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Category: voter suppression

  • Some US Companies Decry Voter Suppression Laws While Funding Their Sponsors

    People wait in line to participate in early voting on October 31, 2020, in Greenville, South Carolina.

    In April 2021, as Republican-controlled states began passing bills that will restrict voting in upcoming elections, cable and media giant Comcast put out a statement declaring its opposition to the measures.

    “We believe that all Americans should enjoy equitable access to secure elections and we have long supported and promoted voter education, registration and participation campaigns across the country to achieve that goal,” the company said in a statement it provided to Deadline. “Efforts to limit or impede access to this vital constitutional right for any citizen are not consistent with our values.”

    In the following months, however, Comcast and its political action committees made donations to several Republican lawmakers who authored voter suppression bills that were signed into law last year. At least 19 states enacted 33 laws that further restrict access to voting in 2021, according to a recent analysis by the nonpartisan institute Brennan Center for Justice.

    On October 15, Comcast donated $1,000 to Florida Sen. Dennis Baxley, the sole sponsor of SB 90, a 48-page bill that, among other measures, makes it a misdemeanor to give water — or anything else — to people waiting in line to vote in the sweltering Florida heat, similar to a restriction that first appeared in Georgia Republicans’ suppression bill. Baxter’s bill eliminates 24/7 ballot drop boxes and requires such boxes to be monitored at all times and only available during in-person voting hours. It also requires voters seeking an absentee ballot to submit a driver’s license or Social Security number and requires voters to reapply for mail ballots more often, among its many other provisions that make voting more difficult.

    The League of Women Voters of Florida, Black Voters Matter Fund, and Florida voters have filed a lawsuit to stop Baxley’s bill, which Gov. DeSantis signed into law in May. The lawsuit argues that the bill is designed to make it more difficult for seniors, minorities, and young people to vote and violates people’s First and Fourteenth Amendment rights.

    Comcast made several other donations to voter suppression bill sponsors after it put out its statement, Sludge found by reviewing donations to the sponsors of new restrictive voting laws identified by the Brennan Center. The company donated $1,000 in September to Alabama Republican State Representative Alan Baker, the sponsor of a new law that shortens the window of time people have for requesting an absentee ballot. It also made donations to the sponsors of new Brennan Center-identified voter suppression laws in Utah and Kansas.

    Pharmaceutical company Merck signed a pro-voting rights statement that was published as an advertisement in the New York Times on April 14. “For American democracy to work for any of us, we must ensure the right to vote for all of us,” the ad reads. “We call upon all Americans to join us in taking a nonpartisan stand for this most basic and fundamental right of all Americans.”

    After signing the ad, Merck donated $1,000 in September to Florida’s Baxley and $1,000 in October to Texas Republican State Senator Lois Kolkhorst, the primary sponsor of one of the state’s two new voter suppression laws and a cosponsor of the other one.

    Kolkhorst’s bill, SB 1111, which was signed into law by Gov. Greg Abbott in June, limits the types of addresses people can use to register to vote in ways that could be difficult for people who move often or are homeless. The bill says that people can’t use addresses where they do not live full time, and it allows voting officials to demand voters show documents to prove their place of residence. With few exceptions, Texans would not be able to use commercial post office boxes as their registration addresses, a practice that Democratic attorney Marc Elias says is often used by churches that help homeless people register to vote.

    Kolkhorst was also one of the 14 cosponsors of SB 1, an omnibus voter suppression law that bans drive-through voting and 24-hour voting locations, requires voters to provide driver’s license or Social Security numbers to request absentee ballots, prohibits election officials from proactively mailing out ballots, says poll watchers can not be denied “free movement” in polling places, and more. The Brennan Center is suing Gov. Abbott in an attempt to stop the law, which it says is “a reaction to Texas’s changing electorate, which is now more racially diverse and younger than ever before.”

    JPMorgan Chase also donated to a cosponsor of Texas SB 1, giving $1,000 from its PAC to Sen. Dawn Buckingham in September. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon released a statement in March saying that “as state capitals debate election laws, we believe voting must be accessible and equitable,” and that “We regularly encourage our employees to exercise their fundamental right to vote, and we stand against efforts that may prevent them from being able to do so.”

    AT&T is another company whose political donations seem to contradict its public statements.

    “We believe the right to vote is sacred and we support voting laws that make it easier for more Americans to vote in free, fair and secure elections,” reads an April statement from AT&T CEO John Stankey. “We are working together with other businesses through groups like the Business Roundtable to support efforts to enhance every person’s ability to vote.”

    In September, AT&T donated $1,000 to Alabama Republican Wes Allen, the chief sponsor of H.B. 285, a new state law that prohibits election officials from setting up curbside voting, ballot drop boxes, or putting voting machines outside of polling locations. The company’s Oklahoma PAC also donated $2,500 that month to Oklahoma Senate Republican Majority Leader Kim David, the sponsor of a new state law that shortens the deadline for applying for a mail-in ballot from 7 days before an election to 15 days before the election, among other provisions.

    AT&T and its PACs also donated $500 to Florida’s Baxley in March, after the senator had formally introduced his voter suppression bill, and made donations to sponsors of Brennan Center-identified restrictive voting laws in Utah and Kansas.

    Other companies and organizations that donated to the sponsors of Brennan Center-identified state voter suppression measures after publicly denouncing them earlier this year include General Motors and Planned Parenthood, whose PACs contributed to Democratic New York senators who cosponsored a bill that shortens the window for applying for a mail-in ballot, and Microsoft, which donated to a Kansas Republican representative who chairs the committee that sponsored a new law limiting mail-in voting.

    AT&T, Merck, and Comcast did not respond to Sludge’s requests for comment on how their donations to the sponsors of voter suppression bills relate to their public expressions in favor of voting rights. JPMorgan Chase declined to comment.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Sanders Says He’s Open to Supporting Primary Challengers to Manchin and Sinema

    Sen. Bernie Sanders answers questions from reporters at the Capitol on July 12, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    Ahead of a crucial vote to amend the filibuster to support voting rights, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) has said that he would be open to supporting candidates levying a primary challenge to conservative Democrats Senators Joe Manchin (West Virginia) and Kyrsten Sinema (Arizona).

    Sanders told reporters on Tuesday that he would consider backing primary challenges to the two filibuster holdouts when they’re up for reelection. The senators, who are basking in the praise and political contributions from conservative groups, stand in the way of nearly every Democratic priority currently before Congress.

    The Senate’s protracted battle on the filibuster is coming to a head this week. Schumer announced on Tuesday that he will bring a filibuster reform vote to the chamber after Republicans inevitably vote to shoot down the Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act, which could take place as soon as Wednesday or Thursday.

    Though the two lawmakers aren’t up for reelection until 2024, both senators’ approval ratings have been falling fast as they stand in the way of Democratic progress – and an October poll found that Sinema would lose to progressive challengers if the election were held immediately.

    Sanders, who has previously expressed frustration with the two senators, condemned their opposition to filibuster reform in a Twitter video on Tuesday.

    “Right now, every Republican will be voting against us, and that’s pretty pathetic,” he said. “But what’s equally pathetic, as of now, two Democrats will be voting against us as well. I would hope very much that those two Democrats, Senator Sinema and Senator Manchin, will rethink their position and understand that the foundations of American democracy are at stake.”

    According to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York), the two lawmakers are the only Democrats in the chamber who still staunchly oppose any changes to the filibuster, essentially supporting minority rule. Some other legislators have said that they’re torn on the issue, but that they’re open to filibuster reform, which Sinema and Manchin are not.

    Schumer is proposing an implementation of a talking filibuster for the voting rights bill. This means that the bill will be able to pass with a simple majority vote after any opponents delay the vote by speaking on the Senate floor, if they so choose. Currently, bills must overcome a 60-vote threshold in order to pass.

    The Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act, which is a combination of two voting rights bills that have both been passed by the House, would greatly increase financial transparency in campaign donations and restore provisions of the Voting Rights Act meant to protect marginalized voters.

    Voting rights advocates and progressives have welcomed Schumer’s plan, saying that it’s necessary to put senators’ views on the filibuster issue – which serves as somewhat of a proxy vote for voting rights – on the record. Sinema and Manchin have both already said that they will vote against the reform.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Republicans, Aided by Manchin and Sinema, Are Stonewalling Voting Rights Bills

    Activists take part in a voting rights protest in front of the White House on November 17, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    “The denial of this sacred right [to vote] is a tragic betrayal of the highest mandates of our democratic tradition,” Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said in 1957. Now, on January 18, 2021 — one day after we celebrated King’s birthday and one year after a mob of right-wing Trump supporters attacked the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the results of a free and fair election — the Senate is debating voting rights legislation aimed at stopping voter suppression. But the legislation appears doomed to failure.

    The right to vote is “preservative of all rights,” the Supreme Court said in 1886 in the case of Yick Wo v. Hopkins. The Constitution mentions the right to vote in five separate places — the 14th, 15th, 19th, 24th and 26th Amendments, each of which empowers Congress to enact “appropriate legislation” to enforce the protected right. Yet right-wingers — enabled by congressional Republicans and reactionary members of the Supreme Court — are mounting a full-court press to prevent marginalized groups from voting.

    During Reconstruction after the Civil War, the 15th Amendment was added to the Constitution. It prohibits the federal government and the states from denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude.

    As a result of the civil rights movement, Congress passed the landmark Voting Rights Act (VRA) in 1965 to enforce the 15th Amendment. It links racial discrimination with the right to vote.

    The VRA forbids voting changes if their purpose or effect is to diminish the ability of citizens to vote on account of race, color or language minority status. “The right to vote was the crown jewel of the civil rights struggle,” said Rev. Jesse Jackson.

    Supreme Court Uses States’ Rights Rationale to Usurp Congress’s Power

    Although Congress re-authorized the VRA four times with strong bipartisan majorities and each reauthorization was signed by a Republican president, the Roberts Court has now usurped the power of Congress and eviscerated the VRA.

    In the 2013 case of Shelby County v. Holder, a 5-4 right-wing majority of the court struck down the provision of the VRA which required that jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination obtain preclearance from the Justice Department or a panel of three federal judges in the District of Columbia before making voting changes. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote on behalf of himself, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy.

    The majority took a states’ rights approach (citing “equal sovereignty”) which will allow states to enact racist voting laws. They looked only to the end of discriminatory voting tests and the lack of disparity between whites and non-whites in voter registration and turnout since the enactment of the VRA. The court then concluded that the formula set forth in Section 4 for requiring Section 5 preclearance need no longer be used.

    At that time, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, joined by Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Stephen Breyer, filed a scathing dissent. “Hubris is a fit word for today’s demolition of the VRA,” Ginsburg wrote.

    “Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet,” Ginsburg noted. Moreover, the dissent explained, “the VRA is grounded in Congress’ recognition of the ‘variety and persistence’ of measures designed to impair minority voting rights.”

    The dissent said discrimination is “more subtle” today, citing “second generation barriers” to voting that reduce the impact of minority votes. Ginsburg mentioned racial gerrymandering and at-large voting instead of district-by-district voting in cities with sizable Black populations. She also listed vote dilution (drawing redistricting maps in a way that minimizes the voting strength of the non-white population), curtailment of early voting, moving polling places away from predominantly Black neighborhoods and purging voter rolls of many Black voters.

    After Shelby, state after state enacted — and continue to enact — voter suppression laws. They prevent easy access to polling places, provide for early closure of polls in Black and Brown communities, make it harder to receive mail ballots, reduce early voting, restrict voter registration and prevent the accurate counting of votes. States including Georgia and Texas have drawn extreme gerrymandered maps which entrench the power of Republican politicians.

    Using baseless and alarmist claims about “voter fraud” (which is virtually non-existent) as a justification, states are passing voter identification laws that make it harder for marginalized communities to vote. GOP-led states insert Republicans into the election process and empower state legislatures to overturn presidential election results even after certification by election officials.

    In 2020, the Supreme Court made it more difficult to mount legal challenges to voter suppression measures. The court held 6-3, again along ideological lines, in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, that two Arizona voter suppression laws (ballot harvesting and out-of-precinct voting) did not violate Section 2 of the VRA, which forbids any voting procedure that “results in a denial or abridgment of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race.”

    Shelby Invited Congress to Draft Another Preclearance Formula for “Current Conditions”

    “Congress may draft another formula [for preclearance] based on current conditions,” the Shelby majority stated. Two bills are pending in Congress to address the “current conditions” of voter suppression.

    The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would establish new criteria for determining which states and political subdivisions must obtain preclearance before changes to voting practices may take effect. States need preapproval based on the number of voting rights violations they have had in the past 25 years. After 10 years without violations, they no longer require preclearance.

    The Freedom to Vote Act cracks down on voter suppression. It would facilitate early voting, allow same-day voting and online voter registration, protect voters from purges, ban partisan gerrymandering, mandate disclosure of major campaign donors, prevent state restrictions on mail-in voting, require the counting of votes that are postmarked on or before Election Day and arrive at polling places within a week, set uniform standards for voter ID, provide that no one has to wait longer than 30 minutes to vote and require voter-verified paper records.

    The House has passed a voting rights bill that contains provisions of both the John Lewis Act and the Freedom to Vote Act. On January 18, the Democrats in the Senate started debate on the bill with a simple majority.

    Although there are enough votes to pass the bill with a simple majority, Democrats also need 50 votes to change Senate rules to allow cutting off debate and moving to a vote. The filibuster effectively requires 60 votes (including 10 Republicans) to advance legislation. Democrats do not have a majority to change the filibuster rules because Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona) oppose overriding the filibuster for voting rights legislation.

    Democrats are considering procedural maneuvers to allow the bill to pass with 51 votes without altering the filibuster rule. They would force Republicans to mount a talking filibuster to hold the Senate floor with procedural motions and speeches. It could go on for days or weeks, and Democrats hope that Republicans would tire of it and relent. But this strategy, which hasn’t been used in decades, poses major challenges. It is, in effect, a Hail Mary pass.

    “I think the tragedy is that we have a Congress with a Senate that has a minority of misguided senators who will use the filibuster to keep the majority of people from even voting. They won’t let the majority senators vote,” King said in 1963.

    As the Senate debates these voting rights bills, the American people will see for themselves how racist Republicans, aided and abetted by Manchin and Sinema, are stonewalling legislation that would protect the sacred right of everyone to vote.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Ohio Supreme Court Rules That GOP-Drawn District Maps Are Unconstitutional

    Demonstrators gather outside of the U.S. Supreme Court on October 3, 2017, in Washington, D.C.

    Ohio Supreme Court justices struck down Republican-drawn district maps in the state on Wednesday, ruling that they were unconstitutionally gerrymandered. The state’s redistricting panel will now have 10 days to redraft the maps.

    The decision was made 4 to 3, with one Republican justice breaking from her party to rule with the three Democrats. In the majority opinion, Justice Melody Stewart wrote that the maps didn’t match statewide voting preferences, which were 54 percent for Republicans and 46 percent for Democrats in the past decade.

    “[T]he commission did not attempt to draw a plan that meets the proportionality standard,” Stewart wrote, adding that the commission’s maps unfairly favored one party.

    Although the justice didn’t specify which party, the maps were drawn by Republicans. Ohio voters passed a constitutional amendment in 2015 aimed at preventing partisan gerrymandering; the redistricting commission will have to redraw maps to obey that amendment.

    The decision was celebrated by voting rights advocates who have argued in lawsuits that the new map is unfairly biased toward the GOP and that the map violates the Voting Rights Act by suppressing Black voters.

    “The Ohio Supreme Court took an important step in rejecting the cynical partisanship that was behind the Republicans’ gerrymandered state legislative map,” Marc E. Elias, a voting rights attorney who represented plaintiffs in one of the lawsuits, told The Washington Post. “Our fight for fair maps and voting rights continues in Ohio and around the country.”

    The news was also celebrated by Alicia Bannon, who aided plaintiffs in one of the lawsuits and who serves as the Judiciary Program director for the Brennan Center for Justice.

    “The General Assembly maps entrenched a GOP supermajority and flouted clear partisan fairness requirements in the Ohio constitution – abuses that especially impacted Ohio’s Black, Muslim and immigrant communities,” she said in a statement. “The commission is now tasked with drawing replacement maps. We will be watching to ensure that all Ohioans get the fair representation they are due.”

    Indeed, plaintiffs had accused the redistricting commission of ignoring the fact that Black voters have historically had their voting power diluted by district maps. Voting rights advocates pointed to a September hearing in which a Republican mapmaker told the commission that “legislative leaders” instructed him to deliberately disregard racial data in drawing Ohio House and Senate districts.

    The bipartisan redistricting commission, which is made up of five Republicans and two Democrats, was created in order to help quell partisanship in map drawing in the state. But lawmakers were able to sidestep the commission, allowing the Republican-controlled legislature to draw what experts said was an extremely gerrymandered map.

    The map gave heavy favor to Republicans, further entrenching previously red districts and ensuring that more competitive districts were still right-leaning. It also took one surefire seat away from Democrats, creating a high possibility of 13 Republican seats and only two Democratic seats in the state, FiveThirtyEight found.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • There Are Many Ways to Steal a Midterm — and the GOP Is Laying the Groundwork

    There Are Many Ways to Steal a Midterm -- and the GOP Is Laying the Groundwork

    Mother Jones reporter Ari Berman warns the Republican Party is laying the groundwork to steal the 2022 midterms and future elections through a combination of gerrymandering, voter suppression and election subversion, that together pose a mortal threat to voting rights in the United States. Republicans, many of whom are election deniers, are campaigning for positions that hold immense oversight over the election process. “What’s really new here are these efforts to take over how votes are counted,” says Berman. “That is the ultimate voter suppression method, because if you’re not able to rig the election on the front end, you can throw out votes on that back end.”

    TRANSCRIPT

    This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

    AMY GOODMAN: President Biden is meeting with Senate Democrats on Capitol Hill today for a lunchtime meeting to push for rewriting Senate rules to prevent Republicans from filibustering a pair of major voting rights bills — the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act. On Wednesday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer outlined a plan to bring the voting bills to a debate using a parliamentary maneuver, but the move would still leave room for Republicans to block final passage of the bills using the filibuster. Two Senate Democrats have so far refused to support changing the filibuster rules: Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona.

    Biden heads to Capitol Hill two days after he gave a major speech on voting rights in Atlanta, Georgia. On Wednesday, Senate Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell blasted Biden’s remarks.

    MINORITY LEADER MITCH McCONNELL: Twelve months ago, this president said disagreement must not lead to disunion. Ah, but yesterday he invoked the bloody disunion of the Civil War — the Civil War — to demonize Americans who disagree with him. He compared — listen to this — a bipartisan majority of senators to literal traitors. How profoundly, profoundly unpresidential.

    AMY GOODMAN: Democrats are increasingly concerned that Republicans will be able to successfully steal future elections, both on the national and state level, if major voting rights legislation is not immediately passed. During his speech in Atlanta, President Biden made reference to efforts by Donald Trump and his supporters to overturn the 2020 election.

    PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: We’re here today to stand against the forces in America that value power over principle, forces that attempted a coup — a coup against the legally expressed will of the American people — by sowing doubt, inventing charges of fraud and seeking to steal the 2020 election from the people.

    AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now by Ari Berman, a senior reporter at Mother Jones covering voting rights. He’s the author of Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America. His new piece, out just today, “The Coming Coup: How Republicans Are Laying the Groundwork to Steal Future Elections.”

    Ari, I want to start off by talking about what this maneuver is — very complex, I’m sure very hard for people to understand — how the Democrats try to plan to get these bills on the floor and voted on in the Senate.

    ARI BERMAN: Good morning, Amy.

    Well, the plan is that the House is taking a bill, and they are putting the two voting rights bills — the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act — in what’s essentially a shell bill. They are going to pass that today and send it to the Senate. And that will allow the Senate to immediately debate the bill without needing 60 votes to get it to the floor. They will still need 60 votes to pass the bill if they don’t reform the filibuster, but this will allow at least the Senate to immediately begin debating the bill, probably Friday or Saturday, and then set up a vote on these bills, and also potentially changing the Senate rules, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

    AMY GOODMAN: Which, of course, is Monday. I mean, this is really unusual. It’s a bill completely unrelated, something to do with NASA, that the House will pass. Then they will remove the text of that and put the two bills into it, and it’s called a message, that will be sent to the Senate, as they do this. So, then, what has to happen next? And why are Manchin and Sinema key at the point in the Senate?

    ARI BERMAN: Yeah, and it’s important to remember, Amy, these bills have already passed the House. So it’s not like the House hasn’t taken up the Freedom to Vote Act or the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act already. They just have to do this message bill to get it to the Senate to essentially avoid 60 votes on debate. That’s the only way that Schumer will be able to then have a debate on the bills themselves and on the rules changes.

    Manchin and Sinema are key because there’s essentially 48 votes for changing the Senate rules to pass voting rights legislation, but they’re two votes short, and the two votes that are short are Manchin and Sinema. And Democrats have been working feverishly, both publicly and behind the scenes, to get Manchin and Sinema to support the rules changes, but they’re not there yet. It’s important to remember, this voting rights bill, the Freedom to Vote Act, this is Joe Manchin’s bill. This is not like Build Back Better, where he doesn’t support the bill. He supports these bills. The question is: Is he willing to change the rules to pass them? And as of now, the answer is no.

    AMY GOODMAN: During his speech on Tuesday in Atlanta, President Biden made reference to Strom Thurmond, the longtime segregationist senator who served in the Senate for nearly half a century.

    PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: In 2006, the Voting Rights Act passed 390 to 33 in the House of Representatives and 98 to 0 in the Senate, with votes from 16 current sitting Republicans in this United States Senate. Sixteen of them voted to extend it. The last year I was chairman, as some of my friends sitting down here will tell you, Strom Thurmond voted to extend the Voting Rights Act. Strom Thurmond. … Think about that. The man who led the longest — one of the longest filibusters in history in the United States Senate in 1957 against the Voting [sic] Rights Act, the man who led and sided with the old Southern bulls in the United States Senate to perpetuate segregation in this nation — even Strom Thurmond came to support voting rights. But Republicans today can’t and won’t. Not a single Republican has displayed the courage to stand up to a defeated president to protect America’s right to vote. Not one. Not one.

    AMY GOODMAN: So, Ari Berman, it looks like President Biden was trying to cut through all the bureaucracy, as they talk about filibusters and everything else, and just say, “Which side are you on?” Right? Strom Thurmond or John Lewis? Are you on the side of Jefferson Davis or Abraham Lincoln?

    ARI BERMAN: Exactly, Amy. He was trying to frame the fight for voting rights in moral terms, much like Lyndon Johnson did when he introduced the Voting Rights Act in 1965, saying, “This is a defining moment in American history, and you have to pick a side.” You can’t just praise Martin Luther King on Martin Luther King Day; you have to live the values that Martin Luther King fought for — namely, the values of the right to vote, which Martin Luther King called “civil right number one.”

    And I thought it was really interesting what the president said about Republicans previously supporting voting rights, because the Voting Rights Act was reauthorized four times, and every reauthorization was signed by a Republican president and supported by overwhelming bipartisan majorities in Congress. Now, that didn’t mean every Republicans like the Voting Rights Act. Lots of GOP presidents, like Nixon and Reagan, didn’t want to sign a reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act. But there was such a strong bipartisan consensus for these bills that Republicans had no choice but to support them. And that’s really evaporated. And obviously, so much of the attention has been on the Democrats and been on Manchin and Sinema to use their power to pass these bills, but Republicans have sort of gotten a free pass in terms of people really saying, “How come you reauthorized the Voting Rights Act overwhelmingly in 2006 — 390 to 33 in the House, 98 to 0 in the Senate — Mitch McConnell led the effort to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act — and just two decades later, you are completely opposing a bill that you basically supported not too long ago?”

    AMY GOODMAN: So, let’s go broader, with your piece that was just released as we went to air, “The Coming Coup: How Republicans Are Laying the Groundwork to Steal Future Elections.” You go beyond the issue of actually casting the ballot and how difficult that is — and you can lay that out — around the country, as well, increasingly, 19 states passing, what, more than 30 laws to restrict voting, but then the issue, for example, of gerrymandering and others.

    ARI BERMAN: That’s right. I think the big trend over the last year has been the Republican Party’s single-minded focus on instituting an insurrection through other means. They failed to overturn the 2020 election, so they’re doing everything they can to rig and steal future elections through a toxic combination of voter suppression, extreme gerrymandering and election subversion. And they’re really trying to take over every aspect of the voting process. They’ve passed 34 new laws in 19 states making it harder to vote, so they’re making it harder to cast a ballot. They’ve passed all of these extreme gerrymandered maps in places like Texas and Georgia, which entrench the power of anti-democratic politicians. And then they’ve added all of these new election subversion laws that give “Stop the Steal” Republicans unprecedented power in states like Georgia over how elections are run and how votes are counted. And so they’re really trying to take over every aspect of the election process to essentially try to succeed in 2022 and 2024 where they failed in 2020.

    AMY GOODMAN: Talk about Lucy McBath, how you open your piece, a congressmember who we had on for years beforehand, after her son was murdered by a white man.

    ARI BERMAN: I think this is really telling. Lucy McBath is a Black member of Congress from Georgia. She ran for the House in Georgia after her son, Jordan Davis, was murdered by a white man. Her victory in 2018 really opened the doors for the victories of Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff two years later. And what Republicans did is they gerrymandered her out of her congressional district. She represents a metro Atlanta area that has become a lot more diverse, a lot more Democratic. And they drew this district to go all the way up to the Appalachian Mountains, and basically took out the most diverse and Democratic parts of her district and added in the most white and conservative parts of the state.

    And so, what happened in Georgia is that all of the demographic change was from communities of color, who increasingly lean Democratic. But the maps themselves reduced representation for communities of color, reduced representation for Democrats and targeted Black members of Congress like Lucy McBath. And that is a form of election rigging, because if you can choose who your electorate is, then the elections themselves become essentially meaningless. So, gerrymandering is one of the many tactics Republicans are using to consolidate power going into the midterm elections.

    AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the victory against gerrymandering in Ohio that just happened.

    ARI BERMAN: Well, this was really significant because Ohio Republicans drew these flagrantly undemocratic maps where there was a bipartisan constitutional amendment passed by the voters in 2018 to rein in partisan gerrymandering, and then Republicans essentially hijacked this redistricting commission to draw these extreme gerrymandered maps that go exactly against what the voters wanted. And the Ohio Supreme Court struck it down, with one of the Republican judges siding with the Democrats and basically saying that the Legislature not just needs to redraw these maps, but that in the future voters might want to consider taking away the power of politicians to be able to draw their districts in the first place.

    So, this was a significant victory, but it’s going to be very hard to uphold these maps in most states. Ohio has a moderate state Supreme Court. North Carolina has a moderate state Supreme Court. But in Texas, in Georgia, in Florida, in other key states, the state supreme courts have moved far to the right. And the federal courts, because of the Supreme Court, have said, “We can’t even review partisan gerrymandering.” So it’s going to be very difficult to fight gerrymandering through the courts writ large.

    AMY GOODMAN: And can you talk about something that didn’t get a heck of a lot of attention, the Cyber Ninjas, the company that led that partisan review of the 2020 ballots in Arizona, closing down following a scathing report by election officials and the threat of $50,000 fines a day, the report rebutting almost every claim this company made?

    ARI BERMAN: Well, yeah, the entire audit in Arizona was a complete —

    AMY GOODMAN: It cost millions.

    ARI BERMAN: It cost millions of dollars in taxpayer money. At the end of the day, they reaffirmed Joe Biden’s victory, so they weren’t actually able to find any of the evidence of fraud. But I think they accomplished their job, in the sense that after this review Republicans were even more skeptical of the validity of the 2020 election, compared to less skeptical. So, just by airing all these conspiracy theories, they made the Republican Party more conspiratorial. And these same kind of, quote-unquote, “audits” are happening in other states, like in Wisconsin, where a very radically conservative state Supreme Court justice is threatening to jail election officials, threatening to subpoena the mayors of the largest cities, threatening to disband the state’s election commission.

    So, it’s very scary, what’s happening here. And I think what’s really new here is all of the efforts to subvert fair elections. We’ve seen voter suppression before. We’ve seen gerrymandering before. It’s gotten worse, but we’ve seen it before. What’s really new here are these efforts to take over how votes are counted. And that is the ultimate voter suppression method, because if you’re not able to rig the election on the front end, you can throw out votes on the back end. And that is a very, very scary prospect for democracy.

    AMY GOODMAN: For example, like in Arizona, Republicans stripped the Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs of the power to defend state election laws, and transferred that authority to the Republican attorney general — but only through the 2022 election, just in case the partisan composition of the offices change. I mean, it is truly astounding. If you could comment on that and another key point of your piece, being that Trump and his allies are aggressively recruiting “Stop the Steal”-inspired candidates to take over other key election positions, like secretary of state, and also fiercely intimidating, going after election workers all over the country?

    ARI BERMAN: That’s absolutely right, Amy. What we’ve seen is that both Democrats and Republicans who defended the integrity of the 2020 election have been purged from their positions, whether it’s taking away the power of the Arizona secretary of state to defend election lawsuits or removing the Republican secretary of state in Georgia, who stood up to Donald Trump, removing him as chair and voting member of the State Election Board. And The Washington Post had recent article finding that 163 Republicans who have amplified the big lie are running for statewide positions with authority over elections, so positions like gubernatorial races, attorney general races, secretary of state races. And the Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold told me this is akin to giving a robber a key to the bank. You are having people who say falsely the election was stolen running to oversee how elections are run.

    And so, this is both a legal mechanism, in that they’re changing the laws in many states to make it easier to subvert elections, but it’s also a political dynamic, in that people who are election deniers are running to take over election operations in all of these key states. And when they get this power, who knows what they will do with it? Because I believe if you are willing to overturn the 2020 election for Trump, you are very likely going to be willing to overturn the 2022 and 2024 election for Republican candidates if it doesn’t go in your favor.

    AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Ari, if the bills are passed, the voting legislation in the Senate, could the U.S. Supreme Court overrule them? I mean, this is the Roberts court, and John Roberts has been opposed to voting rights legislation throughout his career.

    ARI BERMAN: Absolutely, it’s possible the Supreme Court could strike down these laws. But I think it’s important to remember that Congress has authority, under both the 15th Amendment and also under the core guarantees of the Constitution, to write the rules of federal elections. So Congress has the power to pass these bills. Could the Supreme Court strike them down? Absolutely. The Supreme Court can clearly do whatever it wants at this point. It’s gone so far.

    But I have to say it’s very ironic that Mitch McConnell wants there to be 60 votes to protect voting rights in the U.S. Senate, but he was able to put three justices on the Supreme Court for Donald Trump to take away voting rights with just 51 votes. So there’s a fundamental asymmetry here that Republicans have been able to take away voting rights at both the state level and the federal level with 51 votes, but they want Democrats to have 60 votes to be able to protect voting rights in the U.S. Senate. And that’s the fundamental asymmetry that has to change here.

    AMY GOODMAN: Ari Berman, I want to thank you for being with us, senior reporter for Mother Jones. We’ll link to your new cover story, “The Coming Coup: How Republicans Are Laying the Groundwork to Steal Future Elections.” Ari is the author of Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America, speaking to us from New Paltz, New York.

    Coming up, “Confessions of a ‘human guinea pig.’” Stay with us.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Although Democrats May Benefit From Redistricting, Midterm Outlook Remains Grim

    People display signs during a pre-pandemic protest

    In the wake of the 2020 census, the redistricting process by which congressional districts are redrawn has not been as devastating for Democrats as many observers feared. Nonetheless, the consequences could still be dire for democracy: The latest round of Republican gerrymanders threatens to undermine the political power of voters of color and push the Republican Party even further toward the Trumpist extreme.

    Despite months of alarm that Republicans could retake control of the House through redistricting alone, recent analyses by the nonpartisan Cook Political Report with Amy Walter and the left-leaning Data for Progress have found that the redistricting cycle has gone surprisingly well for House Democrats.

    Rather than redrawing Democratic districts into Republican ones, the GOP has largely focused on shoring up existing districts created in the ultra-aggressive 2011 redistricting cycle while the few Democratic-led states that haven’t ceded redistricting to independent commissions, such as Oregon and Illinois, have aggressively tried to add likely Democratic seats. Even though Republicans are redrawing 187 House seats, compared to 75 for Democrats, that’s a significant improvement over the five-to-one advantage the GOP held in 2011.

    As a result, “redistricting is going surprisingly well for Democrats,” wrote Joel Wertheimer at Data for Progress, noting that some states were already so red that it was virtually impossible for Republicans to add seats. “There will be a few more Biden-won districts after redistricting than there are now,” wrote the Cook Political Report’s Dave Wasserman.

    But the surprisingly good news actually isn’t all that good — and not just because both analyses also predict that Republicans will likely win back control of the House this year regardless of redistricting patterns. Wasserman cautioned that Democrats already hold 11 of the 15 “newly Democratic-leaning” seats, meaning there are only a handful of pickup opportunities, while Republicans currently hold just one of the nine “newly GOP-leaning” seats.

    “Because Democrats currently possess the lion’s share of marginal seats, estimating the practical effect of new lines in 2022 still points towards a wash or a slight GOP gain,” Wasserman wrote. And states that have not completed their redistricting, like Florida, Tennessee and New Hampshire, could further cut into Democratic gains.

    But the surprisingly good news actually isn’t all that good — and not just because both analyses also predict that Republicans will likely win back control of the House this year regardless of redistricting patterns. Wasserman cautioned that Democrats already hold 11 of the 15 “newly Democratic-leaning” seats, meaning there are only a handful of pickup opportunities, while Republicans currently hold just one of the nine “newly GOP-leaning” seats.

    “Because Democrats currently possess the lion’s share of marginal seats, estimating the practical effect of new lines in 2022 still points towards a wash or a slight GOP gain,” Wasserman wrote. And states that have not completed their redistricting, like Florida, Tennessee and New Hampshire, could further cut into Democratic gains.

    Multiple lawsuits are also challenging extreme Republican gerrymanders in Ohio and Georgia. But while Democrats were able to beat back several gerrymanders last decade in court, legal remedies are limited after the Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that federal courts have no jurisdiction over partisan gerrymanders (which are deemed to be “political” matters), although they may still hear cases about racial gerrymanders. As a result, most of these lawsuits will be heard in state courts in primarily red states, where Republican governors appointed a large proportion of the state judges.

    Federal courts could ultimately weigh in on some maps where voting rights groups have alleged racial gerrymanders.

    Most legal analyses of the latest round of gerrymanders, Li said, “don’t take into account how these gerrymanders are being accomplished, which is predominantly at the expense of communities of color.”

    Even though Texas gained two congressional seats in the census and people of color (mostly Latinos) accounted for 95% of the state’s population growth, for instance, Republican mapmakers created creating two more white-majority districts where Republicans are likely to win. The Justice Department last month filed a lawsuit alleging that the state’s new maps violate the Voting Rights Act.

    “Texas has violated Section 2 by creating redistricting plans that deny or abridge the rights of Latino and Black voters to vote on account of their race, color or membership in a language minority group,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement.

    These lawsuits come as Democrats ramp up their latest push to advance voting rights legislation, which includes a ban on partisan gerrymandering. Democrats would need to change the Senate’s filibuster rules to advance their bills but they’ve run into stringent opposition, and not just from notorious filibuster fans like Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. Li said he worries that the “not so bad” analyses could undercut the urgency of passing voting-rights bills and warned Democrats not to take any “victory laps” just yet.

    “When people say, ‘Well, these articles say it’s not so bad,’ talk to a voter in Texas,” he said. “Better yet, go talk to a voter of color in Texas — which could be a really deep blue state, and Republicans would still have a two-to-one advantage in the congressional delegation. Ask a Texas voter if that seems fair or ‘not so bad.’ That’s a real danger, because people have taken one part of the story and presented it as the whole of the story, and I think that’s a dangerous thing to do.”

    Former Congressional Black Caucus chairman G.K. Butterfield, a North Carolina Democrat, chose to retire last year after the Republican state legislature redrew his district in ways he said would hurt Black voters.

    “The map that was recently enacted by the legislature is a partisan map. It’s racially gerrymandered. It will disadvantage African American communities all across the 1st congressional district,” Butterfield said last month.

    In Georgia, Rep. Lucy McBath’s district was redrawn to be heavily Republican, forcing her to run in the same district as Rep. Carolyn Bourdeaux, a fellow Black Democrat. Voting rights groups filed a federal lawsuit earlier this month over the changes, alleging that the map is unconstitutional because it denies representation to Black voters.

    “These maps intentionally discriminate against Georgians of color by silencing our voices at the ballot box,” Aunna Dennis, executive director of Common Cause Georgia, the lead plaintiff in the case, said in a statement.

    The trend has been even more glaring on the state level. North Carolina mapmakers redrew the districts of four Black state senators and five Black state representatives in ways that could easily cost them their seats, the New York Times reported last month. South Carolina Republicans drew four Black state representatives into districts now represented by other Democrats. Ohio mapmakers also altered the districts of four Black state representatives or drew them into other districts.

    The Justice Department, in its lawsuit against Texas, argued that the state’s legislative districts also violate the Voting Rights Act because they result in “minority voters having less opportunity than other citizens to participate in the political process and elect legislators of their choice.”

    While the redistricting cycle winds down and litigation over the new maps ramps up, one key casualty of these new maps is already clear: competitive elections.

    The number of competitive districts, defined as those where either Trump or Biden won by fewer than five points, has already fallen by about 58% this cycle and is on track to decline by a third, according to the Cook Political Report. In Texas, the number of districts Biden won by more than 15 points has increased from eight to 12 while the number of districts Trump won by 15 or more points has nearly doubled, from 11 to 21. In four of the most gerrymandered states — Texas, North Carolina, Ohio and Georgia — the number of districts where Trump won by 15 or more points increased from 27 to 39.

    Though competitive seats have long been on the decline, it’s well understood that competitive elections tend to have a moderating effect on both parties. Parties are likely to nominate more moderate candidates when they face a competitive race in the general election, and are much more likely to nominate candidates that strongly appeal to base voters when there is little risk they will lose the general. For the Republicans, that could mean more candidates like Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia or Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina, who have no serious worries about losing to Democrats in their deep-red districts despite alienating large swaths of voters.

    “You’re looking at a potentially much more fractious and much more extreme [Republican] caucus,” Li said. “This may be a case where Republicans were in the classic case of ‘Be careful what you wish for, because you may get it.’ I don’t think people have factored that in: They’re really surrendering to the MAGA wing of the party.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Republicans Are Trying to Pass More Voting Restrictions Ahead of 2022 Midterms

    Officers stand between two opposing groups of demonstrators outside of the Georgia Capitol building on March 3, 2021, in Atlanta, Georgia.

    After Republican legislators in 19 states passed 34 laws restricting ballot access in 2021, largely fueled by Donald Trump’s election lies, more than a half-dozen more states are gearing up to go even further ahead of this year’s midterm elections.

    Georgia Republicans, who last year passed a sweeping set of restrictions that Democrats likened to Jim Crow-era laws and led to widespread corporate condemnation and boycotts, have introduced a torrent of new voting bills that go well beyond the limits in last year’s legislation. Missouri Republicans have pre-filed multiple bills that would impose stricter voter ID requirements for in-person and mail ballots, after their previous attempts were rejected by courts. At least four states have already pre-filed seven bills that would “initiate or allow illegitimate partisan reviews” of election results, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law. Republicans in multiple states have also pre-filed at least seven bills that would restrict access to mail voting.

    Even those numbers only scratch the surface. Republicans introduced more than 400 bills with provisions to restrict voting last year. Of those, at least 88 bills in nine states will carry over into the new legislative session, according to the Brennan Center. Democrats have described this onslaught of legislation as an extension of the Capitol riot last January, when Trump supporters hunted lawmakers through the halls of Congress in a failed effort to block the certification of Joe Biden’s win.

    “There can be no doubt that the events of January 6th were inspired by, and designed to promote, the Big Lie of mass voter fraud, which Donald Trump and the GOP have used to justify racist voter suppression laws in states across the country,” Rep. Mondaire Jones, D-N.Y., who was first elected in 2020 and sworn in days before the attack, said in a statement. “It was clear then, and is clear now, that the modern-day Republican Party is more interested in preserving the rule of its authoritarian leadership than in preserving our democracy.”

    Republicans have defended the nationwide push by claiming it is necessary to ensure “election integrity” and to assuage their constituents’ concerns about election security — concerns that have been stoked for more than a year by Trump and his allies. Democrats and voting rights groups argue that many of the restrictions are attempts to suppress votes, especially those of people of color, who have disproportionately backed Democratic candidates. Some of the bills may go even further than that — and could allow Republican-led legislatures to subvert elections.

    “The attack on our democracy continues in the form of a victorious nationwide wave of voter suppression and subversion of our electoral systems,” Leah Greenberg, the co-executive director of the Indivisible Project, a progressive nonprofit, said in a statement. “Republicans in state legislatures across the country have introduced and passed hundreds of bills to limit participation in democracy — targeting Black and brown voters in particular — and make it easier for partisan officials to remove election officials from their posts and subvert legitimate election results. And every day since, Senate Republicans have blocked federal voting rights and democracy reform legislation that would restore faith in our democratic processes.”

    Georgia state Sen. Butch Miller, a Republican now running for lieutenant governor, is pushing a bill to ban absentee ballot drop boxes entirely, just months after supporting a provision in the state’s exhaustive Senate Bill 202 that already restricted their use. State House Speaker David Ralston has proposed a bill that would move election investigations from the secretary of state’s office to the state bureau of investigations. It’s the latest in a series of measures aimed at undercutting the power of Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican who rejected Trump’s attempts to “find” enough votes to help him overturn his Georgia margin of defeat. The GOP last year removed Raffensperger as chair of the State Election Board and banned him from entering any election lawsuit settlements without approval from the legislature.

    Another new Republican proposal would restructure the government of Georgia’s Gwinnett County, where Biden won by 18 points, and allow the GOP-dominated legislature to pack the Democratic-led county commission with its own appointees. Nicole Hendrickson, the Democratic chairwoman of the county commission, has said the proposal “removes our voice as a board of commissioners and disenfranchises our citizens who did not have a say in any of this.”

    Florida Republicans, who last year passed a wide-ranging law restricting mail-in voting and drop boxes while empowering partisan poll-watchers, have also unleashed a tide of new proposals ahead of the next election cycle. Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, has called to create a massive new law enforcement unit to investigate voting “irregularities.” State lawmakers have introduced proposals to make it a felony for any third party to submit more than two ballots and to increase “maintenance” of voter rolls, which critics argue too often amounts to a “purge” of valid voters, according to the advocacy group Voting Rights Lab.

    Republican legislators in five states, including Florida, Tennessee and Oklahoma, have all introduced bills that would launch partisan reviews of the 2020 election, although no recount or “audit” in any state — including those conducted or ordered by Republicans — has found any evidence of significant voter fraud.

    A New Hampshire Republican bill would eliminate vote-counting machines and require all ballots to be counted by hand, which Democrats worry could lengthen the time it takes to tally ballots and create an opening for bad actors to challenge the legitimacy of the election. Republicans in the state have also proposed creating stricter residency requirements to vote, which appears to be a continuation of the GOP’s aim to restrict voting by college students.

    Republican legislators in five states, including Florida, Tennessee, and Oklahoma have all introduced bills that would launch partisan reviews of the 2020 election.

    Many of the bills that Republicans have already introduced will also carry over from last year. At least 57 of the 88 carryover bills would restrict mail voting, including limiting the time voters have to apply or deliver a mail ballot, according to the Brennan Center. Seven others would expand voter purges, five would impose criminal penalties for election officials who send out unsolicited mail ballots or people who assist voters in returning their ballots, and 23 others would impose or expand voter ID requirements.

    “The Capitol attack was just the beginning of the campaign to overthrow our democracy,” Andrea Waters King, president of the progressive think tank Drum Major Institute, said in a statement. “White supremacists failed to steal the presidential election, so now they’re trying to steal it in the states. Dozens of voter suppression bills have passed around the country since the insurrection — these attacks on our democracy are less visible but no less insidious. We must fight against these anti-democratic laws as fervently as we condemn the insurrectionists.”

    Many of the bills were written with the help of deep-pocketed conservative groups. Jessica Anderson, executive director of Heritage Action for America, sister organization to the powerful Heritage Foundation, last year bragged in a leaked video obtained by Mother Jones that in some cases the organization has prodded lawmakers to craft voting restrictions.

    “In some cases, we actually draft them for them,” she said in the video. “Or we have a sentinel on our behalf give them the model legislation so it has that grassroots, from-the-bottom-up type of vibe.”

    Anderson recalled that the group was able to “quickly” and “quietly” help Iowa lawmakers draft bills and gather public support for a slew of new voting restrictions.

    “Honestly, nobody even noticed,” she said. “My team looked at each other and we’re like, ‘It can’t be that easy.’”

    Democrats have renewed their push to pass voting rights legislation before this year’s midterm elections in response to the new voting restrictions. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has vowed to hold a vote on changing the chamber’s filibuster rules by Martin Luther King Jr. Day if Republicans continue to block the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. It’s unclear whether he can convince Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., to support filibuster changes they have long opposed.

    “We’re running out of time,” Schumer warned earlier this week. “What these legislatures have done in 2021 and are now beginning to do in 2022, if you wait much longer, you won’t be able to undo them in time for the 2022 elections. Even if the legislation says what they did is wrong, the courts may say it’s too close to the primary season, we can’t change it. So we have to move quickly.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • GOP Attack on “Election Fraud” Is Really an Attack on Black Voters

    GOP Attack on “Election Fraud” Is Really an Attack on Black Voters

    Many events marking the first anniversary of the deadly January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol are focusing on voting rights, as false claims about voter fraud have fueled Republican efforts to restrict voting access, especially for Black voters. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer vowed Tuesday to proceed with a vote to change the filibuster rule to prevent Republicans from blocking new voting rights legislation. Professor Carol Anderson, author of White Rage and One Person, No Vote, says former President Trump’s false claims about voter fraud prompted a wave in 2021 of some of the most aggressive and racist assaults on voting rights in recent U.S. history. “It is Jim Crow 2.0,” Anderson says of Republican voter suppression waged through state legislation. “It is designed to make sure we have minority rule in the United States, that we don’t have a democracy.”

    TRANSCRIPT

    This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

    AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

    More than 200 vigils and events across the United States today will mark the first anniversary of the deadly January 6 insurrection at the Capitol, when a largely white mob of Trump supporters tried to stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election and subvert democracy. Many of today’s events will focus on voting rights, as former President Trump’s false claims about voter fraud have fueled Republican efforts to restrict voting access. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer vowed Tuesday to proceed with a vote to change the filibuster rule to prevent Republicans from blocking new voting rights legislation.

    MAJORITY LEADER CHUCK SCHUMER: There is no better way to heal the damage of January 6th than to act so that our constitutional order is preserved for the future. If we do not act to protect our elections, the horrors of January 6th will risk becoming not the exception but the norm. The stakes could not be higher, so we are going to move forward.

    AMY GOODMAN: But Democratic leadership may lack the votes needed. On Tuesday, Democratic Senator Joe Manchin voiced skepticism about changing the filibuster rules.

    SEN. JOE MANCHIN: Let me just say, to being open to a rules change that would create a nuclear option, it’s very, very difficult. That’s a heavy lift.

    AMY GOODMAN: For more, we go to Atlanta, Georgia, to speak with Carol Anderson, professor at Emory University, author of One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy and White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide.

    Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Professor Anderson. Can you talk about what you think is at the root of Trump’s big lie about the election? It was a year ago today, January 6, not only the deadly insurrection — and maybe these are linked — but that a Black man, Reverend Raphael Warnock, and a Jewish man, Jon Ossoff, had just won the two Senate seats in Georgia.

    CAROL ANDERSON: Yes. And so, for me, what is at the root of this is the delegitimization of Black voters, the delegitimization of African Americans as citizens who have the right to vote. And we heard that in November and December, when you kept hearing about the big lie. And you heard Newt Gingrich talking about: “They stole the election in Philadelphia. They stole the election in Milwaukee. They stole the election in Atlanta.” Notice that he identified cities that have sizable Black populations, and linking those cities with the theft, with the theft of democracy, with the theft of this election, stealing it from good, honest, hard-working white folk. That was the subtext that led to the insurrection: the delegitimization of African Americans as citizens, as voters.

    AMY GOODMAN: And so, if you can talk about what was at the root of what was happening a year ago, the certifying of the national election? But also, it was not only about Biden. At this point a year ago, by the afternoon, it was very clear that the Senate would be Democrat. And you had this group of white supremacists, of right-wing extremists, one carrying a Confederate flag, marauding through the Capitol. Talk about the connection between those two and what you think has to happen now.

    CAROL ANDERSON: And so, the connection really is the assault on American democracy via what I call this bureaucratic violence of voter suppression. And what we saw in the 2020 election and in the 2021 runoff here in Georgia, the Senate runoff, was that you had this massive voter turnout by Democrats, by African Americans, by Asian Americans, by Latinos, by Indigenous people, who were voting for the Democrats. And that flipped the — that flipped the White House, and it flipped the Senate. And that flipping of the Senate to blue, that is what made the election, in the eyes of the white supremacists, in the eyes of the white nationalists, illegitimate.

    So, when you have Mo Brooks, out of Alabama, talking about, “If you only count the legal votes, then Trump is the winner,” so that means that the illegal votes are those for African Americans — are those coming from African Americans, are those votes coming from Latinos, are those votes coming from Native Americans, are those votes coming from Asian Americans. It’s saying that the only real Americans are white Americans, white conservative Americans. Those are the only real Americans. That is what is at the foundation of this assault. That is why you saw the Confederate flag being hauled up in the Capitol, something that Robert E. Lee wasn’t even able to do.

    AMY GOODMAN: Professor Anderson, your fellow Georgian, the oldest-ever living president, Jimmy Carter, just wrote an op-ed in The New York Times today, saying, “Our great nation now teeters on the brink of a widening abyss. Without immediate action, we are at genuine risk of civil conflict and losing our precious democracy.”

    So, as we look back, let’s also look forward to the 2024 election. There are 200 vigils that are being held today across the country about voting rights. You have this, well, some call him senator, some call him “the other President Joe” — that’s Joe Manchin — questioning whether he would change the filibuster rules. Talk about how filibuster links to voting and what the wave of voting suppression laws has — what has to be done about them.

    CAROL ANDERSON: And what really has to be done is that what we saw in the face of the big lie was that you had a number of states, including Georgia, that passed these voter suppression laws, that figured out how did African Americans, how did Latinos, how did Asian Americans, how did young folk, how did poor folk access the ballot box, and figure out a way how to shut that access down or to make it much more difficult. And you also had laws lowering the guardrails that protected this democracy from Trump being able to overturn the will of the voters. And so, that two-pronged attack is what is happening right now in our state laws.

    We need federal legislation to come in and protect the rights of American citizens to vote. That is the Freedom to Vote Act, and that is the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. We need both of those in place. But we’ve got this filibuster thing that says that you need to have 60 votes in order to even discuss this thing, to discuss protecting American democracy, to protect voting rights for American citizens. We need to have those laws passed so that we can have a free and fair election in 2024. The election is being rigged right in front of our very eyes. The ways to stop American citizens from voting, it is Jim Crow 2.0. It is designed to ensure that we have minority rule in the United States, that we don’t have a democracy. It is a way to subvert having a fully vibrant, multiracial, multiethnic, multireligious democracy. That is what’s on the table. That’s why the filibuster that is blocking federal voting rights legislation has to be stopped. Joe Manchin is wrong.

    AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to former Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro, who was speaking with Ari Melber on MSNBC and outlined his support for what he called the Green Bay sweep, a plan to overturn the election results in six states, including yours.

    PETER NAVARRO: The plan was simply this: We had over a hundred congressmen and senators on Capitol Hill ready to implement the sweep. The sweep was simply that. We were going to challenge the results of the election in the six battleground states. They were Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, Nevada.

    ARI MELBER: Do you realize you are describing a coup?

    PETER NAVARRO: No. I totally reject many of your premises there.

    AMY GOODMAN: So, that was Peter Navarro, Professor Anderson. And he included Georgia in that. And, of course, President Trump was putting enormous pressure on your Republican secretary of state to find the 11,000-plus votes, and the Republicans resisted. Today there’s no Republican leadership at the ceremonies at the Capitol. Your thoughts?

    CAROL ANDERSON: And it begins to tell you. So, right after the insurrection, the invasion of the Capitol, you had Republicans coming out being appalled, being aghast. But that flipped relatively quickly, and you saw this loyalty to Trump being the defining characteristic of being a Republican: You are loyal to Trump; you are loyal to overthrowing the will of the voters.

    And you saw here in Georgia, when Brad Raffensperger and Brian Kemp basically refused to bend to Trump’s will, how they have become anathema, so that Raffensperger lost the — the new law, legislation, here has removed his power on the state election board. And you saw there were billboards up defining Kemp and Raffensperger as enemies, as enemies of democracy, because they did not abide by Trump’s will. That is where we are right now, where we have a party that is loyal to a man and not loyal to the country, not loyal to American democracy, not loyal to the United States of America.

    AMY GOODMAN: Finally, would you call President Trump racist? Would you call the voter suppression laws that are being enacted around the country straightforward racist?

    CAROL ANDERSON: Trump is racist. Trump gained his political power on birtherism, which was denying the legitimacy of Barack Obama, a Black man.

    And the laws that are being passed, they are as subtle and as vicious as the Jim Crow laws that came up in the 1890s and the early 20th century. They don’t say, “We don’t want Black folks to vote,” but the laws are written in ways that use the characteristics, the socioeconomic characteristics, of African Americans to stop and block African Americans from being able to vote. So, if you thought those Jim Crow laws were racist, then the ones that we are dealing with right now are equally racist.

    AMY GOODMAN: Carol Anderson, professor at Emory University, author of the new book The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America, also author of One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy and White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide.

    Next up, we look at the lead-up to the insurrection and what followed with Newsweek’s William Arkin. Stay with us.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • GOP Set to Ramp Up Voter Suppression Efforts in 2022

    Voters can be seen at booths as people waiting in line in the foreground

    Republican state lawmakers are showing no signs of slowing down the “tidal wave of restrictive voting legislation” that ramped up across the country in 2021, according to a new analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice on Tuesday that warns such attacks are set to continue or even escalate in the New Year.

    The past year saw an undeniable acceleration of the passage of anti-democratic state laws, the Brennan Center reported Tuesday, with state legislatures enacting more voting restrictions in 2021 than in any year since the organization began tracking such laws in 2011. Nineteen states passed 34 restrictive laws between January 1 and December 7.

    The analysis points to several categories of anti-voting restrictions, including laws restricting access to voting by mail, new or expanded voter ID requirements, the criminalization of “ordinary, lawful behavior by election officials” who try to help voters, and laws allowing voter purges.

    The Brennan Center also highlighted “a new trend” in which “legislators introduced bills to allow partisan actors to interfere with election processes or even reject election results entirely,” such as Arizona’s H.B. 2720, which would empower state legislatures to reject election results and Texas’s S.B. 7, which would allow elected judges to do the same.

    Journalist and voting rights expert Ari Berman noted that despite the frenzied race by Republican lawmakers to pass laws they claim are aimed at maintaining “election integrity” — with 440 restrictive voting laws proposed in 2021 — zero states have found any evidence of widespread voter fraud.

    Looking ahead to 2022, at least 13 bills have been pre-filed in state legislatures in four states — Arizona, Missouri, New Hampshire, and South Carolina — meaning they’ll receive top priority when the new legislative session begins.

    “These early indicators — coupled with the ongoing mobilization around the Big Lie (the same false rhetoric about voter fraud that drove this year’s unprecedented wave of vote suppression bills) — suggest that efforts to restrict and undermine the vote will continue to be a serious threat in 2022,” reported the Brennan Center.

    Dozens of what the report called “carryover bills” — which have not reached resolution in 2021 and will be debated next year — focus on restricting voters’ access to mail-in voting. Republicans in Pennsylvania and Kansas aim to shorten deadlines for applying for and delivering mail ballots, while Ohio lawmakers will continue debating whether election workers can assist people who return ballots.

    Five carryover bills propose criminal penalties for election officials who mail out unsolicited ballots or for individuals who assist voters — including people with disabilities — with returning mail ballots.

    Out of at least 74 pre-filed bills, at least seven also target voting by mail, “including shortening the time period in which a mail ballot may be requested, eliminating Covid-19 as an excuse for voting by mail, and expanding the grounds on which an absentee ballot can be rejected.” In at least five states, six bills that have been pre-filed for 2022 aim to establish “illegitimate partisan review boards of election results,” the group reported.

    South Carolina’s H.B. 4550, for example, would amend the state’s code of laws “to create a joint committee to be known as the ‘Restore Election Integrity Now’ (REIN) Committee,” which would be empowered to review election security, the accuracy of the election process, and other aspects of voting.

    “These reviews have typically been designed to set the stage for future efforts to suppress votes and subvert election outcomes,” said the Brennan Center, noting that four of the six pre-filed bills focus on continuing “questionable and politically motivated reviews of the 2020 election results” like those that were initiated in six states in 2021, while two would set up review boards for future elections.

    Both are part of “a disturbing legislative trend,” said the organization, in which “partisan state legislators have empowered other partisan actors who are not part of the election administration process to access and review ballots and other materials.”

    The Brennan Center identified several states—including Arizona, Texas, Michigan, Missouri, and Pennsylvania—as “key states to watch” in the coming year, noting that their legislatures have already passed several restrictive bills and are set to try to enact even more.

    In Texas, S.B. 1, one of the country’s harshest anti-voting laws which “makes it harder for voters with disabilities and language access barriers to obtain assistance, constrains election workers’ ability to stop harassment by poll watchers, and bans 24-hour and drive-thru voting, among other measures,” landed the state on the list of key states.

    Michigan was also identified as a hotspot for voter suppression in 2022, with anti-voting rights activists organizing a ballot initiative that would impose new requirements on voters such as including the last four digits of their Social Security number on their voter registration or absentee ballot applications.

    “There are solutions to this alarming and unprecedented attack on our democracy,” noted the Brennan Center. “Congress has the power to take bold action now to protect American voters from the kinds of restrictions enacted this year and the looming threats to voters and elections that may be imposed in 2022 and beyond.”

    The organization urged the Senate to pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, both of which have been passed by the House but remain stalled in the Senate due to the filibuster and the Democrats’ razor-thin majority.

    “These attacks on voting rights will continue in 2022,” tweeted the group. “The Senate must protect our democracy.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Georgia Senator Wants to Ban Ballot Drop Boxes After Voting to Install Them

    A woman votes at a booth

    Georgia Senate President Pro Tempore Butch Miller is pushing to eliminate all absentee ballot drop boxes in the state, only months after he voted to install them.

    Miller, the No. 2 Republican in the state Senate and a candidate for lieutenant governor, has introduced Senate Bill 325, which would eliminate drop boxes, a focal point among pro-Trump Republicans who ginned up unfounded fears about mail-in voting. The state’s election board approved the use of drop boxes amid the pandemic last year.

    “Drop boxes were introduced as an emergency measure during the pandemic but many counties did not follow the security guidelines in place, such as the requirement for camera surveillance on every drop box,” Miller said in a statement. “Moving forward, we can return to a pre-pandemic normal of voting in person. Removing drop boxes will help rebuild the trust that has been lost. Many see them as the weak link when it comes to securing our elections against fraud. For the small number of Georgians who need to vote absentee, that will remain as easy and accessible as it was before 2020.”

    Voting rights groups accused Miller of “going all-in on the Big Lie.”

    “Instead of figuring out how to put together policies that will help our people, he is preemptively erecting barriers to voting a year out,” Stephanie Ali, policy director at the New Georgia Project, said in a statement, arguing that Miller’s proposal shows he is “terrified” of the state’s changing demographics after Republicans got swept in the last round of statewide races.

    Election officials around the country have warned that proposals like Miller’s will make it more difficult to vote, particularly for voters of color.

    “Efforts like Sen. Miller’s to remove drop boxes or place other restrictions on voting are not about election security, but part of a national coordinated attack on democracy,” Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, chairwoman of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, told Salon. “Nationwide, the voter suppression proposals and laws disproportionately affect people of color and working people — these are the voices extreme lawmakers are trying to suppress to tip future elections in their favor. Candidates should win by running good campaigns, not by undemocratically taking away Americans’ freedoms.”

    Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican who has pushed back against false GOP election claims and Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn his loss, rejected Miller’s claim that every county did not have video surveillance, noting that officials had identified only one irregularity: a woman who cast a ballot one minute after the deadline.

    “This office and I have worked very hard on making sure we have integrity up and down the line,” he told WSB-TV.

    On Tuesday, the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that helped the GOP write a slew of new voting restrictions, ranked Georgia No. 1 in the country on “election integrity,” including the new drop boxes.

    “It means that we’re a leader in voter integrity and also security,” Raffensperger told the news outlet.

    Georgia Democrats called out Miller for pushing the proposal after he said in a recent interview that newly-arrived Georgians “need to assimilate into our values and our culture.”

    “Butch Miller’s proposal to blow up our elections based on lies is part of his sad, desperate attempt to win over far-right voters after Donald Trump endorsed his primary opponent,” Scott Hogan, executive director of the Democratic Party of Georgia, said in a statement. “We already know Butch Miller is terrified of Georgia’s diversifying electorate — now, he’s trying to silence the voters of color who elected Democrats last cycle by banning one of the most popular ways they chose to cast their ballots.”

    Just months earlier, Miller joined other Georgia Republicans in supporting Senate Bill 202, a sweeping set of voting restrictions that codified the use of drop boxes, even while restricting their availability. But Miller now faces an opponent endorsed by Trump, and appears intent on trying to win over Trump supporters after the former president accused him of not doing enough to try to overturn his election defeat. Repeated reviews and investigations have found no evidence of fraud or widespread irregularities in Georgia — or for that matter in any other state.

    “Trump’s grip on the Republican Party is clear: he has made endorsing the Big Lie a litmus test for his support,” Griswold said. “Now, hundreds of candidates running under the GOP banner at the county, state and federal levels have promoted lies about the 2020 elections. We need lawmakers and election administrators who will respect voters and their decisions at the ballot box, even if they don’t like the outcome. That is how democracy works.”

    Miller is running to replace Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, a Republican who opted not to run for re-election after spending much of the year battling election conspiracy theories from his own party. Duncan has said that he does not think anything should be done about drop boxes.

    “I’m one of those Republicans that want more people to vote,” he said earlier this year.

    An analysis by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Georgia Public Broadcasting earlier this year found that heavily Democratic counties like Fulton, DeKalb, Cobb and Gwinnett were far more likely to use the drop boxes than Republican areas. More than 305,000 of about 547,000 absentee ballots in the metro Atlanta area were cast using drop boxes, compared to just 32% of the absentee votes in 11 smaller countries.

    “This legislation is nothing more than a last-ditch attempt to further undermine faith in the results of the 2020 election and win support with those who simply cannot accept that they lost,” Fulton County Commission Chairman Robb Pitts said in a statement. “Our absentee ballot drop boxes were safe and secure — three counts of the vote and monitors from the Secretary of State’s office proves that.”

    Georgia has already restricted the use of drop boxes. Though SB 202 required each county to have at least one drop box per 100,000 active voters, they must now be located inside early voting sites and can only be accessible during early voting days and hours. Voting rights advocates accused Republicans of seeking to “limit options in the metro areas versus the rural areas” where Republicans tend to do better.

    Miller’s proposal comes ahead of two high-profile elections in the state next year. Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., the state’s first Black senator, is up for re-election and appears likely to face Trump favorite Herschel Walker, a former NFL star. Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican who has rejected Trump’s election fraud claims, is set to take on Trump-endorsed former Sen. David Perdue in the GOP primary, ahead of a potential rematch with former Georgia House Minority Leader Stacey Abrams, who refused to concede her race in 2018 after accusing Kemp of voter suppression. Abrams has charged that Georgia Republicans’ crackdown on ballot access is a “redux of Jim Crow in a suit and tie” targeting Black voters.

    SB 202 is already having noticeable effects on the state’s elections. Rejected absentee ballot requests rose 400% in November’s municipal elections after the state imposed new restrictions, and 52% of rejected applications were denied because they were submitted after the state’s new deadline, which requires voters to request ballots at least 11 days before an election. State lawmakers have also used the new law to replace local election officials with their own picks, often replacing Black Democrats with white conservatives.

    Griswold said laws like SB 202 are part of the “worst attack on democracy in recent history.” She called on Congress to pass voting rights legislation in response to the ballot access crackdown, urging the Senate to reform the filibuster because “American democracy is more important than antiquated Senate rules.” While the Senate has renewed its focus on voting rights amid increasingly aggressive Republican gerrymandering, which threatens the Democratic House majority, conservative Democrats like Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona have ruled out any changes to the filibuster.

    “Access to the ballot box shouldn’t be dependent on voters’ zip code, political party or the amount of money in their bank account. Every eligible American deserves to have their voice heard and their vote counted,” Griswold said. “Congress needs to do its job and pass the Freedom to Vote Act and John Lewis Voting Rights Act as soon as possible to combat this historic wave of voter suppression.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Sinema Imperils Voting Rights Push for the Sake of Archaic Filibuster Rule

    Sen. Kyrsten Sinema departs from a meeting with fellow Democratic Senators in the basement of the U.S. Capitol Building on December 15, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    Right-wing Sen. Kyrsten Sinema on Wednesday cast further doubt on Democrats’ nascent effort to pass voting rights legislation before the end of the year by reiterating her defense of the Senate’s legislative filibuster, an archaic rule that the GOP minority has used to stonewall bills aimed at protecting the franchise.

    Democratic leaders signaled Wednesday afternoon that they intend to shift their focus to a last-ditch voting rights push ahead of the new year after talks over the party’s Build Back Better package faltered, as Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) indicating he wants to gut the expanded child tax credit — a non-starter for progressives.

    But just hours after the party’s rapidly changing strategy began to emerge, Sinema (D-Ariz.) all but dashed any lingering hopes of concrete action on voting rights, with her spokesperson telling Politico that the senator opposes even minor tweaks to the filibuster rule.

    “Senator Sinema has asked those who want to weaken or eliminate the filibuster to pass voting rights legislation which she supports if it would be good for our country to do so,” said Sinema spokesperson John LaBombard, who warned that newly passed bills could be “rescinded in a few years and replaced by a nationwide voter-ID law, nationwide restrictions on vote-by-mail, or other voting restrictions currently passing in some states extended nationwide.”

    Voting rights advocates were quick to slam Sinema’s latest filibuster apologetics as ridiculous, arguing it shouldn’t take a supermajority in the U.S. Senate to thwart voter suppression legislation passed along party lines by state-level Republicans.

    “This is so asinine,” replied Stephen Wolf, a staff writer at Daily Kos Elections. “Republicans are already passing a wave of voting restrictions at the state level while the Supreme Court dismantles what’s left of the Voting Rights Act. Sinema doesn’t support the voting rights legislation. The filibuster just lets her pretend she does.”

    Mother Jones journalist Ari Berman echoed that point:

    Politico reported Wednesday that Senate Democrats are attempting to persuade Sinema and Manchin — another ardent defender of the filibuster — to support “installing the talking filibuster, which would force the minority to hold the floor and continuously put up at least 41 votes to block legislation, or creating a filibuster exception specific to the issue of elections and voting.”

    Thus far the right-wing senators have not agreed to either change, even after both voted earlier this week to bypass the filibuster to raise the U.S. debt ceiling. Manchin has previously suggested he would be open to reinstituting the talking filibuster, which would represent a major shift from the current-day rules that allow senators to mount a filibuster via email.

    Filibuster reform would require the support of all 50 members of the Senate Democratic caucus.

    “We’re carving out exceptions to the filibuster left and right depending on how important we all think an issue is. And yet we still don’t have an exception to pass voting rights? How out of touch are we?” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) lamented in a recent tweet.

    For months, voting rights advocates and state lawmakers have warned that congressional Democrats are running out of time to prevent a wave of GOP-led redistricting and voter suppression — anti-democratic efforts that could prove decisive in the upcoming midterm elections. Republicans need to flip just five Democratic seats to take control of the House in 2022.

    The Freedom to Vote Act, a compromise measure co-sponsored by Manchin and Sinema, would bar partisan gerrymandering, institute campaign finance reforms, and bolster ballot access. Republicans filibustered the bill when Senate Democrats attempted to pass it in October, and they would likely do so again if Democrats bring the legislation to the floor without a rule change.

    Progressive advocacy groups and state lawmakers have called on Senate Democratic leaders to postpone the upcoming holiday recess and do everything in their power to pass strong voting rights legislation, including eliminating the filibuster entirely.

    Emily Kirkland, executive director of the local advocacy group Progress Arizona, said in a statement late Wednesday that “in continuing to support the filibuster, Senator Sinema is single-handedly destroying any hope of progress on voting rights or democracy reform at the federal level for the foreseeable future.”

    “History will not be kind to her if she continues on this path,” Kirkland added. “It is time for her to come to terms with her responsibility to the American people and end the filibuster — now.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Justice Department Sues Texas Over Racist Congressional Maps

    Attorney General Merrick B. Garland speaks at a press conference at the Department of Justice on December 06, 2021 in Washington, D.C.

    On Monday, the Department of Justice announced that it is suing Texas over Republicans’ newly-drawn congressional maps, which marginalize Latinx people and other nonwhite communities while giving disproportionate influence to white voters.

    In its lawsuit, the Justice Department says that the Texas legislature “refused to recognize the State’s growing [non-white] electorate” in their new congressional maps, which they drew in an “extraordinarily rapid and opaque legislative process.” The maps, which were signed into law in October, were rammed through the legislature by the state’s Republican majority.

    “This is not the first time Texas has acted to minimize the voting rights of its minority citizens. Decade after decade, Texas has enacted redistricting plans that violate the Voting Rights Act,” the Justice Department wrote. “In enacting its 2021 Congressional and House plans, the State has again diluted the voting strength of minority Texans and continued its refusal to comply with the Voting Rights Act.”

    This is the second time that the Department of Justice has sued Texas over voter suppression in a little over a month. In November, the agency charged that the state Republicans’ marquee voter suppression bill, S.B. 1, limited the voting rights of people with disabilities and elderly people. The bill outlawed drive-through and 24-hour voting, measures that had greatly expanded voting access for marginalized groups.

    The Department of Justice joins voting rights groups that have also sued the state over its new district map. These groups similarly argue that the map violates the Voting Rights Act by diminishing people of color’s voting power in the state.

    The new map creates two additional heavily Republican-leaning congressional districts, meaning that — if the map is upheld by courts — there will be 24 heavily-Republican districts, one competitive district and only 13 Democratic districts in the state.

    Though non-Latinx white people make up only about 41 percent of the state’s population, they are a majority in 60 percent of congressional districts in the new map. Meanwhile, Latinx people are a majority in only 18 percent of districts, despite making up 40 percent of the population. Under the new map, Black, Asian, and other populations don’t represent a majority in any district.

    These maps have also marginalized the state’s new residents, 95 percent of whom are people of color. Although the state will be gaining two seats in the House due to recent population growth, Republicans are giving white voters a majority over both new districts in Houston and Austin — a move that the Department of Justice has rebuked in its lawsuit.

    Republicans “surgically excised minority communities from the core of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex (DFW) by attaching them to heavily Anglo rural counties, some more than a hundred miles away, placing them in a congressional district where they would lack equal electoral opportunity,” the agency wrote.

    The party has marginalized these voters despite the fact that many of the people that politicians would consider Latinx voted for Donald Trump in 2020. (Notably, many of the so-called Latinx people in Texas label themselves as Tejanos.) But despite wins in South Texas, Trump still lost the Latinx vote in the state overall, according to exit polls.

    Regardless of political affiliations, however, it seems Republicans are set on taking extreme measures to suppress nonwhite voters, even when those measures are based on bunk conspiracy theories. For instance, S.B. 1 creates a monthly review for voter rolls to ensure that undocumented immigrants aren’t registered to vote. This rule was made after Trump lied by saying that undocumented people were voting en masse.

    The last time Texas did a sweep of its voter rolls was in 2019, when Secretary of State David Whitley ordered a review of nearly 100,000 voters to check for noncitizens. After voting rights groups sued the state, alleging that the review violated voting rights protections, the state gave up its search.

    Whitley instructed officials not to take action on the list of people that his office had categorized as “possible non-U.S. citizens.” It’s unclear what methodology Whitley’s office used to create that list, but voting rights advocates noted that the very concept behind the project was discriminatory.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Poll Finds Most Young Americans Say US Democracy Is “In Trouble” or “Failed”

    Young woman looking at lawn maze with hand on head, expressing uncertainty

    As the U.S. faces converging existential issues perpetuated largely by establishment politicians and the right wing, new polling released on Monday finds that a majority of young Americans believe that U.S. democracy is on the brink of failure — or that it has already failed.

    The poll surveyed 2,109 Americans, aged between 18 and 29 years old. Thirty-nine percent of respondents said that the U.S. is “a democracy in trouble,” while 13 percent said that the U.S. is “a failed democracy,” adding up to 52 percent.

    Only 27 percent of respondents described American democracy as “somewhat functioning,” while a mere 7 percent said that U.S. democracy is “healthy.”

    The results of this poll, conducted by the Harvard Public Opinion Project, may be a sign that young Americans are ready for the country to be radically transformed.

    Over half of the survey’s young respondents reported having felt depressed or anxious, with the pandemic, economic concerns, and school or work ranking high as factors that affected their mental health. The climate crisis was also cited as a major concern, with 56 percent of poll respondents saying they expect their personal decisions in the future to be affected by climate change.

    Young Americans are already feeling the impact of massive economic and political crises on an individual level, said Jing-Jing Shen, student chair of the Harvard Public Opinion project. “Right now, young Americans are confronting worries on many fronts. Concerns about our collective future ​​– with regard to democracy, climate change, and mental health – also feel very personal.”

    Interestingly, young Republicans were more likely to say that democracy is either “failed” or “in trouble,” with 70 percent of respondents saying as such. They were also more likely than Democrats or independents to say that a civil war was coming within their lifetime. This may be due to increasing radicalization within right-wing media and the Republican Party.

    The poll comes at a time of extreme turmoil for the U.S. Last year, measures taken by Congress to counteract the economic impact of the pandemic were successful in decreasing the poverty rate — but that relief is likely to be short-lived, as social safety nets like the federal student loan repayment pause are soon set to expire. Despite several effective vaccines, the U.S. is currently nearing 800,000 deaths due to the pandemic, and the country now faces what could potentially be a fifth wave of COVID infections.

    Meanwhile, scientists have warned that the climate crisis is rapidly worsening. But mainstream U.S. politicians are still blocking climate action in favor of lining their own pockets — often while outright denying that the climate crisis even exists, parroting decades-old talking points from fossil fuel companies.

    Indeed, the political establishment appears to be less interested in serving the public than it is in serving their own interests. While Republicans openly oppose the very idea of democracy, saying that less people should have the ability to vote, the Democratic establishment has consistentally sabotaged their own party, ignoring the wants and needs of the public to prevent progressive and socialist politicians from gaining power.

    “After turning out in record numbers in 2020, young Americans are sounding the alarm. When they look at the America they will soon inherit, they see a democracy and climate in peril,” said John Della Volpe, polling director for Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics. “Despite this, they seem as determined as ever to fight for the change they seek.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Dems Hopeful Stacey Abrams Will Win Governor’s Seat After Georgia’s Blue Wave

    Former Representative and voting rights activist Stacey Abrams is introduced before speaking at a Souls to the Polls rally on October 17, 2021, in Norfolk, Virginia.

    Voting rights advocate Stacey Abrams has officially launched her campaign to run for governor of Georgia, challenging Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, who has led voter suppression initiatives in the state over the past year.

    As a high-profile Democrat, Abrams is a leading candidate in the race. She previously served as the party’s minority leader in the Georgia House of Representatives and has, in recent months, strongly condemned Republicans’ efforts to suppress voting as a backlash to the 2020 election. If elected, she would be the first Black female governor ever to be elected and the first Democrat to hold the governor’s office in the state since 2003.

    “Leadership that understands the true pain folks are feeling, and has real plans — that’s the job of governor, to fight for one Georgia, our Georgia,” Abrams said in a video announcing her run. “And now, it’s time to get the job done.”

    If Kemp clinches the Republican primary next year, this will be Abram’s second time running against him. In 2018, she lost by a margin of only 1.4 points. Shortly before the election, however, Kemp purged over half a million voters from voter rolls, leading voters and voting rights advocates to call the results into question.

    Thanks to voter suppression efforts by conservatives in the state, access to voting seems like it will be restricted again in 2022. Concerningly, voters have already been affected by Georgia Republicans’ voter suppression bill passed earlier this year, with election officials rejecting absentee ballot applications for this year’s municipal elections at a rate four times higher than in 2020.

    This is a manifestation of Republicans ending no-excuse absentee voting in the state; because of this, only 26 percent of people whose applications were rejected ended up casting their vote in person on Election Day.

    Abrams has spent the years after her initial run for governor advocating for voting rights. After her run, she launched Fair Fight Action and Fair Count, organizations aimed at combating voter suppression and giving communities of color accurate representation in the 2020 census.

    Abrams has specifically rejected Georgia Republicans’ voter suppression laws, saying that the hundreds of voter suppression bills filed in states across the country are “a redux of Jim Crow in a suit and tie.”

    Georgia had record voter turnout in the 2020 election, leading to the state voting blue in the presidential election for the first time since 1992. “The only connection that we can find is that more people of color voted, and it changed the outcome of elections in a direction that Republicans do not like,” Abrams said in March. “Instead of celebrating better access and more participation, their response is to try to eliminate access to voting for, primarily, communities of color.”

    Still, Georgia’s blue flip could represent hope for Democrats. The presidential election results and the state’s rejection of both Republican senators up for election in January have signalled, to some Democrats, that the state’s demographic and political shifts could lead to changes in the state at large.

    The Republican stronghold over the governorship may still prove a challenge. Kemp enjoys a 44 percent approval rating in the state as of September, with 34 percent disapproval, despite the state’s Republicans gaining national attention earlier this year for their voter suppression efforts. But it’s not clear if Kemp is a shoo-in for the party’s primary, as he lacks the support of former President Donald Trump. Instead, Trump may back a candidate like former Sen. David Perdue, who has had ethics concerns railed against him and who Trump likely views as more loyal to him than Kemp is.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Redistricting Threatens Decades of Black Voters’ Hard-Fought Victories

    Activists take part in a voting rights protest in front of the White House on November 17, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    While building back the nation’s infrastructure remains the focus inside the Capital Beltway, congressional inaction on voting rights has the biggest potential to tear down years of progress for Black people in this country.

    Even though communities of color in cities and rural towns across the United States are organizing to fulfill the promise of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) during the 2021 redistricting cycle, the loss of the VRA’s Section 5 voting protections threatens decades of hard-fought victories for fair representation and equitable resources.

    Voting rights advocates as far north as Wisconsin, and in Southern states like Georgia, Texas and Florida, are sounding the alarm: Without immediate federal action to restore the VRA, even our smallest towns aren’t safe from anti-democratic, racist redistricting that could have devastating impacts on people who simply want their voices heard.

    Recently, in North Carolina, the Republican state legislature approved new maps for the U.S. House that could give white Republicans control of 11 out of 14 of the state’s districts. The erosion of Black votes and representation remains a major concern on the local level, where redistricting often receives less attention and scrutiny.

    North Carolina’s Lee County, currently at the center of a decades-long gerrymandering debate, is just the latest consequence of the 2013 Shelby County decision gutting what’s known as the preclearance provision of the Voting Rights Act: Last month, Lee County’s commissioners manipulated the county’s only Black voting district and threatened to roll back Black voters’ ability to elect candidates of their choice.

    The VRA’s preclearance provision, which prohibits certain jurisdictions from implementing changes affecting voting without preapproval, would have prevented such manipulation by protecting districts that allow voters of color to elect their preferred candidates.

    One of 10 southern counties named for the slaveholding Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, the county has long elected its commissioners in an at-large system — where all the county’s voters can vote for each candidate — which all but guaranteed electoral victories for white majorities.

    With the full protection of the VRA, the Lee County NAACP filed suit in 1989, alleging the at-large system denied Black residents a genuine opportunity to elect their candidate of choice. As a result of the VRA lawsuit, the board increased its size and changed its method of election from completely at-large to a hybrid system with a majority of single-member districts. Moreover, the county commissioners explicitly acknowledged in their 1989 resolution Lee County’s “desir[e] to increase the opportunity for Black voters to elect candidates of their choice.”

    Instead, Lee County’s Republican commissioners rammed through a voting map dramatically decreasing the Black population and shoring up the white population in District 1, the county’s only opportunity district for communities of color. District 1 is currently represented by Commissioner Robert Reives, Sr., the county’s only Black elected commissioner. Lee County exploited the population growth of communities of color by choosing to focus on bolstering the political power of declining white populations.

    This is part of a perverse trend mirrored by states drawing new state and congressional district lines across the South, as well as the rest of the nation. In fact, GOP legislatures will finalize redistricting in 20 states covering 187 congressional districts, compared to Democrats who control the process in eight states with 75 districts.

    Certain commissioners not only ignored warnings against drawing maps for partisan gain, but they also denied the public any chance to comment on changes to districts for communities of color by refusing to hold public hearings that would ensure Lee County residents could ask questions, provide alternatives or hold elected officials accountable.

    Without the VRA’s federal preclearance provisions, discriminatory redistricting plans like those in Lee County cannot be stopped.

    Black voters in Lee County, North Carolina, are not alone in their struggle. In nearby Fayetteville, ousted white politicians, unhappy with a majority-Black city council built from VRA-protected districts, are waging their own dangerous campaign to change election methods in the state’s sixth-largest city, designed to upend majority-minority districts and return the city to a racist at-large system. Pair this trend with local “prison gerrymandering” efforts that purposefully shift political power away from cities where more Black people live to smaller, majority-white prison towns where predominantly Black people are incarcerated, and once again voters of color everywhere from Mobile, Alabama, to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, are paying the political price.

    These efforts to erode local Black voting power are the real-life consequences of congressional inaction. Places like Lee County, Fayetteville and Milwaukee not only risk losing the representation they deserve, but also the resources for housing, jobs, public health and environmental protections they need.

    In 1965, Congress made a promise to hundreds of communities like those in Lee County. In 2021, it’s time they ensured that decades of struggle and sacrifice were not in vain.

    Congress must pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act to strengthen the VRA and restore its core protections, and also pass the Freedom to Vote Act as soon as possible. Robust voting rights protections are the only bulwark against racist redistricting that we’ve witnessed across the South and the latest wave of anti-voter legislation happening now across the country.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Georgia Rejects Record Number of Absentee Ballot Requests Under New Voting Laws

    A ballot counter looks up from her table in what looks to be dismay

    Georgia election officials rejected absentee ballot applications in the state’s municipal elections this month at a rate more than four times higher than during the 2020 election cycle, in large part as the result of new restrictions on voting passed by Republican state lawmakers.

    Election officials rejected 4% of absentee ballot applications ahead of the Nov. 2 elections, up from less than 1% in 2020, according to an analysis by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Most of the absentee ballot applications rejected last year were duplicates of applications that had already been submitted, often because voting groups or local governments sent out multiple forms to voters.

    The new Georgia law, SB 202, requires absentee ballot applications to be submitted at least 11 days before the election, while the previous deadline was the Friday before Election Day. Data shows that 52% of the rejected applications were denied because they were submitted too late under the new law. Another 15% were rejected because of missing or incorrect ID information under the new law.

    Most of those people ended up not voting at all. Only about 26% of people whose ballots were rejected because of the deadline voted in person on Election Day, according to the AJC analysis.

    “This is what voter suppression looks like,” charged state Sen. Michelle Au, a Democrat.

    Though full voter file data will not be released by the state until next year, 19% of people who requested an absentee ballot did not submit one before the polls opened on Election Day, according to the New Georgia Project Action Fund, a voting rights group. Based on 2020 trends, the group estimates that 13% of people who requested an absentee ballot ended up not voting at all this year, nearly double the 2020 rate, Aklima Khondoker, the group’s chief legal officer, told Salon.

    The data shows the “voter suppression law working as intended,” tweeted former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

    Georgia Republicans passed the law after Joe Biden carried the state last November and Democrats won both U.S. Senate runoff races amid an expansion of absentee voting during the COVID pandemic. A record 1.3 million Georgia voters cast absentee ballots in the 2020 election, with two-thirds of them voting for President Joe Biden.

    The law also restricts ballot drop boxes, imposes new ID requirements and includes provisions that critics say could allow Republican lawmakers to subvert elections.

    Local election officials have also expressed concern that voters could be disenfranchised by the new deadline.

    “The 11-day deadline is too far in advance of Election Day to adequately serve voters, particularly when there is no provision for voters with unforeseen circumstances who learn shortly before Election Day that they cannot vote in person,” Tonnie Adams, who oversees elections in Georgia’s Heard County, said in an affidavit supporting a challenge to the law.

    More than a half-dozen lawsuits have been filed challenging the law, including a suit filed by the Justice Department. Attorney General Merrick Garland said in June that the Georgia law was enacted with the “purpose of denying or abridging” the rights of Black voters in violation of the Voting Rights Act.

    “In the November 2020 general election, Black voters were more likely than white voters to request absentee ballots between ten and four days before Election Day,” the DOJ suit says. “In addition, of the absentee ballots requested during this period, those that were successfully cast and counted were disproportionately cast by Black voters.”

    Khondoker called out Republican lawmakers for rushing through the bill without a “racial impact analysis,” arguing that the increased rejection rates “show just how damaging that kind of negligence can be to communities of color.”

    “Since we know that Black voters in Georgia were more likely to request absentee ballots than white voters in 2018, 2020, and the January 5th [U.S. Senate] Runoff, restrictions to voting by mail clearly impact those voters at disproportionate rates,” Khondoker said in a statement to Salon. “In a crucial swing state that was decided by 12,000 votes, this kind of seemingly boring or technical administrative burden that the state legislature placed on voters of color could swing the entire nation’s trajectory.”

    Some absentee voting advocates backed the law, arguing that the previous five-day deadline was too short to allow many voters to return their ballots.

    “The way it was before, you almost were setting voters up to fail,” Amber McReynolds, CEO of the National Vote at Home Institute, told AJC. “That’s actually a best practice to cut it off so that voters are actually receiving the ballot with enough time to get it back.”

    But McReynolds wrote on Twitter that because the Georgia law also restricted drop-off options, the 11-day cutoff should be “revisited” to set an “appropriate deadline to ensure voters have enough to time receive, vote & then return their ballot.”

    Georgia State Election Board member Sara Tindall Ghazal, a Democrat, said the deadline should be between five to seven days before Election Day.

    “Far too many voters end up being disenfranchised,” she told AJC. “It leads to many voters getting their applications rejected and not able to access their ballot otherwise.”

    Marc Elias, a prominent Democratic lawyer who filed a lawsuit challenging the law, said that the increased rate of rejections is a “feature” of the law, “not a flaw.”

    “This law wasn’t designed for ‘election integrity’ as Republicans have claimed — it was designed to make it harder for voters to reach the ballot box,” Elias’ voting advocacy group, Democracy Docket, said in a statement.

    Kristin Clarke, the first Black woman to head the Justice Department’s civil rights division, alleged at a press conference earlier this year that many of the law’s provisions were “passed with a discriminatory purpose” at a time when the state’s Black population and Black voters’ share of ballots cast by mail continues to increase.

    “The provisions we are challenging reduce access to absentee voting at every step of the process, pushing more Black voters to in-person voting, where they will be more likely than white voters to confront long lines,” Clarke said. “SB 202 then imposes additional obstacles to casting an in-person ballot.”

    Georgia is just one of a growing number of Republican-led states that passed restrictive voting laws this year amid a torrent of baseless conspiracy theories about Donald Trump’s election loss. Garland vowed to go after “laws that seek to curb voter access” in other states but acknowledged that the Justice Department has limited power unless Congress passes the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would restore a Voting Rights Act requirement for states with a history of racial discrimination to pre-clear any electoral changes with the DOJ. The bill has stalled in Congress after Republicans filibustered the bill and Democrats like Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have resisted calls to reform the filibuster rule to pass voting rights legislation.

    “If Georgia had still been covered” by the pre-clearance requirement, Garland said, it is “likely that SB 202 would never have taken effect.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • UN Human Rights Envoy Slams Racist Voter Suppression in US

    People vote at booths

    A top human rights official at the United Nations has concluded that new voting restrictions pushed by conservatives in Texas and other states are diluting the political representation of people of color in the United States, where human rights protections are “far from comprehensive” and “even incoherent.”

    “I conclude that there is in fact what could be described as an undermining of democracy, with a phenomenal number of legislative measures in different parts of the country which … have the effect of making the exercise of the right to vote more difficult for certain minorities,” said Fernand de Varennes, the special rapporteur on minority issues for the UN human rights office, during a press conference on Monday.

    De Varennes has met with government officials, experts and civil rights groups in multiple states as well as Puerto Rico and Guam, where he decried the lack of national political representation for the people living in these U.S. territories. His visit comes nearly 60 years after Black revolutionary leader Malcolm X called on UN human rights officials to indict the U.S. government for anti-Black racism and oppression, a problem that, Malcolm X said, the U.S. could not even begin to address in the absence of international pressure and solidarity among people of African descent.

    Following two-week tour of the U.S., de Varennes urged policymakers to overhaul the nation’s human rights laws to combat a “dramatic” increase in discrimination, hate speech and hate crimes against Black, Latinx, Asian and Indigenous people. Millions of Americans, especially people of color, are also threatened by growing economic inequality, environmental pollution and disparities in health care and education, he said.

    “Though there were significant and hard-won human rights gains made mainly during the civil rights movement in the 1960s, the USA stands out among Western democracies for its incomplete patchwork of human rights recognition and their legal protection, with minorities and [I]ndigenous peoples most likely left behind in times of upheaval, uncertainty and crisis,” he added.

    The UN envoy’s comments also come as Republicans continue to block voting rights legislation in Congress and push statewide restrictions on voting fueled by former President Trump’s thoroughly debunked yet persistent claims of election fraud.

    De Varennes was particularly concerned about Texas, where he said new voting restrictions passed into law by Republicans are expected to have a disproportionate impact on growing urban populations that threaten conservative political dominance in the state. De Varennes said the voting law, known as S.B 1, limits what poll workers can do to protect voters from partisan poll watchers who could harass or intimidate voters.

    Since Democrats won the White House and a slim majority in Congress in 2020, Republicans in at least 19 states have passed 33 laws making it harder for people vote. Citing a decline in civil liberties and Trump’s efforts to overturn the election he lost, the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance recently added the U.S. to its list of “backsliding democracies” alongside countries such as Poland and Slovenia.

    Trevor Potter, president of Campaign Legal Center and a former GOP chairman of the Federal Election Commission, pointed to recent attempts by Republicans in Wisconsin to undermine a bipartisan elections agency and even threaten its members with criminal for charges making it possible for residents of nursing homes to vote during the pandemic.

    “In recent months, partisan attempts to undermine legitimate and fair American elections have found shocking amounts of support and gained a concerning amount of traction,” Potter said in a statement on Monday.

    Though state lawmakers in both parties are also redrawing electoral maps to maximize their political power, Republicans have an advantage due to their control of more state legislatures. Aggressive gerrymanders that dilute the electoral power of communities of color in states such as Texas and Georgia could provide Republicans with avenues for taking control of Congress in the midterm elections without winning the popular vote.

    Critics say racial gerrymandering helps maintain white supremacy even as demographics in local communities and the nation as whole become less white.

    “It is becoming unfortunately apparent that it is almost a tyranny of the majority where the minority right to vote is being denied in many areas,” de Varennes said.

    There seems to be “three tier approach” to citizenship and voting rights for Americans, de Varennes said, with people living in Guam and Puerto Rico considered citizens but denied the right to vote in presidential elections and elect voting representatives to Congress, and people living in the American Samoa considered “only nationals” rather than citizens despite living under U.S. rule. Considering the legacy of slavery, racism and genocide in the U.S., it’s “not a coincidence” that most people living in U.S. territories are people of color.

    “It seems hard to understand looking from the outside into the United States how you can have different levels of citizenship in the country,” he said.

    Noting the murder of George Floyd and other high-profile police-perpetrated killings of Black people, de Varennes said Black people in the U.S. are most likely be imprisoned, denied the right to vote and targeted by hate speech on social media. He added that Indigenous people in the U.S. and its territories have experienced centuries of “dispossession, brutality and even genocide.”

    Systemic racism disadvantages oppressed groups within the U.S. criminal legal system, one reason why Black and Brown people are disproportionately locked up in the nation’s vast systems of jails and prisons.

    “I have been informed that minorities such as African Americans and Latinx in particular find themselves disproportionally at the receiving end of marginalization and criminalization that crushes them into a generational cycle of poverty, with a legal system that is structurally set up to advantage and forgive those who are wealthier, and penalizing those who are poorer, particularly minorities of color,” de Varennes said.

    While he did not mention Trump or President Joe Biden by name, de Varennes did commend the U.S. government for making “significant changes” since the 2020 elections, including executive orders and hate crimes legislation approved by Biden in the wake of an increase in violence and hate crimes against Asian Americans.

    However, de Varennes concluded that the U.S. must pass comprehensive national legislation to guarantee human rights for oppressed communities and live up to its international obligations and lofty rhetoric. The human rights expert will submit a final report on human rights for minorities in the U.S. to UN Human Rights Council in Geneva in March 2022.

    De Varennes’s report will come almost six decades after Malcolm X sought to internationalize the issue of Black oppression by bringing it to the United Nations as a human rights issue. The UN Human Rights Council avoided interfering with U.S. domestic politics for decades after Malcolm X’s death in 1965, although in recent years officials have toured the U.S. and weighed in on the impacts of current policy.

    In June 2020, the UN council formally acknowledged Malcolm X’s request and finally adopted a resolution on human rights violations perpetrated by law enforcement against people of African descent as uprisings for racial justice raged across the U.S.

    Speaking at the founding rally of the Organization for Afro-American Unity in 1964, Malcolm X said the U.S. government is not “morally equipped” to solve the problem of racism:

    We feel that the problem of the Black man in this country is beyond the ability of Uncle Sam to solve it. It’s beyond the ability of the United States government to solve it. The government itself isn’t capable of even hearing our problem, much less solving it. It’s not morally equipped to solve it.

    So we must take it out of the hands of the United States government. And the only way we can do this is by internationalizing it and taking advantage of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, the United Nations Charter on Human Rights, and on that ground bring it into the UN before a world body wherein we can indict Uncle Sam for the continued criminal injustices that our people experience in this government.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Trump-Allied Lawyers Ordered to Pay $187,000 in Fees for Their Election Lawsuit

    Rudy Giuliani, lawyer for President Donald Trump, speaks during a news conference about lawsuits related to the presidential election results at the Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington, D.C., on November 19, 2020.

    A federal judge in Colorado has ordered two Donald Trump-allied lawyers to pay a hefty fee for a lawsuit over the 2020 election that the judge had panned — and dismissed.

    The December 2020 lawsuit, which was dismissed in April, was brought by two Colorado lawyers as a class-action case on behalf of the nearly 160 million people who voted in the 2020 election. They alleged that Dominion Voting Systems, Facebook and several elected officials had been involved in a plot to steal the election from Trump, even though there is no evidence for this claim. The lawyers sought $160 billion in damages.

    The judge panned the lawsuit, reports The Washington Post: “Albeit disorganized and fantastical, the Complaint’s allegations are extraordinarily serious and, if accepted as true by large numbers of people, are the stuff of which violent insurrections are made.”

    He ordered the duo to pay $187,000 in legal fees in order to deter similar cases from being brought in the future. The two lawyers, who were sanctioned by the judge earlier this year, will have to pay $50,000 each to Facebook and $62,930 each to Dominion and Center for Tech and Civic Life, a Facebook-affiliated organization that was also named in the case.

    “[T]he repetition of defamatory and potentially dangerous unverified allegations is the kind of ‘advocacy’ that needs to be chilled. Counsel should think long and hard, and do significant pre-filing research and verification, before ever filing a lawsuit like this again,” Magistrate Judge N. Reid Neureiter wrote. “I believe that rather than a legitimate use of the legal system to seek redress for redressable grievances, this lawsuit has been used to manipulate gullible members of the public and foment public unrest.”

    The two lawyers had attempted to appeal the order, dubiously claiming that the lawsuit had nothing to do with Trump. In their original filing, the lawyers quoted a Trump tweet falsely claiming that Dominion “deleted 2.7 million Trump votes nationwide.”

    There is no evidence for this conspiracy theory that has been largely embraced by conservatives due almost solely to attempts by Trump, his team and sympathetic media outlet to sow doubt in elections.

    According to The Washington Post , this ruling is one of the first attempts by a judge to put a price tag on a punishment for the dozens of lawyers who filed election lawsuits over the past year. Trump and his team had filed many lawsuits in attempts to overturn the election, all of which failed.

    Earlier this year, a judge sanctioned Sidney Powell, Lin Wood and other lawyers who had worked on Trump-allied lawsuits and ordered them to pay attorney’s fees in a Michigan case brought over false election fraud claims. Trump’s top lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, was disbarred in June by a New York court for his role in perpetuating the former president’s election lies.

    Though the strategy to file lawsuits over the election didn’t work out for the Trump team, the overall strategy paid out in spades, opening avenues for Republicans to openly skew elections in their favor by rewriting local laws and engaging in more aggressive gerrymandering.

    Republicans in key states like North Carolina and Ohio are charging ahead with racist district maps that give the GOP an edge in the 2022 midterms.

    GOP electeds have filed and passed law after law in nearly every state to suppress voters as an extreme and alarming reaction to Trump’s loss in 2020.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • ALEC “Academy” Featured a Who’s Who of Voter Suppression Leaders

    People protest for their right to vote

    An “Academy” for state lawmakers on voter suppression strategies run by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in July featured a veritable who’s who of the right-wing leaders behind this year’s disinformation campaign about voter fraud and assaults on voting rights across the country, documents obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) show.

    While the July 26-28 session was ostensibly led by the dark money group Honest Elections Project, it was organized, hosted, and bankrolled by ALEC, despite repeated claims by its CEO, Lisa Nelson, that the group does not work on voting issues.

    Nelson provided the formal welcome at the conference’s opening session, ALEC staff organized turnout, and ALEC provided two nights of accommodations at the five-star Grand America Hotel, five meals, and a $450 travel reimbursement for attendees. ALEC’s annual meeting was held at the same hotel immediately after the Academy.

    An invite published by CMD in July stated that “13 legislators from across the country” would be in attendance, but the materials acquired by CMD do not include an attendance list.

    Rather than email materials to ALEC lawmakers that may be subject to open records laws, ALEC distributed hard copies of the agenda at registration along with a “zip drive containing a resources document and a one-pager on your state’s election policies,” according to an email from Sarah Wall, ALEC’s manager of legislative outreach and coalitions, obtained by CMD. Wall’s email also lists Michael Bowman, president of ALEC Action, as a key contact for the event.

    Nelson tipped her hand about ALEC’s voter suppression subterfuge in May at a meeting of the far-right Council for National Policy. Video of the event obtained by CMD shows Nelson speaking frankly about ALEC’s work on voting and revealing its plans to outsource model policy on the controversial topic to avert the spotlight. “We don’t have model policy. We will be developing that at the Honest Elections Project [Academy], through them,” Nelson said.

    Honest Elections Project, the group ALEC chose to carry the ball on its voting agenda, is a dark money operation formed in February 2020 to push for voting restrictions and spread baseless and dangerous claims about election fraud, laying the groundwork for Trump’s attempt to overturn the election. It is a project of The 85 Fund, the new legal name for the Judicial Education Project, a group linked to Leonard Leo that played a central role in Trump’s effort to pack the federal judiciary with right-wing judges.

    Speakers at the Academy featured many of the key strategists and leaders on the Right spreading misinformation around voter fraud, promoting Trump’s lies around the 2020 election, and pushing sweeping new voting restrictions.

    Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita gave the keynote address. A proponent of Trump’s Big Lie that the election was stolen, Rokita recently testified in front of the U.S. Senate against strengthening the federal Voting Rights Act.

    Rokita was one of only four state attorneys general to not sign a National Association of Attorneys General letter condemning the Jan. 6 violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, and is a member of the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA). RAGA was a member of the “March to Save America” coalition that organized the Jan. 6 rally, and its policy arm, Rule of Law Defense Fund, sent out robocalls urging supporters to “march to the Capitol building and call on Congress to stop the steal.”

    Agenda Focused on Election Legislation

    Most of the Academy sessions focused on legislation, giving legislators a chance to discuss bills to restrict voting that have already been introduced and passed in their states this year and hear from Republican-aligned leaders about what more they think needs to be done.

    By the time ALEC held its voter suppression Academy in July, 18 states had already passed 30 laws this year making it harder to vote, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

    The Honest Elections Project’s Executive Director Jason Snead, who worked with ALEC to organize the event, laid out “priorities for election integrity across the states” and polling results in a breakfast session and appeared on another panel on how to “shore up” legislative control over election processes with Jason Torchinsky and Lee Goodman.

    The Honest Elections Project has aggressively promoted a radical legal theory called the “independent state legislatures doctrine,” which holds that state courts don’t have the authority to review state election laws and would empower heavily gerrymandered state legislatures to determine election outcomes.

    Republican legislators have already introduced and passed bills in 2021 “interfering with nonpartisan local election administration and consolidating power to administer and determine elections results themselves,” the Voting Rights Lab reported.

    Snead is a former senior policy analyst with the Heritage Foundation where he developed its Election Fraud Database, which the Brennan Center for Justice says “grossly exaggerated” the extent of voter fraud.

    Torchinsky is general counsel for the National Republican Redistricting Trust and has been defending ALEC against CMD’s state complaints alleging that ALEC illegally gave sophisticated voter management campaign software linked to the Republican National Committee to its legislative members.

    Goodman is an elections attorney and a former Republican chairman and commissioner of the Federal Election Commission (FEC) between 2013 and 2018.

    Jessica Anderson, the executive director of Heritage Action, and Ken Blackwell, executive director of the MAGA voter suppression center at America First Policy Institute led another legislative session on “securing absentee ballots.”

    Anderson bragged to Heritage donors in April that policies, “severely restricting mail ballot drop boxes” and “preventing election officials from sending absentee ballot request forms to voters” were among recommendations Heritage gave Georgia for its massive voter suppression bill.

    Blackwell’s Center for Election Integrity recently published a “Top 25 Common-Sense State Election Integrity Reforms” fact sheet that includes these Heritage recommendations alongside other extreme voter suppression wish-list items, such as eliminating no-excuse absentee ballots and requiring an affidavit for absentee applications.

    Blackwell also moderated a panel at the Academy with state legislators “discussing election challenges they’ve faced in their own states.”

    Another panel over breakfast covered “things to consider with implementation of laws” related to election day voter registration, “election observer protections,” and organizing seniors to work the polls. Chairman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission Donald Palmer, a Trump appointee, and Cleta Mitchell, chair of the Conservative Partnership Institute’s Election Integrity Network, led the session.

    Mitchell is a Big Lie fueler and Trump legal advisor who lost her job at Foley & Lardner following news that she participated in a January call in which Trump asked Georgia election officials to “find” enough votes to make him the winner of the state’s electoral votes.

    “On Dec. 30, Cleta Mitchell wrote to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and offered to send some 1,800 pages of documents purporting to support claims of election fraud,” The Washington Post Magazine reported. Meadows is now a colleague of Mitchell’s at the Conservative Partnership Institute.

    Three Republican secretaries of state, Tennessee’s Tre Hargett, Kentucky’s Michael Adams, and West Virginia’s Mac Warner, spoke on a panel about “what policies the states need to employ to make it easier to vote and harder to cheat.”

    “Easier to vote and harder to cheat” has been a favored talking point of Republicans in recent years.

    All three are active in the Republican Secretaries of State Committee (RSSC), with Hargett serving as chair and Adams as vice chair. Republican secretaries of state produced a report on “Best Practices for Making It Easier to Vote and Harder to Cheat” for the Republican State Leadership Committee, obtained by CMD.

    The RSSC holds monthly calls that Commissioner Palmer often attends. Secretary Warner and Palmer also participated in an “off-the-record” Election University session on June 21 as part of the U.S. House GOP’s “Faith in Elections Project,” as first reported by CMD.

    ALEC Lawmakers Consider Litigation

    ALEC’s Academy featured two panels on litigation. The first dealt with “anticipating challenges to the Voting Rights Act in Arizona,” legal challenges mounted by Democratic voting rights attorney Marc Elias, and redistricting fights, and was led by with Republican lawyers Torchinsky, Michael Thielen, and Brian Barnes.

    Thielen is the executive director of the Republican National Lawyers Association and served on the national board of Lawyers for Trump in 2020. Barnes was involved in legal challenges to changes in voting procedures in North Carolina and Pennsylvania last fall.

    Goodman and Utah’s former Solicitor General Tyler Green led the second panel on “operationalizing litigation challenges.” Noted in the description of the panel are “ways to challenge the scope of litigation attacks on new election integrity legislation (defense) as well as advance the ball on election integrity (offense).”

    As of Oct. 3, “at least 43 voting cases have been filed in 12 states, and Georgia and Texas lead the way with ten new lawsuits each in 2021,” the Brennan Center reports.

    Training Sessions on “the Left”

    Two trainings focused on “the Left” filled out the remaining agenda at the ALEC Academy. Hans von Spakovsky, senior legal fellow and manager of the Heritage Foundation’s “Election Reform Initiative,” and Ken Cuccinelli, former Trump staffer and chairman of the Election Transparency Initiative, led a session focused on “the Left’s attack on our election system” through “state-level attacks on election integrity legislation” and HR 1, the sweeping voting rights and campaign reform bill pending in Congress.

    Spakovsky, who was appointed by Trump to his ill-fated Presidential Advisory Committee on Election Integrity, has been a major mouthpiece of the voter fraud myth from the Right for well over a decade.

    President of the Capital Research Center Scott Walter gave the keynote for a “Mapping the Left Lunch.” Walter and CRC received funding from the Bradley Foundation to develop an “Online Encyclopedia of the Left,” inspired by CMD’s SourceWatch, called “Influence Watch.” The site was “constructed in partnership with Berman and Company,” run by PR spin doctor Richard Berman, and in collaboration with ALEC.

    Arn Pearson contributed to this report.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Michigan GOP’s Voter Restrictions Could Eliminate 20 Percent of Polling Sites

    A man tears a sign reading "Uphold Democracy"

    A controversial scheme by Michigan Republicans to circumvent Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s veto of their proposed voting restrictions could eliminate one in every five polling sites in the state, according to a new study.

    The head of the Michigan Republican Party is funding the “Secure MI Vote” petition, which includes a ban on in-kind contributions to local election clerks. Organizers have acknowledged that this provision would in fact end the use of donated polling sites, such as churches. Some cities and townships could lose half their polling sites — or in some cases all of them — under the new restrictions, according to a new report from the liberal advocacy group Progress Michigan.

    “I hope people are able to see the danger and the impact of this proposal,” Mary Clark, president of the Michigan Association of Municipal Clerks and Delta Township clerk, said in a statement. “This is the type of policy that causes me to lay awake at night because it will cause so much confusion amongst voters and put clerks in impossible situations. This would absolutely negatively impact legally registered voters in my jurisdiction and every jurisdiction in this state.”

    Michigan Republicans, who introduced a 39-bill package to change the state’s voting laws in the wake of Donald Trump’s defeat, in September launched an effort to pull an end-around on Whitmer’s veto of their proposed voting laws by introducing a ballot petition — one that voters will never get to see. An unusual quirk in the state’s constitution allows the Republican-dominated state legislature to adopt the initiative rather than put it on the ballot if they collect just 340,047 signatures, or 8% of the number of voters who participated in the last gubernatorial election. Whitmer has no power to veto such an initiative if it is passed by the legislature.

    The initiative would create the “most restrictive voter ID law in the entire country,” voting rights groups say, even though the state already has a voter ID law on the books. It would also ban election officials from “sending or providing access to” an absentee ballot application unless it is requested and ban election clerks from accepting donated spaces or private donations to help administer the elections.

    Local election clerks have sounded the alarm over the proposed initiative, arguing that the stricter voter ID requirement amounts to a “poll tax” and will restrict ballot access while causing confusion among voters. But the ban on donated spaces “would be devastating,” Clark said in a news conference last week.

    Churches and religious spaces accounted for 664 of the state’s 3,355 polling places in 2020. Religious spaces accounted for more than 40% of polling places in five counties and more than 20% of polling places in 15 counties. More than 1.5 million voters across Genesee, Kalamazoo, Kent and Ottawa counties could lose about half of their polling locations, according to the Progress Michigan report. Religious sites also made up more than 25% of polling locations in the state’s largest counties, Wayne and Oakland. About 111 cities and townships used churches as 50% or more of their polling sites and 28 cities and townships used churches as 100% of polling locations.

    Ingham County, which includes most of Lansing, could lose a quarter of its polling locations.

    “The most effective way to kill something in government is to cut off its funding,” Ingham County Clerk Barb Byrum told Salon. “Republicans, through this petition, are trying to starve our clerks, who safeguard and administer our democracy, of funding in every way possible. The result will be a democratic system that is anything but.”

    Delta township had 16 polling locations for 26,000 voters, Clark said, 12 of which are located in religious sites. Under the proposed ban, local election clerks would have to make do with fewer polling locations or pay to use sites they otherwise would have accessed for free.

    “I wake up in the middle of the night and think, ‘Where am I going to put 26,000 voters?’ There are townships that don’t have a township hall. What are you going to do in a small community?” she said, adding, “It’s alarming, it’s frustrating, and it’s scary. … It’s starting to create panic about how we are going to manage this.”

    Jamie Roe, a spokesman for the Secure MI Vote ballot committee, did not respond to questions from Salon but defended the provision in a statement to the Associated Press.

    “We do not believe that it is improper for churches to serve as polling places,” he said. “It’s wholly appropriate. The fact of the matter is, though, churches are providing a benefit to the public and they should be compensated for that benefit.”

    The initiative does not include any funds for local election clerks to cover the cost of the new polling sites, meaning that cash-strapped election officials may be forced to reduce the number of polling locations. This could lead to longer lines and longer journeys for voters to get to the polls, the report said. But state law also requires election clerks to provide a minimum number of polling places depending on the population, meaning that local election officials will have to find ways to stretch budgets to pay for locations they would have had access to for free.

    “Banning donated spaces while not also increasing budgets for local clerks will mean that precincts have to move to cheap, inaccessible spaces, be consolidated, or be paid for at the expense of other necessary fiscal expenditures for the smooth operations of the municipal clerks’ offices,” Bynum explained. “So it will be difficult for voters to use, will be consolidated so that lines are long and force voters to wait for hours to cast a ballot, or will disrupt the local clerks in carrying out their duties in other, unforeseen ways.”

    Changing polling locations voters have used for years could also spark confusion. When voters who have been voting at the same location for years “show up to vote and are turned away, they are being disenfranchised,” Byrum said.

    While the new report focuses only on houses of worship, the language in the petition would also ban clerks from using schools and senior centers as polling sites.

    These locations “all give this space as their contribution to our democracy and their community,” Clark said. “It’s quite unsettling.”

    The religious sites listed in the report as “just the tip of the iceberg,” said Sam Inglot, deputy director of Progress Michigan.

    “This proposal will negatively impact voters and clerks across Michigan,” he said. “This initiative will change where voters have voted in previous elections, in some cases for decades, and could reduce the overall number of polling places available to voters. This systematic defunding of our elections will result in longer lines, longer drives and less people able to make their voices heard.”

    A survey of members of the Michigan Association of Municipal Clerks found that 82% of respondents oppose at least some components of the petition, Clark said, leading the group to oppose the initiative.

    “It’s not a Dem issue, it’s not a Republican issue, it’s a voter issue,” she said, adding that no one from the state legislature reached out to the group for input on the provision.

    The proposal in the Secure MI Vote petition are similar to the voting restrictions introduced by Republicans in the state legislature amid a slew of Republican legislation restricting ballot access nationwide amid baseless allegations of voter fraud from President Donald Trump and his allies. But the ban on private donations appears aimed at Republican suspicions over “Zuck bucks,” or private grants from a nonprofit that received funding from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan.

    The couple gave $400 million to the Center for Technology and Civic Life, a nonprofit that donated funding to local election officials to help administrators conduct elections amid the pandemic. The funds, including nearly $8 million that it donated to cash-strapped election officials in Michigan, were meant for renting polling places, recruiting poll workers, equipment and PPE, according to the organization.

    Though the organization said it donated funds to urban, suburban and rural areas, Republican lawmakers have raised suspicions over “what strings are attached” to the grants and whether third-party group donations may favor liberal areas. Some Trump allies have used the donations to claim that tech “oligarchs” are “buying the administration of the state’s elections.”

    Byrum rejected the Republican argument, questioning whether lawmakers also want to ban sheriffs from using grant money because it is “tantamount to buying off law enforcement.”

    “Is Mark Zuckerberg calling up 1,600 local clerks in Michigan? We have dozens of safeguards that prevent malfeasance at every level,” she said. “We can review paper ballots if needed, the results are tabulated, canvassed, audited, audited a second time and can be recounted if the candidate believes there is some kind of error.”

    Beyond the impact of the ban on donated spaces, prohibiting cash-strapped election clerks from accepting outside funding could make it more difficult to administer elections.

    “No other constitutional office holders are restricted from accepting grants and donations to supplement the meager funding that we get to do the jobs that the constitution requires of us,” Byrum said. “Clerks use these grants to buy ballot drop boxes, tabulators, envelope openers and office supplies.”

    Republicans in Michigan and around the country have framed their onslaught of new voting restrictions as necessary to preserve “election integrity” amid Trump’s years-long fear-mongering over baseless allegations of voter fraud and unfounded concerns about mail voting. But Republicans in Michigan and other states have failed to find any evidence of voter fraud, and some have even admitted that restrictions are necessary for their party to counter the increase in voter turnout boosted by the expansion of mail voting during the pandemic.

    “Let me be absolutely clear about what the intent is of this petition as well as other efforts by Republican lawmakers in Michigan and across the country: The intent is to ensure that fewer people vote,” Byrum said. “In Michigan, the Senate Republican leader stated that more voters did not ‘accrue to his interest’ during the 2020 election. But this is not just true for 2020. Republicans have tried to suppress the vote for decades because when more people vote, they lose.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Corporations Donated $164,000 to Anti-Voting Rights Senators Despite Pledges

    Rep. Terri Sewell holds a photo of the late Rep. John Lewis at a press event outside of the U.S. Capitol on August 24, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    Despite pledging that they would fight to protect voting rights, major corporations like Amazon and Facebook have given $164,000 to Senate Republicans in 2021 so far — even though the party has made it a major priority to block voting rights advancement.

    According to a report by the government watchdog Accountable.US, eight major corporations have donated to Senate Republicans, giving tens of thousands of dollars over the course of this year. In July, those same corporations signed a letter pledging to support expanding election access, specifically citing the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act that Senate Republicans shot down last week.

    For months, Republicans have vocally opposed the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, disingenuously claiming that the expansions to the Voting Rights Act, which are aimed at reducing voter suppression for historically disenfranchised groups, are a violation of states’ rights.

    The bill, which was passed by the House in August, would place restrictions on jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination in elections, mandating that they gain approval from the Justice Department if they want to change their election rules.The Senate’s rejection of the bill comes in a contentious year for voting rights, as Republicans across the country have been introducing and passing laws to make it harder to vote as an extreme reaction to the 2020 election.

    The letter, which is dated July 14 and signed by hundreds of businesses, claims to stand against those efforts. “[T]he undersigned group of U.S. employers urges Congress to address these problems through legislation amending the Voting Rights Act of 1965,” the letter reads. “Last Congress, the House of Representatives passed the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. We support the ongoing work of both the House and the Senate to enact legislation amending the Voting Rights Act this Congress.”

    By donating to Republicans who oppose strengthening voting access, corporations directly undermine the letter’s claims. Target, which signed the letter, has donated $32,000 to Senate Republicans; Dell, also a signatory, has donated $38,500. Meanwhile, Amazon and Facebook both donated over $20,000, and Microsoft and Boston Scientific have donated more than $15,000 each.

    The report found that the most common recipient of donations was Sen. John Thune (R-South Dakota), minority whip for the GOP. Thune received thousands of dollars in donations from Boston Scientific, Dell, Target, Intel, Amazon and Microsoft. It’s unclear what the donations are for, since federal filing guidelines don’t require such information to be divulged, but empowering the prominent Republican stands directly against the companies’ stated goals.

    Thune has consistently fallen in step with Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) and his opposition to the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. Earlier this year, the South Dakota lawmaker delivered a speech claiming that the Democrats’ marquee voting rights bill, then known as the For the People Act or H.R. 1, was a “power-grab” by Democrats. In reality, the bill would massively expand voting access, with the goal of driving out dark money’s influence in politics and making it easier for everyone to cast a ballot.

    Though Republicans have come up with a myriad of excuses for their opposition to voting rights advancement, some lawmakers have made the motivation behind the nationwide push for voter suppression explicitly clear: the party wants less people to vote. Even a so-called compromise bill from right-wing Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin (West Virginia) failed to garner any Republican support; lawmakers have still yet to find any compromise that would please the party’s senators.

    This is not the first time corporations have broken pledges with regard to political donations. After the January 6 attack on the Capitol, 147 Republicans voted against the certification of the election results, and many companies made pledges to stop donating to those Republicans or stop political donations altogether. But so far, four dozen companies that pledged to suspend donations have broken those promises, including major corporations like Facebook and Target, according to Popular Information.

    While making pledges and signing letters is an easy way to receive positive press or praise from the public, companies are ultimately looking out for their bottom line — and as long as Republicans oppose measures like raising corporate income taxes, the GOP and corporations will maintain a mutually beneficial relationship at the cost of the public.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Democrats’ Failure to Effectively Champion Voting Rights May Cost Them in 2022

    Voting Rights and Economic Justice activists prepare to be arrested on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on October 28, 2021, after they tried to gain access to Hart Senate Office Building while protesting.

    For the past year, since the 2020 presidential election, the Republican Party has waged war on the democratic process. It has initiated phony “audits” of swing-state election results that former President Donald Trump falsely claimed were rigged against him. State GOP parties have purged Trump critics, including fellow Republicans, from positions of power. And in Georgia and elsewhere, state legislators have passed laws that make it easier for the governing party to purge election officials who don’t bend to partisan claims of fraud.

    Ultimately, however, even with laws making it easier to remove low-level election officials, each state’s secretary of state still has the most say over how elections and post-election controversies are conducted in their jurisdiction. This is why the Trumpified GOP has also been steadily ratcheting up pressure on higher-ranking officials.

    Recently, Trump has been throwing his political weight behind a slew of primary challenges designed to weed out all remaining opposition within the Republican party to his claims that he can only lose an election if his opponents rig the vote count. Trump is, for example, pushing to oust Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger, who had the temerity to push back against Trump’s demands that he “find” enough pro-Trump votes to deliver the Peach State to him in 2020.

    And in one state after another, GOP legislators have passed, and governors have signed, laws intended to massively roll back access to the ballot box, and make it ever more difficult for poor and non-white residents to vote. Legislators have proposed draconian restrictions in 43 states this year, in an effort to roll back early voting, to impose onerous voter ID requirements, and to limit actions such as the Black church–led “Souls to the Polls” walks on the Sunday before Election Day in many states throughout the South in particular. As of July at least 17 states had signed such restrictions into law, with more states likely to follow suit.

    This is a meticulous, multipronged and deeply strategic attack on the viability of, and protections underpinning, American democratic institutions.

    In response, Democrats in Congress have pushed two pieces of legislation intended to shore up the Voting Rights Act, which has been largely drained of its force by the Supreme Court over the last decade. The most ambitious of these, the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, included a host of provisions that expand automatic voter registration, protect early and mail-in voting systems, and ensure that states are subject to federal review if legislatures begin passing laws that look like they discriminate against voters of color. The second act, known as the Freedom to Vote Act, brokered as an act of compromise by Senators Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota), is less far reaching but still critically important. It aims to limit gerrymandering, whereby political parties carve out voting districts that are almost immune to partisan challenges; reforms the campaign finance system; and sets in place a slew of protections for access to the ballot box.

    Yet neither of these bills has garnered significant Republican support in the Senate, although Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) did come out in favor of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. In fact, quite the reverse: To date, every time the Senate votes on these bills, Mitch McConnell orders his people to lockstep filibuster and otherwise frustrate passage of the legislation. The result has been an ongoing stalemate, with McConnell seeking to sustain the state-level stampede toward massive voter suppression in the upcoming elections.

    Given the byzantine rules of the senate, this stalemate is one that Democrats can only break by ditching the filibuster. Scrapping the filibuster has been known as the “nuclear option” since Republican majority leader Trent Lott coined that phrase when musing on what he saw as the dangers of meddling with age-old institutional rules. In 2013, Democratic leader Harry Reid abolished the filibuster for presidential nominees. More recently, McConnell rode roughshod over it when it came specifically to Supreme Court nominees. To date, though, neither party has given the formal nod to entirely abolishing the antiquated process. Yet, given the five-alarm-fire nature of the attack on voting rights, such an option is now more needed than ever before, for without doing so, popular and vital political measures aimed at protecting fundamental parts of the country’s democratic system will continue to be stymied by a determined and anti-democratic minority.

    Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York), who is nowhere near as adept as McConnell in ruthlessly keeping his caucus in line, has, however, failed dismally to move forward on this.

    Ironically, the biggest obstacle to reform is Manchin, who ostensibly supports protecting voting rights, yet has refused to contemplate abolishing or modifying the filibuster. President Joe Biden himself, the senate institutionalist that he is, has also not fully thrown his weight behind the efforts to overturn the filibuster. As a result, the Democrats have, with a lot of grumbling but precious little real bite, stepped back on the issue, and the GOP senators, whose 50 members represent 41 million fewer Americans than do their 50 Democratic colleagues, are being given free rein to run roughshod over the democratic process.

    Time is running out fast for the Democrats on this issue. Failure to protect voting rights federally this year makes it all but certain that in a critical number of closely contested states in 2022 and again in 2024, the full force of the GOP-controlled state political machinery will be brought to bear to limit the franchise and also to make it easier to reject inconvenient political results that don’t go the way the GOP and their marquee candidates want them to.

    Had the Democrats been riding high at this point in the electoral cycle, the failure to protect voting rights might not have been so catastrophic. After all, if the Democrats were to blow the GOP out of the water by huge margins, no amount of shenanigans would alter that outcome. But by no stretch of the imagination is the party faring well with critical parts of the electorate. The Democratic Party is hemorrhaging support in rural America, and it is deeply underwater with suburban independent voters, who have provided the critical margins of victory in the last two elections. The best case scenario in 2022 is that Democrats recover just enough to hold their own; the worst case and more likely scenario is that a combination of voter disillusionment due to legislative letdowns and aggressive GOP-led restrictions on the franchise couple to create a GOP sweep similar to the Tea Party wave of 2010 that overwhelms the Democratic Party and consigns it to minority status in Congress for years.

    In the aftermath of last Tuesday’s election results, the Democrats’ prospects in next year’s midterms look increasingly tenuous; and, in consequence, their failure to forcefully advocate for meaningful voting rights protections looks increasingly self-destructive.

    Biden’s popularity has sunk to dramatically low levels, and even though large majorities of the public support the infrastructure bill that just passed Congress, it seems unlikely that the president or his party will, in the short term, benefit politically from its passage, especially since so much attention has centered on the intraparty warfare within the Democratic caucus process leading up to the bill’s passage rather than the substance of the bill itself.

    This was a self-inflicted wound, as has been the abject failure to tackle McConnell’s shameful obstructionism on voting rights. It will make it that much harder for the Democrats to stand a fighting chance come 2022; and that, in turn, could have huge implications for the 2024 presidential election.

    For if the GOP controls both houses of Congress in 2023 and 2024, and if state parties continue their crusade to undermine ballot box access and to eviscerate vote count protections going into the next presidential election, the stage will have been set for a contest in which the institutional brakes that just about worked in 2020 and early 2021 to stop Trump’s attempted coup no longer hold. And that could, truly, be the death knell of democracy in the U.S.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Republican Poll Watchers Make Their Return in Virginia Gubernatorial Race

    Supporters hold up homemade signs as Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin speaks at a campaign rally on October 29, 2021, in Warrenton, Virginia.

    There’s just one day to go before the much anticipated Virginia gubernatorial race will be decided, and since the polls say it’s close, I think we can expect some MAGA fireworks whether their candidate, Glenn Youngkin, wins or loses.

    If they lose, we know that they will say the vote was rigged. If Youngkin wins, Donald Trump’s Big Lie will be equally well-served. They will say it’s because of the vigilance of the hordes of Republican poll watchers who are set to descend upon polling places on Election Day. Trump made clear what he wanted last year at the presidential debate and they will not let him down this time:

    “I’m urging my supporters to go into the polls and watch very carefully because that’s what has to happen. I am urging them to do it. Today there was a big problem. In Philadelphia, they went in to watch. They’re called poll watchers, a very safe, very nice thing. They were thrown out. They weren’t allowed to watch. You know why? Because bad things happen in Philadelphia.”

    He was lying, however, as usual.

    One woman who claimed she was working for the Trump campaign had complained that she was not allowed in a satellite early voting location. However, she did not have an official certificate because, by law, no poll watchers were authorized at such locations. Trump was likely under the assumption that he could just send his MAGA mob to storm the polling places, no questions asked. And a spate of new election laws being enacted by Republican state legislatures are essentially making that reality now.

    Trump’s comments during that debate set off election officials’ alarm bells all over the country. What Trump was describing is better known as voter intimidation. Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford tweeted the next day, “Voter intimidation is illegal in Nevada. Believe me when I say it: You do it, and you will be prosecuted.” Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring said that the president’s loose talk was dangerous, adding:

    “The President is blatantly urging his supporters to congregate at polling places, go inside, and ostensibly harass and intimidate voters.While there are authorized ‘poll watchers’ who monitor polls on Election Day, their duties are clearly laid out, and they do not include what President Trump has suggested.”

    There were some poll watching shenanigans on election day in 2020, but the Big Lie launched the GOP into action.

    Last May, The New York Times reported a national program to train tens of thousands of MAGA faithful to “watch.” The report highlighted one recruitment seminar in which a precinct chair in a white suburb of Houston exhorted volunteers to go into the Black, Asian and Latino areas on election day because “that’s where the fraud is occuring.” That is not true, of course. But it illustrates what they actually have in mind: suppression and intimidation of racial and ethnic minority voters, particularly in urban areas.

    That is nothing new. Partisans used such tactics for centuries. I wrote about this years ago here on Salon, including the stunning tale of former Chief Justice William Rehnquist who, as a young lawyer in Arizona, personally applied some ugly racist intimidation against Latino and Black voters in the 1964 presidential campaign. The GOP ran the program in which he participated called “Operation Eagle Eye” throughout the nation.

    While researching his book on the Goldwater campaign, called Before the Storm, historian Rick Perlstein unearthed a memo written by a Lyndon Johnson staffer outlining the scheme:

    “Let’s get this straight, the Democratic Party is just as much opposed to vote frauds as is the Republican party. We will settle for giving all legally registered voters an opportunity to make their choice on November 3rd. We have enough faith in our Party to be confident that the outcome will be a vote of confidence in President Johnson and a mandate for the President and his running mate, Hubert Humphrey, to continue the programs of the Johnson-Kennedy Administration.

    But we have evidence that the Republican program is not really what it purports to be. It is an organized effort to prevent the foreign born, to prevent Negroes, to prevent members of ethnic minorities from casting their votes by frightening and intimidating them at the polling place.”

    I bring this up again because it’s important to remember that Trump didn’t invent this stuff. He’s never done anything original in his life. People have been at this for a very long time. Trump’s just supercharged it.

    Over the past half century, the nation had made great strides in controlling the threat of poll watcher intimidation. The majority of states put laws in place to ensure that people felt safe at their polling places. The problem was pretty much snuffed out for several decades. But now it’s back.

    The Washington Post reports that Virginia has poll watchers by the hundreds ready to go Tuesday. In fact, they have already been on the job during the early voting. In Democratic counties, the poll watchers are 2-1 Republican, many of them trained and organized by the Youngkin campaign. The candidate, who insists he’s not a MAGA kind of guy, has been pushing the voter fraud myth like crazy and his voters are out in force. One of the Virginia groups doing training was created by a Republican candidate who lost his election by 23 points in 2020 and refused to concede. According to the Post, other groups involved in similar activities throughout the country are Tea Party Patriots, Americans for Limited Government, No Left Turn in Education and Alliance for Free Citizens, led by former Kansas secretary of state Kris Kobach, a vote fraud zealot who Trump once enlisted to prove that Hillary Clinton didn’t win the popular vote in 2016. (Needless to say, he failed.) Another group called The Virginia Project, a purveyor of the Big Lie, has been subtly intimidating election officials. At one of its meetings, Joe Flynn, the brother of General Michael Flynn, asked the crowd if they believe Joe Biden won the state of Virginia in 2020. The crowd roared, “No!” Biden won the state by 10 points.

    Glenn Youngkin may very well win the election tomorrow. The polls are neck and neck. And if he does, the pundits and analysts will immediately construct a narrative that tells us the national implications of the GOP victory. But the right’s narrative will be that they were able to keep the Democrats from stealing the election the way they stole 2020 and they’ll double their efforts around the country. The Big Lie will be validated one way or the other.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Struggles for Voting Rights Will Shape the Fate of Abortion Access

    Demonstrators are gathered outside of the Texas State Capitol during a voting rights rally on the first day of the 87th Legislature's special session on July 8, 2021, in Austin, Texas.

    State-level advocates are at the front lines of multiple intersecting battles in the larger quest to protect democracy. Often covered as separate and distinct considerations, the systematic attack on voting rights and abortion access are connected to the ongoing program of eroding constitutionally protected freedom and rights afforded to all individuals.

    “When we think about voting rights and reproductive rights, we have to look no further than Texas,” said Jennifer Driver, senior director of reproductive rights at the State Innovation Exchange (SiX), a national resource center that aims to support state legislators in passing transformative policy.

    Driver added: “It is no mere coincidence that the same week that Texas implemented SB-8 [Senate Bill 8, which bars all abortions after six weeks of pregnancy], they also pass an extremely problematic anti-voter bill. And what we know is that voting is an accountability measure. We vote for politicians who are going to represent our best interests.”

    The intersection of these issues demonstrates the importance of protecting civil liberties and human rights to uphold democracy. Democracy is not a fixed point, but more of a practice that requires deliberate efforts to maintain.

    And part of that practice and effort involves showing up for the people and issues that matter to our communities. Through its Reproductive Freedom Leadership Council, the State Innovation Exchange pulled together hundreds of legislators to join an amicus brief supporting legal abortion in the upcoming Supreme Court Case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

    The State Innovation Exchange “organized the largest state legislator amicus briefs submitted to an abortion case in this country’s history,” Driver told Truthout. “Nearly 900 state legislators sign on to say to the court, ‘We want you to uphold the fundamental rights to abortion’.”

    Driver says working with state legislators is really critical in elevating the connection between voting rights and reproductive rights.

    The State Innovation Exchange “has been working both with legislators who are actively trying to protect abortion rights in their states and also the right to vote and push back against the redistricting that’s happening in states across the country,” Driver said.

    In places like Ohio, partisan gerrymandering has paved the way for aggressive abortion restrictions. The Ohio Capital Journal describes the result of this gerrymandering as changing the landscape to benefit conservatives and pave the way for anti-abortion legislation to pass.

    Aileen Day, communications director for Planned Parenthood of Ohio, described the issue as both simple and complicated at the same time.

    “A majority of Ohioans believe abortion should be legal and accessible,” Day said. “Despite this, the Ohio Legislature is majority anti-abortion. This is possible because we don’t pick our legislatures. Gerrymandering allows our legislatures to pick us and give themselves disproportionate power.”

    Day spoke with Truthout while en route to a protest of an Ohio Senate hearing on a trigger ban, which outlaws abortion in the event Roe v. Wade is struck down. Last month, the Ohio Senate moved forward a bill that does just that.

    An October 2020 poll showed over 50 percent of Ohio voters believe abortion should be legal, while only 38 percent thought it should be illegal all or most of the time. Data published in July 2019 showed strong support for abortion despite the pre-viability ban proposed in the legislature.

    “With more Republicans in our legislatures, that means more bills restricting and banning reproductive health care get signed into law, but with the addition of more extreme conservatives in our legislature, that means extreme bills banning reproductive health care get signed into law,” Day said.

    Day shared that partisan gerrymandering contributed to more Republicans in the legislature and the restrictive approach paved the way for extreme ideologues to join the ranks. According to Day, there have been 30 anti-abortion and anti-reproductive health care bans and restrictions in Ohio in the past 10 years.

    Those restrictions include state-mandated counseling and a 24-hour waiting period, forcing people seeking an abortion travel to a clinic twice. This can be burdensome for those who live in communities without a clinic. According to the Guttmacher Institute, 93 percent of Ohio counties did not have an abortion clinic in 2017, accounting for 55 percent of women age 15-44 in the state.

    Day said the new Ohio district map gives Republicans over two-thirds of the legislative seats despite only winning 55 percent of the vote share in 2020. The ACLU of Ohio, the League of Women Voters of Ohio and the A. Phillip Randolph Institute sued last month challenging the new map.

    “Redistricting should not be a one-sided, rigged political process. Voters should pick their politicians,” Alora Thomas-Lundborg, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, said in a statement. “Politicians should not pick their voters.”

    Litigation is often a last resort in ensuring values of fundamental fairness and constitutional protections are upheld. And as states like Mississippi, Kentucky and Georgia are awaiting the outcome of federal appeals processes, including Supreme Court decisions, organizers continue to move forward.

    In 2019, the Georgia Legislature passed a sweeping elections bill, including an overhaul of the voting machines, and a six-week abortion ban. Both were fiercely fought by reproductive health advocates arguing Georgia’s six-week abortion ban is pending at the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals and is on hold until Dobbs is decided by the Supreme Court.

    “Conservative Republicans don’t give a sh*t about reproductive choice and reproductive rights,” Nse Ufot, CEO of the New Georgia Project and the New Georgia Project Action Fund said. “It’s a part of the culture wars. And they know that they can use it to drive up turnout among evangelicals who make up a significant portion of their base.”

    Manipulation of maps, and legislators picking their constituencies instead of the other way around keeps states locked in a regressive posture. As both Day and Ufot explained, communities of color are grouped in ways that limit their power and undermines the ability to shift legislative control.

    “The only way for them to hold on to power is to take a sledgehammer to our election,” Ufot told Truthout. “That way they keep people on their toes, keep people fighting for their dignity and their humanity — things that they already have, which are already ensconced and enshrined in the Bill of Rights and in our Constitution.”

    As a part of the Amplify Georgia campaign, which aims to expand and protect abortion access in the Peach State, the New Georgia Project co-produced a Georgia Reproductive Justice Voter Toolkit helping voters find candidates committed to helping communities not only survive but thrive.

    Efforts like voter toolkits are important to cut through the deep misinformation used to whip right-wing voters into a frenzy. From claims of stolen elections to fabrications about gestational staging in abortion and claims of fetal pain with no basis in science, there is no waiting for magical federal or court intervention.

    “We are talking about government and nation destabilizing disinformation campaigns,” Ufot said. “We’re talking about major fundamental, world-changing, world-threatening democracy and attacks on our elections.”

    Paraphrasing the late Toni Morrison, Ufot says that white supremacy functions as a distraction to keep us from doing our work and shifting society forward in a way that uplifts people across the board instead of simply enriching a select few. Policies that permit people to exercise their rights and protect their personal well-being are determined by the people who hold seats of power.

    When focused on maintaining partisan power, instead of fair representation of people and their interests, redistricting can enshrine power and tyranny of the few. Collective organizing of groups like the New Georgia Project, state Planned Parenthood staff and the State Innovation Exchange can provide a stopgap where federal intervention is delayed.

    “We are seeing how conservative legislators at the state level have had this playbook for a very long time,” Driver said. She explained that people have relied on the federal system, whether the courts or Congress, to protect rights, but the worst attacks are happening at the state level. “We are reminding people of the power of the state legislature,” Driver concluded.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The no-action climate plan and Morrison’s voter suppression

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    The Plan To Deliver Net Zero is much like the Morrison government: it’s insubstantial, inadequate, filled with political marketing and spin and, ultimately, does very little to act on climate change.

    0:50 The no-action climate plan

    It’s all about politics and directed at those people in the electorate who might be thinking about switching their vote away from the Liberal and National parties at the next election, of which there is a substantial number.

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    Morrison lacks intellect and he’s incurious about the world. But he has rat cunning and will do anything to hold on to power and win the next federal election. This, of course, makes him a dangerous Prime Minister. For him, climate change is not an environmental issue, it’s a political issue that he wants to swat away with a 20-page glossy document. It’s far easier to tell the electorate what they want to hear, not what needs to be done to secure the future of Australia or take the opportunities climate change presents to the Australian economy and industry base.

    13:23 Morrison’s voter suppression

    The Morrison government is now like a wounded beast, bearing its teeth at anything it thinks can provide it with advantage. And Voter ID legislation is one of those issues. It’s not an issue that has been on anyone’s agenda during this Parliamentary term, yet Scott Morrison wants to convince the public that voter fraud is a serious issue – it’s not – and present himself as someone who wants to address a major problem.

    Like the history and culture wars, this is a solution seeking a problem – not even the friends of the Liberal Party – the Institute of Public Affairs – has called for this, saying that it’s a regressive move. But if Morrison can find an advantage in voter suppression, he will go there. How else would the most corrupt and incompetent government in Australia’s history cling onto power if they only depended on legitimate efforts?

    24:00 Tony Smith resigns

    One person who has had enough is Tony Smith, who has resigned as the Speaker of the House of Representatives. After the humiliation of been voted down by his own government, he had no choice. But there was only one more week of Parliamentary sittings for 2021: what could all this mean? He wanted do his Christmas shopping earlier? Send a message to the government? Or clear the decks for a December federal election?

    We think it could be all three.

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    The post The no-action climate plan and Morrison’s voter suppression appeared first on New Politics.

    This post was originally published on New Politics.

  • Opponents of Voting Rights Compete in GOP Primary for Arizona Secretary of State

    A woman wears "Trump Won" stickers as people gather to show support at a watch party regarding the results of the Arizona State Senate report of an audit of the 2020 election at the Arizona State Capitol in Phoenix, Arizona, on September 24, 2021. Trump lost.

    The leading contenders for the GOP nomination for Arizona secretary of state, whose agency oversees elections and certifies election results in the state, are both members of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a right-wing corporate lobby group that backs voter suppression legislation. And one of the two has fully embraced former President Donald Trump’s big lie that the 2020 election was stolen and received his endorsement.

    Arizona’s presidential election was close, with Biden winning by 10,457 votes, and even a controversial sham audit initiated by ALEC’s president elect, Sen. Karen Fann, recently confirmed the outcome and found no evidence of voter fraud in the election.

    Trump’s preferred candidate, state Rep. Mark Finchem, nonetheless believes the election was stolen, attended the Jan. 6 rally in Washington, D.C., that led to Trump supporters’ deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, and has called for the 2020 presidential election to be decertified.

    In a news release endorsing Finchem, Trump said, “In addition to his incredibly powerful stance on the massive Voter Fraud that took place in the 2020 Presidential Election Scam, he is strong on Crime, Borders, our currently under siege Second Amendment, and loves our Military and our Vets.”

    Finchem is one of three Arizona legislators speaking at a QAnon conference in Las Vegas on Oct. 22-25. Democracy reform group Rural Arizona Action spearheaded a campaign to recall Finchem this summer based on his ties to the insurrection, but the effort fell short of the 24,775 signatures required to make the ballot.

    The other leading candidate, state Rep. Shawnna Bolick, is also an ALEC member. The Phoenix Republican co-chairs ALEC’s secretive elections working group, which develops policy on voter suppression and gerrymandering.

    Bolick also sponsored radical legislation this year to allow the Arizona legislature to overturn presidential election results and choose its own electors. The bill, HB 2720, is still pending in the House Rules Committee.

    Her husband, Clint Bolick, was vice president for litigation at the Goldwater Institute and a member of the right-wing State Policy Network before being appointed to the Arizona Supreme Court by Gov. Doug Ducey.

    Running in the Democratic primary for secretary of state are Maricopa County Recorder Adrian Fontes and State Rep. Reginald Bolding.

    The candidates have not yet filed any campaign finance reports for next year’s Secretary of State election.

    Finchem, in his past runs for state representative, has received contributions from the PACs of utility Pinnacle West, the Arizona Association of Realtors, mining conglomerate Freeport-McMoran, Raytheon, and Pfizer, as well as Gov. Ducey’s Arizona Leadership Fund and many other donors

    In her past campaigns, Bolick has raised considerable sums from individuals, as well as money from the PACs of the Arizona Free Enterprise Club, Pinnacle West, Freeport-McMoran, Southwest Gas, the Arizona Chamber of Commerce, and utility Salt River Project.

    Finchem and Bolick both sponsored Arizona’s bill HB 2905, signed by the governor in July, which makes it a Class 5 felony for a county election supervisor to deliver an early voting ballot to a person who did not make a request for the ballot. The bill exempts mailing a ballot to a person on the county’s active early voting list.

    A Class 5 felony carries a presumptive sentence of two years and is often used in prosecuting those profiting from the prostitution of others.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The Right to Vote Should Be Available to Everyone — Including Prisoners Like Me

    Prisoners’ inability to vote means we can’t vote for fair-minded judges who will protect our rights in civil court.

    People in prison often begin their life in marginalized communities where their families’ right to vote has historically been suppressed. Today, voter suppression of those communities is again on the rise. The fact that people are actively trying to legislate additional hindrances to already marginalized communities’ right to vote highlights the need to ensure the right to vote for all of these communities’ members — even if they are in prison.

    This is especially true because, once convicted, their imprisonment further marginalizes them from society. In Illinois, where I’m incarcerated, everyone in prison is completely stripped of their right to vote until release. (For the thousands of people sentenced to die in Illinois prisons, this is a lifetime denial of the right to vote.)

    As someone who has been sitting in prison for the last two decades, I know the full effects of being disenfranchised. It leaves us vulnerable to a voting public that has almost zero concern for our welfare, and deprives us of both a voice in society and what could be a powerful tool to facilitate our return to useful citizenship.

    Fortunately, the organization Chicago Votes has been working to pass Senate Bill 828 in partnership with State Representative Lashawn Ford. If passed, this bill will restore voting rights to the roughly 30,000 individuals incarcerated in Illinois prisons, including me. After nearly passing in the final days of the 2021 regular legislative session with 64 “yes” commitments in the House of Representatives, confusion over the bill’s constitutionality stalled its passage. Since then, Chicago Votes and advocates have worked to address misbeliefs around the bill’s constitutionality. Now, the bill is poised to move during the fall veto session, which would make Illinois the first state in the United States to restore voting rights to people in prison.

    Those of us in prison are severely affected by our inability to vote. First, judges in Illinois are elected. For decades, getting elected required promising to be, or proving they were, “tough-on-crime” — meaning they would, or were, handing out overly harsh prison sentences. Those judges never had to worry about the victims of those harsh sentences voting against them in the next election, because prisoners do not have the right to vote.

    This continues today and affects all of one’s appeals and resentencing hearings. Moreover, the inability to vote means we can’t vote for fair-minded judges who will protect our rights in civil court, nor vote against judges who openly discriminate against petitions filed by people in prison.

    Second, most legislators don’t view anyone in prison as their constituents simply because they can’t vote. This is true whether they were a constituent prior to incarceration or whether the prison is in their district. If legislators don’t need to court the votes of people in prison, it ensures they are unlikely to take their concerns or viewpoints into consideration when passing legislation.

    That simple fact greatly contributed to the passing of tougher and tougher sentencing guidelines, and also ensures that today’s “reforms” of those extreme sentencing laws won’t help the currently incarcerated.

    Thus, for numerous reasons the disenfranchisement of people in prison helps to ensure that they serve more time in prison. This does not serve any true penological or public safety goal. Rather, it largely just serves to benefit the personal political careers of judges and legislators, many of whom have already retired. Therefore, those in prison have a serious liberty interest in obtaining the right to vote.

    The fact that people in prison can’t vote for state legislators also leaves them extremely vulnerable to abuse by the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC). Legislators constantly cater to the guards’ union because they are a powerful voting bloc. This allows them to get legislation passed that is beneficial to prison guards, but detrimental to those of us in prison. This has negatively affected everything from our right to access public records, to our ability to peacefully protest inhumane living conditions via hunger strikes.

    We are also captive consumers at the “mercy” of monopolistic companies that routinely engage in price-gouging and other anti-competitive business practices — all to the detriment of the incarcerated. Additionally, the IDOC adds unnecessary, and unjust surcharges, or increases prices by demanding kickbacks or “commissions.” This too is at our expense.

    Without the right to vote, this is effectively “taxation without representation.” Thus, people confined to the IDOC were not only exploited by yesterday’s “tough-on-crime” politicians and ignored by today’s “reformers,” but are continuously exploited financially throughout our incarceration.

    People in prison are also largely prohibited from earning a living wage, and are often forced to work for pennies per day with no days off for months on end in unsafe working conditions.

    Being disenfranchised means we cannot vote for legislators who will look out for our interests — who will pass laws to stop our exploitation, require a living wage for prison labor, ensure we receive adequate medical care, have access to educational programming, and more.

    Society has this misconception that people in prison are “anti-social” or hell-bent on destroying society and should therefore not be allowed to vote so they can’t “poison the system.” Nothing could be further from the truth, though. Don’t get me wrong; society’s constant efforts to marginalize, ostracize, oppress and discriminate against the incarcerated definitely doesn’t help engender strong ties to society; but despite all of that, ties to the community usually remain.

    That’s because no matter how much society dehumanizes us, we remain just that — human. We are human beings with families and friends out in free society that we care deeply about. I myself am a son, father and grandfather. My right to vote, if restored to me, would be exercised primarily in support of my family’s safety and economic well-being.

    My vote for candidates would also probably be much more informed than the average citizen’s, due to the fact that I have the time to research both the candidates and their stances on the issues. Moreover, I have the time to get a real understanding of the issues and not just vote along party lines or for someone who spouts the best misleading rhetoric.

    People in prison also have a ton of experiential knowledge that can be used to help heal societal ills. We not only have firsthand knowledge about injustices embedded in our legal system, but we also have firsthand experience with oppression and being at the “mercy” of unaccountable agents of the state. For many people who come to prison, this makes us acutely aware of the injustices other people suffer and allows us to relate with empathy.

    This is a significant factor not only in why people personally impacted by mass incarceration are at the forefront of the movement to decarcerate, but also why people who leave prison often get involved in working for nonprofits, become “violence interrupters,” fight against racial discrimination, corruption, and more.

    Denying someone the right to vote is an extremely dehumanizing act. Rather than further ostracizing people in prison — the majority of whom will return to their communities someday — society should work to increase people’s attachments to society.

    Restoring people’s right to vote while in prison would go a long way toward engendering feelings of belonging to society. This would both make it more likely that the incarcerated would work towards the betterment of society, and increase the likelihood that they will be “returned to useful citizenship,” as our state constitution insinuates should be the goal.

    The right to vote should be available to everyone, incarcerated or not.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Texas GOP’s Electoral Map Gives White People Disproportionate Control Over State

    Texas State Representatives Mary Ann Perez, center, and Christina Morales, right, attend a news conference with members of the Texas House Democratic Caucus outside the U.S. Capitol on August 6, 2021.

    The Texas legislature passed a new congressional map on Monday that gives disproportionate favor to Republicans and marginalizes the influence of nonwhite voters.

    The map was passed by the Senate and the House largely on party lines, with nearly all Republicans voting in favor. Democrats have condemned the map, saying that the redistricting process was squeezed into the legislature’s special 30 day session, giving little time for discussion or public input. Republican Gov. Greg Abbott is expected to sign the map into law, which will give Republicans disproportionate control over the state for the next decade.

    According to the Census Bureau, Texas’s population is about 41 percent white non-Latinx, nearly 40 percent Latinx, approximately 5 percent Asian and nearly 13 percent Black. Under the maps approved by the legislature, however, white people represent a majority in 60 percent of the congressional districts, as Mother Jones’s Ari Berman points out. Meanwhile, Latinx people represent a majority in only 18 percent of districts, and Black and Asian people do not represent a majority in any district.

    Though the Texas GOP’s redistricted maps were already discriminatory in 2010, this round is slated to disenfranchise nonwhite voters even more than before. Whereas Latinx residents represented a majority in eight districts over the past decade, there will only be seven such districts in the new maps, despite Latinx residents making up about half of Texas’s new residents over the last ten years.

    Due to the state’s population growth, Texas will be gaining two additional seats in the House. But, despite nearly all of the new population being people of color, the new map gives both seats to majority-white districts.

    The new maps also consolidate and empower the GOP in particular, in the year after Texas was briefly poised to go blue in the 2020 election. Under the new map, the number of safe Republican seats would double from 11 to 22, with nearly the entire state becoming deep red districts with some Democratic strongholds like Dallas, Houston and Austin.

    Democratic state lawmakers criticized the new map. “What we’re doing in passing this congressional map is a disservice to the people of Texas,” said Rep. Rafael Anchía before the vote. “What we’re doing is hurtful to millions of Texans — it’s shameful.”

    Texas Democrats had fled the state this summer in attempts to block the Republicans’ voter suppression package, but were forced to return and restore quorum in the legislature when Republicans threatened to arrest them.

    Several civil rights groups have sued Texas over the map. The plaintiffs, represented by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), say that the new maps violate the Voting Rights Act because they disenfranchise Latinx voters.

    “Violation of voting rights is not a partisan issue,” said Thomas A. Saenz, president and general counsel for MALDEF. “Still, Texas has a uniquely deplorable record in its consistent disregard of Latino population growth over half a century of redistricting.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Women’s March Is Linking Abortion Rights to Fight for Democracy in Austin and DC

    Protesters rally for abortion justice on the south lawn of the Texas State Capitol in Austin on October 2 during Women's March ATX.

    Austin, Texas—Hundreds protested Texas’s new six-week abortion ban, rallying on the south lawn of the State Capitol Saturday as part of nationwide demonstrations for abortion justice. Organized by the Women’s March and more than 90 partnering organizations, including the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice, Planned Parenthood and SisterSong, the actions spread across 610 cities in all 50 states and Washington, D.C.

    Texas leaders in the fight for reproductive rights anchored marches in Austin and in Brownsville in South Texas, joining hundreds of thousands of marchers across the country and in the nation’s capital in D.C., to pressure the U.S. Senate to urgently pass House-approved legislation that would ensure the right to abortion under federal law, and separately, to protect the right to vote, abolish the filibuster and expand the Supreme Court.

    In Austin, Democratic state lawmakers linked their fight against voter suppression to the fight against the state’s Senate Bill 8 (SB 8). The new law bans abortion after six weeks by empowering private individuals to file civil lawsuits seeking up to $10,000 against abortion providers and anyone who “aids and abets” in the procedure — an enforcement mechanism reproductive rights advocates have criticized as a form of legalized bounty hunting.

    State representatives including Jasmine Crockett, Donna Howard and others told the crowd in Austin about their work testifying in D.C. before the Senate Judiciary Committee about SB 8 last week. They connected state lawmakers’ struggle against the state’s voter suppression bill, in which Texas Democrats fled the state for D.C. in order to break a legislative quorum in July, to the fight against SB 8.

    State Sen. Jasmine Crockett speaks to protesters on the south lawn of the Texas State Capitol on October 2 during Women's March ATX.
    State Rep. Jasmine Crockett speaks to protesters at the Texas State Capitol in Austin, Texas, on October 2, 2021, during Women’s March ATX.

    “We’re in the middle of redistricting right now. You know what [the Texas GOP] want to do? They want to further limit your voice,” State Rep. Jasmine Crockett told hundreds of protesters Saturday at the State Capitol. “The Texas Democrats went to D.C. because … we wanted to make sure that everyone in this state had equal access to the ballot box. They don’t want you to have access to the ballot box. They don’t want to make sure that you’re represented because they know that if you’re represented, stupid laws like [SB 8] would never be on the books.”

    Other lawmakers who spoke at the rally Saturday included U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett and Travis County Commissioners Brigid Shea and Ann Howard, as well as members of Austin City Council. Former State Sen. Wendy Davis and former Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards, the daughter of former Texas Gov. Ann Richards, also spoke at the event.

    State troopers with the Texas Department of Public Safety protect a small anti-abortion counterprotest on the south lawn of the Texas State Capitol in Austin on October 2, 2021, during Women's March ATX.
    State troopers with the Texas Department of Public Safety protect a small anti-abortion counterprotest at the Texas State Capitol in Austin, Texas, on October 2, 2021, during Women’s March ATX.

    In Washington, D.C., thousands of marchers gathered at Freedom Plaza near the White House and marched to the Supreme Court, just two days before the start of the Court’s new term, which is set to decide the future of abortion rights in the U.S. as the Donald Trump-appointed conservative majority takes up a Mississippi challenge to the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade in December.

    Speakers at the D.C. event included swimmer Schuyler Bailar, activist Monica Simpson, President of Physicians for Reproductive Health Jamila Perritt and Planned Parenthood CEO Alexis McGill Johnson. Reproductive rights leaders from Texas also spoke out during the rally.

    “We’re going to keep giving [the fight] to Texas,” Marsha Jones of the Afiya Center for Black women’s health care in Dallas, pledged to the Washington crowd. “You can no longer tell us what to do with our bodies!”

    On Friday, the Biden administration urged a federal judge to block SB 8. District Judge Robert Pitman heard arguments from Justice Department lawyers and the Texas attorney general’s office for nearly three hours on Friday but did not say when he would rule. The case is just one of a series of cases, including the Mississippi case, that presents the Supreme Court with the opportunity to uphold or overrule Roe.

    A separate challenge to SB 8 is back on the high court’s docket after a broad coalition of Texas abortion providers led by Whole Woman’s Health again asked the court to intervene. In an attempt to expedite the case, plaintiffs asked the court to hear the defendants’ motions to dismiss, which were denied by the district court and then appealed to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, where they remain pending.

    Additionally, a Texas state court has blocked lawsuits against Planned Parenthood clinics, temporarily protecting the providers from enforcement of SB 8. So far, one Texas abortion provider, Dr. Alan Braid, who claims to have provided an abortion after six weeks, has been sued by two people from outside the state in a deliberate attempt to test the new law in Texas courts.

    The weekend’s demonstrations also come on the heels of powerful personal testimony by congresswomen, including progressive Representatives Cori Bush, Pramila Jayapal and Barbara Lee, at a Thursday House Oversight Committee hearing on protecting abortion access. The women told emotional stories of their own experiences obtaining abortion after rape, contraceptive failure and during the ‘60s before Roe.

    “When I found out that I was pregnant it was very difficult because I still didn’t understand what was happening,” Bush told members of Congress of her pregnancy as a result of rape at just 17. “I just knew I wasn’t ready for a child.”

    A protester wears a dress fashioned out of coat hangers on the south lawn of the Texas State Capitol in Austin, Texas, on October 2, 2021 during Women's March ATX.
    A protester wears a dress fashioned out of coat hangers at the Texas State Capitol in Austin, Texas, on October 2, 2021, during Women’s March ATX.

    Women’s March Executive Director Rachel O’Leary Carmona told Truthout in advance of Saturday’s events that fewer people overall traveled from across the country to be in D.C. than those who chose to stay and organize at home, in contrast to the Women’s March’s largest single-day protest after President Trump’s inauguration in 2017. Activists’ emphasis on organizing locally this year “is actually what we need in order to get the kind of momentum and infrastructure built across the country and for the long haul,” Carmona says.

    Carmona, who recently relocated to Texas, echoed lawmakers and reproductive rights activists in the state in terms of centering the connection between issues of democracy, voting rights and reproductive justice. “So much of what we need to understand about Texas and also the South is the ways in which it has been gerrymandered and, in some ways, occupied by extremist, right-wing actors who are suppressing the will of the people either through refusing to let folks express that or through trying to suppress it once it has been expressed,” she told Truthout.

    The weekend’s marches and rallies build pressure on Congress to pass both the Women’s Health Protection Act (WHPA) and the Equal Access to Abortion Coverage in Health Insurance (EACH) Act. House Democrats passed the WHPA on September 24 in an effort to combat Texas’s SB 8 and in response to mounting fears that the Supreme Court will overturn Roe. WHPA faces an uphill battle in the evenly split Senate, due to center-right Democrats’ refusal to abolish the filibuster — something Women’s March organizers are also centering as a core demand.

    Additionally, the EACH Act would nix the decades-old Hyde Amendment, which prohibits federal Medicaid funding for most abortions. Reproductive rights advocates say the amendment disproportionately harms low-income and communities of color, including immigrants and young people. Again, center-right Democrats are acting as the opposition, as Sen. Joe Manchin indicated last week that the Medicaid expansion Democrats are seeking as part of their $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill must include the Hyde Amendment to get his support.

    According to Carmona, 85 percent of the marches organized across the country Saturday were organized by new activists and that pattern has been the same for every Women’s March. Hundreds of organizers have become activated by joining or getting involved with a Women’s March and have stayed active in the movement, even if they haven’t stayed active with the Women’s March organization itself.

    The Russian feminist protest punk rock band Pussy Riot performs on the south lawn of the Texas State Capitol in Austin, Texas, on October 2, 2021, during Women's March ATX.
    The Russian feminist protest punk rock band Pussy Riot performs at the Texas State Capitol in Austin, Texas, on October 2, 2021, during Women’s March ATX.

    “So when we say, ‘Well, one march doesn’t solve anything,’ I don’t think anybody has any illusions about that, but what it does is expands and consolidates our base and acts as an on-ramp for people to find their political home and kind of get in where they fit in and make a difference,” Carmona tells Truthout. “Then the net result of that, that we saw in 2018 in 2020, and I hope we’ll see in 2022, is a record number of women are running campaigns, and a record number of women are voting.”

    Women’s March organizers are hoping that the women they activated Saturday will jump in and make a difference in multiple, interconnected struggles in order to push back against both voter suppression, minoritarian rule, racial injustice and restrictive abortion laws.

    “For too long the issue of abortion and reproductive health care in general has been kind of thought of separately from democracy efforts or racial justice efforts or even justice around immigration, and what we’re seeing right now is a confluence and a very clear kind of point that all of those things are so interconnected that we cannot kind of have one without the other,” Carmona tells Truthout. “When we’re talking about the Women’s Protection Health Care Act, that’s really important for Congress to pass precisely because of the attacks against democracy that has netted us a politicized Supreme Court. So it’s very hard at this point to find the chicken or the egg, and that’s why all of these demands must be met.”

    Republicans in Missouri, Florida and elsewhere are working to replicate Texas’s near-total abortion ban. This year alone, states have enacted more than 90 bills restricting or complicating access to abortion. Those bills join 33 newly enacted voter suppression laws in 19 states so far in 2021, according to a new tally from the Brennan Center for Justice. That’s why, in organizers’ view, it’s so important for those who marched and rallied on Saturday to stay in the fight for long term.

    “We’re really proactive at sparking women’s civic imagination and helping women to see themselves in the future possibly playing a different role in our public space,” Carmona says. “It’s really about that long-term transformation and that happens inside of the organizing work that’s kind of the long tail of the march.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Third Parties May Disappear From Ballot Under Freedom to Vote Act Provision

    Voting rights should include the right to vote for someone who represents your views, not just the lesser evil.

    Should a major political party use a voting rights bill to rid itself of minor party competition? That appears to be happening with the recently introduced Freedom to Vote Act (S.2747), now before the Senate.

    A pared-down version of the For the People Act, S.2747 would eliminate public funding for presidential campaigns by terminating the Presidential Election Campaign Fund — a post-Watergate era reform meant to reduce big donor influence in presidential races by providing an alternate public funding source for campaigns.

    For over 30 years, this reform was embraced by major and minor party presidential candidates alike. But in recent cycles, only Green Party nominees qualified for presidential primary matching funds. Major party presidential candidates have eschewed both presidential primary matching funds and general election grants — because these programs limit the amount of private funds candidates can spend if they accept public funding — and because the amount of public funding is not enough for major party candidates who now raise hundreds of millions in private funds.

    These matching funds have been critical in helping Green Party presidential candidates pay for expensive petition drives to meet onerous state ballot qualification requirements established by Democrats and Republicans — a use affirmed by the Federal Election Commission. In many states, being on the ballot and achieving a certain result for president is even required for minor parties to retain ballot status. Without these funds, the Green Party would disappear in many states.

    Exit polls in 2016 showed that 61 percent of those voting for Green presidential nominee Jill Stein would have stayed home if she was not on the ballot. Green and other minor party candidates bring more voters to the polls. Party suppression is a form of voter suppression. It is what authoritarian governments do. It is what the Democratic Party is subtly proposing to do via this bill.

    We support S.2747’s provisions that would preempt the new anti-democratic Republican state laws promoting partisan gerrymandering, voter suppression, partisan election certification, and intimidation of voters and election administrators. We support the bill’s provisions that make voting easier, including automatic voter registration, vote by mail, 15 consecutive days of early voting and Election Day as a national holiday. We support its requirements to disclose dark money.

    But lamentably, S.2747 fails to address two primary anti-democratic elements of our electoral system. Voting rights should include the right to vote for someone who represents your views, not just the lesser evil. But ballot access for minor parties and independents in the United States is far more onerous than in other electoral democracies. The U.S. needs a “right to the ballot law” establishing reasonable ballot access requirements in state and federal elections.

    Then there is our outdated single-member district, winner-take-all plurality voting system that systematically excludes diverse voices and political minorities from their fair share of representation, and leaves large number of voters in each legislative district without anyone representing their views. The Fair Representation Act would create multi-party democracy based on proportional representation in the House through ranked-choice voting from multi-member districts, and would eliminate gerrymandering and “the spoiler” dynamics in the process.

    But we must protest the public finance provisions of the Freedom to Vote Act — which in knocking minor parties like the Greens off the ballot, would transfer the money now in the Presidential Election Campaign Fund into a public funding program for the House reachable almost exclusively by only upper-echelon major party candidates.

    Greens vigorously support public funding of elections. But this voting rights bill should focus on voting rights. Public funding should be addressed in separate legislation with a full airing of all the implications for minor as well major parties and voter choice. Therefore, we urge the Senate to eliminate S.2747’s public financing section. Not only is it unfair to minor party and independent candidates — and the voters who support them — but the bill will be harder to pass because no Republican will vote for public funding. And if not enough Republicans support the bill, it would be hypocritical for Democrats to seek a filibuster carve-out for voting rights, when the bill contains such blatant partisan self-interest.

    Millions of Americans are under-represented under our current system. Let’s pass the Freedom to Vote Act without its flawed public campaign funding section, then enact needed electoral reforms that will make the U.S a more representative and inclusive multi-party democracy, including public campaign funding, fair ballot access and proportional representation.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.