from Amarillo. “The governor less so, but not much less so.”Now, if Mr. Abbott and Mr. Patrick hope to sustain momentum for Texas Republicans — and if the ambitious two men hope to strengthen their career prospects — they must navigate a political and public relations battle over voting rights involving an angry base, restive Republican lawmakers and a largely absent yet outspoken Democratic delegation.Mr. Abbott, 63, a lawyer who has held or been campaigning for statewide office since 1996, has shifted to the right as he prepares for a re-election bid next year that will involve the first challenging Republican primary he has ever faced. While Texas voters broadly approve of his leadership and he is sitting on a $55 million war chest, far-right activists and lawmakers have grumbled about his perceived political moderation. And Mr. Abbott is viewed by some in Texas as eyeing a potential presidential run in 2024, which could further sway his political calculations.Mr. Patrick, 71, who started one of the nation’s first chains of sports bars before becoming a radio host and the owner of Houston’s largest conservative talk station, holds what is perhaps the most powerful non-gubernatorial statewide office in the country, overseeing the Senate under Texas’ unusual legislative rules. His years of tending to the conservative base are paying off for him now: He is running unopposed for renomination, after leading Mr. Abbott and the state down a more conservative path than the governor has ever articulated for himself.Both leaders are highly cognizant of what the Republican base wants: Stricter abortion laws. Eliminating most gun regulations. Anti-transgender measures. Rules for how schools teach about racism. And above all there is Mr. Trump’s top priority: wide-ranging new laws restricting voting and expanding partisan lawmakers’ power over elections.Republicans continue to hold most of the cards, but they face the prospect of appearing toothless amid frustrating delays and rising calls from conservatives to take harsh action against the Democrats.The divergent styles of the governor and lieutenant governor could be seen in how they reacted to the news on Monday that Democrats were leaving the state. Mr. Abbott told an Austin TV station that the lawmakers would be arrested if they returned to the state and pledged to keep calling special sessions of the Legislature until they agreed to participate. Mr. Patrick — whose social media instincts could be seen as far back as 2015, when he began his inaugural speech by taking selfies with the crowd — mocked the Democrats by posting a photo of them en route to the Austin airport, with a case of beer on the bus.“They can’t hold out forever,” Mr. Patrick said of Democrats during a Fox News appearance Thursday. “They have families back home, they have jobs back home and pretty soon their wives or husbands will say, ‘It’s time to get back home.’”For the moment, Mr. Patrick has far more power in shaping and moving bills through the State Senate than the governor does. While Mr. Abbott convened the special session of the Legislature and dictated the topics to be discussed, he is not an arm-twister and, with the Democrats gone, there are no arms to be twisted.“The lieutenant governor is riding very high in the Texas Senate and he has regular appearances on Fox and I think he is running pretty freely right now,” said Joe Straus, a moderate Republican from San Antonio who served as the speaker of the Texas House for a decade until, under pressure from conservatives, he chose not to seek re-election in 2018. “He is very influential in setting the agenda at the moment.”Representatives for Mr. Abbott and Mr. Patrick declined interview requests for this article. The Times spoke with Texas Republicans who know the two men, as well as aides and allies who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.Mr. Abbott, above in 2005, previously served as a Texas Supreme Court judge and the state’s attorney general.Gerald Herbert/Associated PressMr. Abbott and Mr. Patrick have tussled occasionally in recent years over how far to the right to take Texas. This winter, Mr. Patrick implicitly criticized the governor’s stewardship of the state’s electrical grid after a snowstorm caused widespread power failures that led to the deaths of more than 200 people. But though Mr. Abbott is now aligned with Mr. Patrick against the state’s Democrats, he is drawing criticism, even from some Republicans, for pushing his agenda as a matter of political expediency, now that he is facing a crowd of primary challengers from the right. His rivals include Allen West, the former congressman and chairman of the state Republican Party, and Don Huffines, a former state senator who was an outspoken critic of Mr. Abbott’s initial coronavirus restrictions.The governor needs to win at least 50 percent in the primary to avoid a runoff that would pit him against a more conservative opponent — a treacherous position for any Texas Republican.“These are issues that the grass roots and the Republican Party have been working on and filing bills on for 10 years,” said Jonathan Stickland, a conservative Republican who represented a State House district in the Fort Worth area for eight years before opting out of re-election in 2020. “Abbott didn’t care until he got opponents in the Republican primary.”Paul Bettencourt, who holds Mr. Patrick’s old Senate seat and hosts a radio show on the Houston station that Mr. Patrick still owns, was blunt about who he thought was the true leader on conservative policy. “The lieutenant governor has been out in front on these issues for, in some cases, 18 years,” Mr. Bettencourt said.Mr. Abbott’s allies say his priorities have not shifted with the political winds. “To me and anyone who pays attention, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Greg Abbott is a conservative and he is a border security hawk,” said John Wittman, who spent seven years as an Abbott aide. The governor is being more heavily scrutinized on issues like guns and the transgender bill, Mr. Wittman said, because “these were issues that bubbled up as a result of what’s happening now.”Mr. Patrick, then a state senator, defeated the incumbent during a Republican primary for lieutenant governor in 2014.Smiley N. Pool/Houston Chronicle, via Associated PressMr. Abbott predicted that Democrats would pay a political price for leaving the state.“All they want to do is complain,” he told the Fox News host Sean Hannity on Thursday. “Texas voters are going to be extremely angry at the Texas House members for not showing up and not doing their jobs.”No bill has produced more outrage among Democrats than the proposals to rewrite Texas voting laws, which are already among the most restrictive in the country.The Republican voting legislation includes new restrictions that voting rights groups say would have a disproportionate impact on poorer communities and communities of color, especially in Harris County, which includes Houston and is the state’s largest..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media 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a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Democrats are most worried about provisions in the Texas bills that would expand the authority of partisan poll watchers, who have become increasingly aggressive in some states, leading to fears that they may intimidate voters and election workers.“We’re seeing backtracking on the progress that has been made in voting rights and access to the ballot box across this country,” State Representative Chris Turner, the Democratic leader in the Texas House, said this week. “There’s a steady drumbeat of Republican voter suppression efforts in Texas and also across the country, all of which are based on a big lie.”Mr. Abbott, Mr. Patrick and other Republicans say the elections legislation will simplify voting procedures across a state with 254 counties and 29 million people.The two Republican leaders have been largely aligned this year on legislative priorities beyond an electoral overhaul. Mr. Patrick has been the driving force for social issues that animate right-wing Texans, pushing for new restrictions on transgender youths and ordering a state history museum to cancel an event with the author of a book that seeks to re-examine slavery’s role in the Battle of the Alamo, a seminal moment in Texas history.Mr. Abbott used an earlier walkout by Democrats over voting rights as an opportunity to place himself at the center of a host of conservative legislation, including a proposal for additional border security funding during the special session that began last week. This follows a regular session in which Texas Republicans enacted a near-ban of abortions in the state and dropped most handgun licensing rules, among other conservative measures.Mr. Abbott’s position, however, has left him without much room to maneuver to reach any sort of compromise that could end the stalemate and bring the Democrats home from Washington. So far he has vowed to arrest them and have them “cabined” in the statehouse chamber should they return to Texas — a threat that has not led to any discussion between the two sides.Mr. Straus, the former State House speaker, said the episode illustrated a significant decline of bipartisan tradition in Texas, one he said was evident under the previous governor, Rick Perry.“I was speaker when Governor Perry was there as well and we had some bumps with him too, but he was always able to work with the Legislature,” Mr. Straus said. “He was able to do this without sacrificing his conservative credentials. That seems to be missing today, as everyone’s dug in doing their tough-guy act.”Manny Fernandez More

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    Republicans Now Have Two Ways to Threaten Elections

    The story of voting rights in the United States looks less like a graph of exponential growth and more like a sine wave; there are highs and lows, peaks and plateaus.President Biden captured this reality in his address on Tuesday at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, where he spoke on the gathering threat to our democracy from the Republican Party’s twin efforts to suppress rival constituencies and seize control of state voting apparatuses.“There is an unfolding assault taking place in America today,” Biden said. “An attempt to suppress and subvert the right to vote in fair and free elections, an assault on democracy, an assault on liberty, an assault on who we are — who we are as Americans.”Biden is right. Americans today are witness to a ferocious attack on voting rights and majority rule. And as he points out, it is as focused on “who gets to count the vote” as it is on “who gets to vote.”Biden is also right to say, as he did throughout the speech, that these attacks are “not unprecedented.” He points to Jim Crow and the “poll taxes and literacy tests and the Ku Klux Klan campaigns of violence and terror that lasted into the ’50s and ’60s.”For obvious reasons, Jim Crow takes center stage in these discussions. But we should remember that it was part of a wave of suffrage restrictions aimed at working-class groups across the country: Black people in the South, Chinese Americans in the West and European immigrants in the North.“The tide of democratic faith was at low ebb on all American shores after the Grant administration, and it would be a mistake to fix upon a reactionary temper in the South as a sectional peculiarity,” the historian C. Vann Woodward wrote in “Origins of the New South, 1877-1913.”For as much as Jim Crow dominates our collective memory of voting restrictions, it is the attack on suffrage in the North in those last decades of the 19th century that might actually be more relevant to our present situation.The current assault on voting is a backlash, in part, to the greater access that marked the 2020 presidential election. More mail-in and greater early voting helped push turnout to modern highs. In the same way, the turn against universal manhood suffrage came after its expansion in the wake of the Civil War.A growing number of voters were foreign-born, the result of mass immigration and the rapid growth of an immigrant working class in the industrial centers of the North. “Between 1865 and World War I,” writes the historian Alexander Keyssar in “The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States,” “nearly twenty-five million immigrants journeyed to the United States, accounting for a large proportion of the nation’s World War I population of roughly one hundred million.”A vast majority arrived without property or the means to acquire it. Some were the Irish and Germans of previous waves of immigration, but many more were eastern and southern Europeans, with alien languages, exotic customs and unfamiliar faiths.“By 1910,” notes Keyssar, “most urban residents were immigrants or the children of immigrants, and the nation’s huge working class was predominantly foreign-born, native-born of foreign parents, or Black.”To Americans of older stock, this was a disaster in waiting. And it fueled, among them, a backlash to the democratic expansion that followed the Civil War.“A New England village of the olden time — that is to say, of some forty years ago — would have been safely and well governed by the votes of every man in it,” Francis Parkman, a prominent historian and a member in good standing of the Boston elite, wrote in an 1878 essay called “The Failure of Universal Suffrage.”Parkman went on:but, now that the village has grown into a populous city, with its factories and workshops, its acres of tenement-houses, and thousands and ten thousands of restless workmen, foreigners for the most part, to whom liberty means license and politics means plunder, to whom the public good is nothing and their own most trivial interests everything, who love the country for what they can get out of it, and whose ears are open to the promptings of every rascally agitator, the case is completely changed, and universal suffrage becomes a questionable blessing.In “The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880-1910,” the historian J. Morgan Kousser takes note of William L. Scruggs, a turn-of-the-century scholar and diplomat who gave a similarly colorful assessment of universal suffrage in an 1884 article, “Restriction of the Suffrage”:The idea of unqualified or “tramp” suffrage, like communism, with which it is closely allied, seems to be of modern origin; and, like that and kindred isms, it usually finds advocates and apologists in the ranks of the discontented, improvident, ignorant, vicious, depraved, and dangerous classes of society. It is not indigenous to the soil of the United States. It originated in the slums of European cities, and, like the viper in the fable, has been nurtured into formidable activity in this country by misdirected kindness.Beyond their presumed immorality and vice, the problem with new immigrant voters — from the perspective of these elites — was that they undermined so-called good government. “There is not the slightest doubt in my own mind that our prodigality with the suffrage has been the chief source of the corruption of our elections,” wrote the Progressive-era political scientist John W. Burgess in an 1895 article titled “The Ideal of the American Commonwealth.”This claim, that Black and immigrant voters were venal and corrupt — that they voted either illegally or irresponsibly — was common.Here’s Keyssar:Charges of corruption and naturalization fraud were repeated endlessly: electoral outcomes were twisted by “naturalization mills” that, with the aid of “professional perjurers and political manipulators,” transformed thousands of immigrants into citizens in the weeks before elections.Out of this furious attack on universal male suffrage (and also, in other corners, the rising call for women’s suffrage) came a host of efforts to purify the electorate, spearheaded by progressive reformers in both parties. Lawmakers in Massachusetts passed “pauper exclusions” that disqualified from voting any men who received public relief on the day of the election. Republican lawmakers in New Jersey, targeting immigrant-dominated urban political machines in the state, required naturalized citizens to show naturalization documents to election officials before voting, intentionally burdening immigrants who did not have their papers or could not find them.Lawmakers in Connecticut endorsed an English literacy requirement, and California voters amended their state Constitution to disenfranchise any person “who shall not be able to read the Constitution in the English language and write his name,” a move meant to keep Chinese and Mexican Americans from the ballot box. The introduction of the secret ballot and the polling booth made voting less communal and put an additional premium on literacy — if you couldn’t read the ballot, and if no one was allowed to assist, then how were you supposed to make a choice?If suffrage restriction in the South was a blunt weapon meant to cleave entire communities from the body politic, then suffrage restriction in the North was a twisting maze of obstacles meant to block anyone without the means or education to overcome them.There were opponents of this effort to shrink democracy. They lost. Voter turnout crashed in the first decades of the 20th century. Just 48.9 percent of eligible voters cast a ballot in the 1924 presidential election, an all-time low. “There were fewer Republicans in the South because of Jim Crow voter suppression, and fewer Democrats in the North because of the active discouragement of working-class urban immigrant voters,” the historian Jon Grinspan notes in “The Age of Acrimony: How Americans Fought to Fix Their Democracy, 1865-1915.” “The efforts of fifty years of restrainers had succeeded. A new political culture had been born: one that had been cleaned and calmed, stifled and squelched.”It would take decades, and an epochal movement for civil rights, before the United States even came close to the democratic highs it reached in the years after Appomattox.With all of that in mind, let’s return to Biden’s speech.There was an urgency in what the president said in defense of voting rights, a sense that now is the only time left to act. “Look how close it came,” he said in reference to the attack on Congress on Jan. 6 and the effort to overturn the election. “We’re going to face another test in 2022: a new wave of unprecedented voter suppression, and raw and sustained election subversion. We have to prepare now.”Right now, of course, there is no path to passage for a voting bill that could address the challenges ahead. Not every Democrat feels the same sense of urgency as the president, and key Democrats aren’t willing to change the rules of the Senate in order to send a bill to Biden’s desk.It is possible that this is the right call, that there are other ways to block this assault on the franchise and that the attack on free and fair elections will stay confined to Republican-controlled states — meaning Democrats would need only a strategy of containment and not a plan to roll back the assault. But as we’ve seen, there is a certain momentum to political life and no guarantee of a stable equilibrium. The assault on voting might stay behind a partisan border or it might not.In other words, to borrow a turn of phrase from Abraham Lincoln on the question of democracy, this government will either become all of one thing or all of the other.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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    The Battle Over State Voting Rights Is About the Future of Texas

    The current skirmish is the latest in a tug of war being waged between the state’s increasingly Democratic cities and its deeply conservative rural areas.HOUSTON — The flight of Texas Democrats to Washington, a last-ditch effort this week to stop Republicans from passing new statewide voting rules, is perhaps the most dramatic illustration of a broad national fight over access to the ballot.But it is something more than that in Texas. The battle over voting rights is also the latest in a tug of war over the future of what it means to be Texan, one being waged between the state’s rapidly diversifying and increasingly Democratic cities and its deeply conservative rural areas, which wield overwhelming power in the State Capitol.The tension grew during the coronavirus pandemic, when cities like Houston, Dallas and Austin clashed with Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, over mask mandates and business restrictions. But it had already been increasing for years, with each political session marked by Republican state officials rolling back progressive changes made in cities led by Democrats.The most direct new restrictions sought by Texas Republicans, who have maintained control of the state for nearly two decades, are a reaction to local polling innovations, notably in Houston, the state’s largest city, and surrounding Harris County.The county introduced drive-through voting for the first time in November, when people were concerned that traditional polling places would spread the coronavirus, and it proved popular, accounting for more than 130,000 votes. Access also expanded at eight polling sites that held a day of 24-hour voting.Officials believed that drive-through polling, which has been used in three subsequent municipal and state elections in Harris County, would soon expand to other areas. “In a place like Houston and Texas that loves cars so much, why shouldn’t we offer drive-through voting?” said Christopher Hollins, who served as interim election chief in the county last year and oversaw the expansion of voting options during the presidential election.Turnout increased in Harris County as it did throughout the state, and out of more than 11 million votes cast, President Biden got within about 600,000 votes of winning Texas — the closest a Democrat has come in decades.Now Texas cities are ground zero in the fight over whether to expand access to the vote, as state Democrats did during the pandemic, or curtail it, as Republicans are seeking to do with a measure that would ban 24-hour and drive-through polling.Drive-through voting was offered in Harris County, which includes Houston, last fall.Go Nakamura for The New York TimesThe conflict is a national one, heightened by former President Donald J. Trump’s false insistence that he lost in 2020 because of voter fraud. On Wednesday, Democratic members of the Texas House met with senators in Washington and urged the passage of bills aimed at expanding and safeguarding voter access.The group fled Austin on chartered planes this week, just days into a 30-day special legislative session, to delay passage of the state’s voting measure. They vowed to stay out of Texas until early August, when the session expires.But in Texas, the fight over voting is only the latest skirmish in the deepening chasm between progressive and conservative versions of the state.“Harris County is being attacked already at a base level because it is one of the most diverse counties in the country,” Mr. Hollins said. “This certainly predates the pandemic.”Elected officials in Texas cities have found themselves forced to govern with the knowledge that many of the things they do in their backyard will be undone the next time lawmakers meet in the Capitol, which they do every other year.“I see a lot of our job as to do 50 good things a year, knowing that the Legislature will only have time, while it’s in session, to undo half of it,” said Greg Casar, a progressive Democratic councilman in Austin.“Each marquee issue over the last three sessions has been the state wanting to attack local governments,” he added, listing efforts to protect immigrants, transgender Texans and workers that each faced stiff resistance at the state level.Texas House Democrats at an airport outside Washington after fleeing Texas in an effort to block a voting restrictions bill.Kenny Holston for The New York TimesThat view is something more than a hunch on the part of Democrats. Before the previous legislative session, in 2019, the speaker of the Texas House at the time shared an animus toward cities in a private conversation with a Republican lawmaker and a conservative activist.“My goal is for this to be the worst session in the history of the Legislature for cities and counties,” the speaker, Dennis Bonnen, a Republican who represented a district just south of Houston, said in a conversation that was secretly recorded.His comments about cities reflect a commonplace view among some Republicans in Texas, even if they are not always as pointedly expressed. Republican operatives and officials described the dynamic as one of concern over the progressive turn in the state’s cities, a change in culture and politics that has accelerated rapidly over the past decade.And the changes have begun spreading into the suburbs. Populous counties outside of Houston and Austin that once reliably voted Republican have swung in recent years toward the Democrats, said Mark Jones, a professor of political science at Rice University.“With the bluing of the major urban counties and the blushing of many of the major suburbs, what has allowed the G.O.P. to continue to win statewide has been its increasing dominance in the state’s rural counties,” Dr. Jones said.Most states have similar divisions between blue cities and red rural areas. But in Texas, the divisions have taken hold only relatively recently — Houston voted for a Republican, George W. Bush, for president in 2004 — adding to the alarm among Republicans and anticipation among Democrats that the state could soon be up for grabs.In the meantime, said Richard Peña Raymond, a Democratic state representative from Laredo, cities are being punished by the Republican majority in the Capitol for daring to extend voting opportunities, particularly in places where it benefited low-income communities of color and disabled people.“They are trying to thin out the crowd,” Mr. Raymond said of the Republicans in the state. “And that’s just wrong.”Republicans have disputed such characterizations. They have said their efforts to pass the voting bill are a way to instill confidence in future elections and to make uniform the rules that govern Texas elections.“It increases transparency and ensures the voting rules are the same in every county across the state,” the lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, said in a statement after the State Senate passed its version of the voting measure on Tuesday.Signage in Austin ahead of the presidential election.Tamir Kalifa for The New York TimesThe Senate bill, and one before the House, includes provisions to ban 24-hour voting and drive-through voting; limit third-party collection of ballots; increase criminal penalties on election workers for violating regulations; grant more freedom of movement to partisan poll watchers; and require large counties — which include the state’s largest cities — to make available a livestream video during vote counting.Democratic lawmakers have described the changes as a means of voter suppression in a state with a long history of such tactics.But without enough votes to block the bills, more than 50 Democrats, representing the state’s largest cities and suburbs, opted to leave the state in order to deny Republicans the quorum necessary for the House of Representatives to conduct its business. Mr. Abbott has threatened to arrest Democrats to bring them back to the State Capitol, though his jurisdiction to do so stops at the state line.“Everything that the Democratic cities do, particularly if it’s progressive, they attack it and they say cities can’t do that,” Eddie Rodriguez, a Democrat representing Austin, said on Wednesday as he rushed between meetings in Washington. “Which is ironic because they were the party of local control.”Like other Democrats, he vowed to remain outside Texas until Aug. 7, when the 30-day special session ends.Back in Austin, Mayes Middleton, a Republican representing Galveston, awaited the Democrats’ return and bemoaned their flight as hypocritical.“The Democrats say that the state should not dictate how counties run their election laws, but at the same time, they’re in Washington trying to have the federal government dictate how Texas should run its elections,” Mr. Middleton said. “We’ve got to let Texas run Texas.”Edgar Sandoval More

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    Biden Speaks on Voting Rights in Philadelphia

    WASHINGTON — President Biden said on Tuesday that the fight against restrictive voting laws was the “most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War” and called Donald J. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election “a big lie.”In an impassioned speech in Philadelphia, Mr. Biden tried to reinvigorate the stalled Democratic effort to pass federal voting rights legislation and called on Republicans “in Congress and states and cities and counties to stand up, for God’s sake.”“Help prevent this concerted effort to undermine our election and the sacred right to vote,” the president said in remarks at the National Constitution Center. “Have you no shame?”But his words collided with reality: Even as Republican-led bills meant to restrict voting access make their way through statehouses across the country, two bills aiming to expand voting rights nationwide are languishing in Congress. And Mr. Biden has bucked increasing pressure from Democrats to support pushing the legislation through the Senate by eliminating the filibuster, no matter the political cost.In fact, the president seemed to acknowledge that the legislation had little hope of passing as he shifted his focus to the midterm elections.“We’re going to face another test in 2022,” Mr. Biden said. “A new wave of unprecedented voter suppression, and raw and sustained election subversion. We have to prepare now.”He said he would start an effort “to educate voters about the changing laws, register them to vote and then get the vote out.”The partisan fight over voting rights was playing out even as the president spoke, with a group of Texas Democrats fleeing their state to deny Republicans the quorum they need to pass new voting restrictions there.In his speech, Mr. Biden characterized the conspiracy theories about the 2020 election — hatched and spread by his predecessor, Mr. Trump — as a “darker and more sinister” underbelly of American politics. He did not mention Mr. Trump by name but warned that “bullies and merchants of fear” had posed an existential threat to democracy.“No other election has ever been held under such scrutiny, such high standards,” Mr. Biden said. “The big lie is just that: a big lie.”About a dozen Republican-controlled states passed laws this spring to restrict voting or significantly change election rules, in part because of Mr. Trump’s efforts to sow doubt about the 2020 results.Republicans, who have called Democrats’ warnings about democracy hyperbolic, argue that laws are needed to tamp down on voter fraud, despite evidence that it is not a widespread problem. They have mounted an aggressive campaign to portray Mr. Biden’s voting-rights efforts as self-serving federalization of elections to benefit Democrats.The president’s speech, delivered against the backdrop of the birthplace of American democracy, was intended to present the right to vote as a shared ideal, despite the realities of a deeply fractured political landscape.Democratic efforts to pass voting rights legislation in Washington have stalled in the evenly divided Senate. Last month, Republicans filibustered the broad elections overhaul known as the For the People Act, and they are expected to do the same if Democrats try to bring up the other measure — the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, named for a former Georgia congressman and civil rights icon — which would restore parts of the Voting Rights Act struck down by the Supreme Court in 2013.In a statement, Danielle Álvarez, the communications director for the Republican National Committee, said that Mr. Biden’s speech amounted to “lies and theatrics.” Republicans had unanimously rejected the For the People Act as a Democratic attempt to “pass their federal takeover of our elections,” she said.There were also concerns among more moderate members of Mr. Biden’s party that the legislation was too partisan. Senators Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona have publicly said they would not support rolling back the filibuster to enact it.But other Democrats see a worrying increase in efforts by Republican-led state legislatures to restrict voting, along with court rulings that would make it harder to fight encroachments on voting rights.A Supreme Court ruling this month weakened the one enforcement clause of the Voting Rights Act that remained after the court invalidated its major provision in 2013. Mr. Biden said last year that strengthening the act would be one of his first priorities after taking office; but on Tuesday, he sought to shift responsibility to lawmakers.“The court’s decision, as harmful as it is, does not limit the Congress’s ability to repair the damage done,” the president said. “As soon as Congress passes the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, I will sign it and want the whole world to see it.”His rallying cry only underscored the impossibility of the task: Neither bill currently has a path to his desk.Activists who had wondered whether Mr. Biden would stake out a public position on the filibuster got their answer on Tuesday: “I’m not filibustering now,” the president told reporters who shouted questions after his speech.“It was strange to hear,” Eli Zupnick, a spokesman for the anti-filibuster group Fix Our Senate, said after watching the speech. “He did a great job of laying out the problem, but then stopped short of talking about the actual solution that would be needed to passing legislation to address the problem.”As Mr. Biden spoke in Philadelphia, the group of Texas Democrats had traveled to Washington, where they were trying to delay state lawmakers from taking up restrictive voting measures.Representative Marc Veasey, Democrat of Texas, speaking at a press conference with Democratic members of the Texas Legislature on Capitol Hill on Tuesday.Sarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesBoth measures would ban 24-hour voting and drive-through voting; prohibit election officials from proactively sending absentee ballot applications to voters who had not requested them; add new voter identification requirements for voting by mail; limit the types of assistance that can be provided to voters; and greatly expand the authority and autonomy of partisan poll watchers.In Austin, Republicans vented their anger at the fleeing group, and Gov. Greg Abbott vowed to call “special session after special session after special session” until an election bill passed. The handful of Democratic lawmakers who did not go to Washington were rounded up and ordered onto the Statehouse floor. Shawn Thierry, a Democratic state representative from Houston, posted to Twitter a video of a Statehouse sergeant-at-arms and a state trooper entering her office to order her to be locked in the House chamber.“This is not an issue about Democrats or Republicans,” Vice President Kamala Harris told the Texas lawmakers when she met with them on Tuesday. “This is about Americans and how Americans are experiencing this issue.”James Talarico, 32, the youngest member of the Texas Legislature, said the group of Democrats had gone to Washington, in part, to pressure Mr. Biden to do more.“We can’t listen to more speeches,” Mr. Talarico said. “I’m incredibly proud not only as a Democrat but also an American of what President Biden has accomplished in his first few months in office. But protecting our democracy should have been at the very top of the list, because without it none of these issues matter.”The restrictions in the Texas bills mirror key provisions of a restrictive law passed this year in Georgia, which went even further to assert Republican control over the State Election Board and empower the party to suspend county election officials. In June, the Justice Department sued Georgia over the law, the Biden administration’s first significant move to challenge voter restrictions at the state level.“The 21st-century Jim Crow assault is real,” Mr. Biden said as he listed the details of the Texas bills. “It’s unrelenting, and we are going to challenge it vigorously.”Zolan Kanno-Youngs More

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    What’s at Stake in the Fight Over Voting Rights

    Here’s a breakdown of the themes in the state laws that Republicans are passing.Texas Democrats left the state for the nation’s capital in an effort to prevent passage of a new restrictive voting law in the Republican-controlled state legislature and to bring national attention to their cause.Kenny Holston for The New York TimesWith President Biden set to give a speech on voting rights in Philadelphia today and the Texas Legislature engulfed in chaos over a Republican effort to change election rules, we want to update you on the latest developments on the issue.We’ll break down the major themes in the new state laws that Republicans are passing, as well as the responses from Democrats. The short version: Democratic leaders have no evident way to stop the Republican-backed laws — but the effect of those laws remains somewhat uncertain.First, the newsIn his Philadelphia speech, Biden will call efforts to limit ballot access “authoritarian and anti-American,” the White House said.Some Democrats hope that presidential attention will persuade Congress to pass a voting-rights bill that outlaws the new Republican voting rules. But that’s unlikely. Congressional Republicans are almost uniformly opposed to ambitious voting-rights bills. And some Senate Democrats, including Joe Manchin, seem unwilling to change the filibuster, which would almost certainly be necessary to pass a bill.So why is Biden giving a speech? In part, it helps him avoid criticism from progressive Democrats that he is ignoring the subject, as Michael Shear, a White House correspondent for The Times, told us.But Biden also appears to be genuinely concerned about the issue, and the use of the presidential bully pulpit is one of the few options available to him. Over the long term, high-profile attention may increase the chances of federal legislation, Michael said.In Texas, Democratic legislators fled the state yesterday to deny the Republican-controlled Legislature the quorum it needs to pass a restrictive voting bill. The move is likely only to delay the bill, not stop it from becoming law.The G.O.P. lawsIn 17 states, Republican lawmakers have recently enacted laws limiting ballot access, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Texas could become the 18th.Republican officials have justified these new laws by saying that they want to crack down on voter fraud. They passed the laws after Donald Trump spent months falsely claiming that the 2020 presidential election was fraudulent.Studies have repeatedly found that voter fraud is not a widespread problem. Some of the very few cases have involved Republicans trying to vote more than once.The substance of the laws makes their true intent clear: They are generally meant to help Republicans win more elections.Increase partisan controlSo far, at least 14 states have enacted laws that give partisan officials more control over election oversight — potentially allowing those politicians to overturn an election result, as Donald Trump urged state-level Republicans to do last year.In Georgia, a Republican-controlled commission now has the power to remove local election officials, and has already removed some. In Florida, elections officials who fail to supervise drop boxes continuously can be fined $25,000. Arkansas has empowered a state board to “take over and conduct elections” in a county if the G.O.P.-dominated legislature deems it is necessary. Arizona Republicans took away the Democratic secretary of state’s authority over election lawsuits and gave it to the Republican attorney general.It’s not hard to imagine how Republican legislators could use some of these new rules to disqualify enough ballots to flip the result of a very close election — like, say, last year’s presidential election in Arizona or Georgia. The election-administration provisions, The Times’s Nate Cohn has written, are “the most insidious and serious threat to democracy” in the new bills.Making voting harderMany Republican politicians believe that they are less likely to win elections when voter turnout is high and have passed laws that generally make voting more difficult..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-16ed7iq{width:100%;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;-webkit-box-pack:center;-webkit-justify-content:center;-ms-flex-pack:center;justify-content:center;padding:10px 0;background-color:white;}.css-pmm6ed{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}.css-pmm6ed > :not(:first-child){margin-left:5px;}.css-5gimkt{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.8125rem;font-weight:700;-webkit-letter-spacing:0.03em;-moz-letter-spacing:0.03em;-ms-letter-spacing:0.03em;letter-spacing:0.03em;text-transform:uppercase;color:#333;}.css-5gimkt:after{content:’Collapse’;}.css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;-webkit-transform:rotate(180deg);-ms-transform:rotate(180deg);transform:rotate(180deg);}.css-eb027h{max-height:5000px;-webkit-transition:max-height 0.5s ease;transition:max-height 0.5s ease;}.css-6mllg9{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;position:relative;opacity:0;}.css-6mllg9:before{content:”;background-image:linear-gradient(180deg,transparent,#ffffff);background-image:-webkit-linear-gradient(270deg,rgba(255,255,255,0),#ffffff);height:80px;width:100%;position:absolute;bottom:0px;pointer-events:none;}.css-uf1ume{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;}.css-wxi1cx{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Some of the new laws restrict early voting: Iowa, for example, has shortened the early-voting period to 20 days from 29 and reduced poll hours on Election Day. Georgia’s new rules on early voting hours will most likely limit access for voters with less flexible schedules. Others make it harder to cast a ballot in person on Election Day. Montana has eliminated same-day registration and will require voters to show a photo ID.Still other states have made it harder to vote by mail: Florida has reduced the hours for ballot drop-off boxes and will also require voters to request a new mail ballot for each election. Georgia and Iowa have banned elections officials from automatically mailing absentee ballot applications to voters — as Texas may soon do. Idaho and Kansas require that a voter’s signature on an absentee ballot match the voter-registration signature.Notably, some of the provisions are targeted at areas and groups that lean Democratic — like Black, Latino and younger voters. Georgia has lowered the number of drop boxes allowed for the metropolitan Atlanta area to an estimated 23 from 94 — while increasing drop boxes in some other parts of the state. Texas Republicans hope to ban drive-through voting and other measures that Harris County, a Democratic stronghold, adopted last year. Montana has ruled that student IDs are no longer a sufficient form of voter identification.There are a few laws that go in the other direction. In Kentucky and Oklahoma, bipartisan groups of legislators voted to expand early voting, while Louisiana made it easier for former felons to vote. Several Democratic-leaning states, including Vermont and Nevada, have also taken steps to make voting easier.And the impact?That’s not so easy to figure out. The laws certainly have the potential to accomplish their goal of reducing Democratic turnout more than Republican turnout. In closely divided states like Arizona, Florida or Georgia — or in a swing congressional district — even a small effect could determine an election.But recent Republican efforts to hold down Democratic turnout stretch back to the Obama presidency, and so far they seem to have failed. “The Republican intent behind restrictive election laws may be nefarious, but the impact to date has been negligible,” Bill Scher wrote in RealClearPolitics on Monday. The restrictions evidently have not been big enough to keep people from voting, thanks in part to Democratic get-out-the-vote efforts.The Republicans’ latest restrictions — and the ones that may follow, as in Texas — are more significant, however, and that creates uncertainty about their effect.“Our democracy works best when we believe that everybody should have free, fair and accessible elections,” Myrna Pérez, a longtime elections expert, told us (before Biden nominated her to a federal judgeship). “And while it may turn out that their self-interested anti-voter efforts may backfire, make no mistake: Our democracy is worse just because they tried.”The Supreme Court has taken a different view. Its Republican-appointed majority has repeatedly ruled that states have the right to restrict voting access. More

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

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

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    The Voter Fraud Fraud

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