Tag: in order to win GOP has to stop people from voting

Democrats see Georgia as opening salvo in war on voting rights

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Republican state legislators engaged in a nationwide effort to rewrite ballot access laws after the highest-turnout, most secure election in history scored their first major achievement Thursday when Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) signed a sweeping overhaul package into law that will restrict voter access to absentee ballots and ballot drop boxes.

In other states, Democrats watched with rising anxiety, knowing their legislatures are next.

“We’ve been watching Georgia pretty closely, and we knew our legislative Republicans were likely to introduce something as well,” said Michigan state Sen. Stephanie Chang (D), who represents part of Detroit and its southern suburbs. Continue reading.

Five big takeaways on Georgia’s new election law

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Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) signed a sweeping voting bill into law on Thursday, making Georgia the first battleground state to enact major changes to its election laws after last year’s tumultuous election.

The GOP effort comes after a disastrous few months for Republicans in the state that included President Biden’s victory in the November general election and Democratic wins in two January Senate runoffs.

The law rewrites large sections of the state’s election laws and seeks to tighten voting procedures in ways that Democrats and voting rights advocates say will curtail voting access and disenfranchise voters across the state. Continue reading.

Georgia’s restrictive new voting law hit with legal challenge

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Voting rights groups on Thursday night filed a lawsuit just hours after Georgia enacted a Republican-crafted law that gives state lawmakers more power over elections and imposes a raft of new voting restrictions.

The 35-page complaint filed in federal court in Atlanta alleges that minority voters will be hit especially hard by the new legislation, which plaintiffs say illegally suppresses voters’ rights in violation of constitutional protections and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

According to the lawsuit, the new restrictions are “clearly intended to and will have the effect of making it harder for lawful Georgia voters to participate in the State’s elections,” adding that the measure will impose “unjustifiable burdens” that disproportionately impact people of color, as well as young, poor and disabled voters. Continue reading.

‘Jim Crow 2.0’: Georgia Dem lays out the hardships the state’s ‘cruel’ and draconian new voter suppression law will cause

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In Georgia, State Rep. Donna McLeod was among the Democrats who fought hard against the voter suppression bill that Gov. Brian Kemp signed into law on Thursday, March 25 — and the next morning, McLeod did not mince words when she slammed the law as “White supremacy” and “Jim Crow 2.0” during an appearance on CNN’s “New Day.”

McLeod, who was first elected to the Georgia House of Representatives in 2016, told CNN hosts Alisyn Camerota and John Berman, “I live in Gwinnett County. We have endured lines every single election. This is just going to create more lines because you’re not giving people more options to vote. And with longer lines, that means you’re going to have people that will probably not want to vote anymore.”

Georgia’s new law goes out of its way to make voting more difficult in the Peach State, from limiting early voting to making absentee voting more complicated to reducing the number of ballot drop boxes. And the law is so draconian that it even makes it a crime to give food or water to someone who is waiting in line to vote. Continue reading.

Georgia governor signs into law sweeping voting bill that curtails the use of drop boxes and imposes new ID requirements for mail voting

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Republican Gov. Brian Kemp on Thursday signed into law a sweeping voting measure that proponents said is necessary to shore up confidence in the state’s elections but that critics countered will lead to longer lines, partisan control of elections and more difficult procedures for voters trying to cast their ballots by mail.

The measure is one of the first major voting bills to pass as dozens of state legislatures consider restrictions on how ballots are cast and counted in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, when President Donald Trump attacked without evidence the integrity of election results in six states he lost, including Georgia.

The new law imposes new identification requirements for those casting ballots by mail; curtails the use of drop boxes for absentee ballots; allows electors to challenge the eligibility of an unlimited number of voters and requires counties to hold hearings on such challenges within 10 days; makes it a crime for third-party groups to hand out food and water to voters standing in line; blocks the use of mobile voting vans, as Fulton County did last year after purchasing two vehicles at a cost of more than $700,000; and prevents local governments from directly accepting grants from the private sector. Continue reading.

In Restricting Early Voting, the Right Sees a New ‘Center of Gravity’

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Donald Trump is no longer center stage. But many conservative activists are finding that the best way to raise money and keep voters engaged is to make his biggest fabrication their top priority.

For more than a decade, the Susan B. Anthony List and the American Principles Project have pursued cultural and policy priorities from the social conservative playbook, one backing laws to ban abortion once a fetal heartbeat could be detected and the other opposing civil rights protections for L.G.B.T.Q. people. From their shared offices in suburban Virginia, they and their affiliated committees spent more than $20 million on elections last year.

But after Donald J. Trump lost his bid for a second term and convinced millions of Americans that nonexistent fraud was to blame, the two groups found that many of their donors were thinking of throwing in the towel. Why, donors argued, should they give any money if Democrats were going to game the system to their advantage, recalled Frank Cannon, the senior strategist for both groups.

“‘Before I give you any money for anything at all, tell me how this is going to be solved,’” Mr. Cannon said, summarizing his conversations. He and other conservative activists — many with no background in election law — didn’t take long to come up with an answer, which was to make rolling back access to voting the “center of gravity in the party,” as he put it. Continue reading.

Making it easier to vote does not threaten election integrity

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As state legislators consider hundreds of bills on election policies this spring, false claims of voter fraud are being repeated as justification for proposals to claw back recent advances that have made voting easier for Americans. 

In debates about election policy, making it easier to vote and election integrity are frequently presented as opposing goals. Increasing one, it is argued, means decreasing the other. 

The 2020 elections saw many states expand voting by mail, the use of ballot drop-off boxes and other procedures. In the end, turnout was high, and both the U.S. Justice Department, under Trump Attorney General William Barr, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, along with a host of other election and security officials, stated that the elections were secure. Continue reading.

People Think There Was Fraud Because We Kept Saying There Was Fraud, So Now We Need Voter-Suppression Laws

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The sleight-of-hand from Republican bullshit artists like Texas Governor Greg Abbott is a growing problem.

So, where are we suppressing votes on Tuesday? Well, Georgia, of course, but it’s clear that the Republicans in the Texas legislature have looked over at Georgia and saw the bandwagon heading for the horizon. From the Texas Tribune:

At a press conference in Houston, Abbott served up the opening salvo in the Texas GOP’s legislative response to the 2020 election and its push to further restrict voting by taking aim at local election officials in the state’s most populous and Democratically controlled county. The governor specifically criticized officials in Harris County for attempting to send applications to vote by mail to every registered voter and their bid to set up widespread drive-thru voting, teeing up his support for legislation that would prohibit both initiatives in future elections. “Whether it’s the unauthorized expansion of mail-in ballots or the unauthorized expansion of drive-thru voting, we must pass laws to prevent election officials from jeopardizing the election process,” Abbott said on Monday. Harris County planned to send out applications to request a mail-in ballot, not the actual ballots.

Remember when that federal judge down in North Carolina said that state’s new election laws targeted minority voters with “almost surgical precision”? Well, the new Texas effort targets Harris County—and its minority populations—with the same kind of deadly accuracy.

Harris County officials quickly fired back at Republicans’ proposals in their own press conference. “These kinds of attempts to confuse, to intimidate, to suppress are a continuation of policies we’ve seen in this state since Reconstruction,” Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo said. “It is a continuation as well of the big lie that’s being peddled by some far-right elements that the election in 2020 was somehow not true and should be overturned.”

Continue reading.

For Voting Rights Advocates, a ‘Once in a Generation Moment’ Looms

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Opposition to restrictive Republican voting laws — and support for a sweeping Democratic bill — fuels a movement like none in decades. But can it succeed?

WASHINGTON — State and national voting-rights advocates are waging the most consequential political struggle over access to the ballot since the civil rights era, a fight increasingly focused on a far-reaching federal overhaul of election rules in a last-ditch bid to offset a wave of voting restrictions sweeping Republican-controlled state legislatures.

The federal voting bill, which passed in the House this month with only Democratic support, includes a landmark national expansion of voting rights, an end to partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts and new transparency requirements on the flood of dark money financing elections that would override the rash of new state laws.

The energy in support for it radiates from well-financed veteran organizers to unpaid volunteers, many who were called to political activism after former President Donald J. Trump’s upset win in 2016. It is engaging Democrats in Washington and voting rights activists in crucial states from Georgia to Iowa to West Virginia to Arizona — some facing rollbacks in access to the ballot, some with senators who will play pivotal roles and some with both. Continue reading.

How GOP-backed voting measures could create hurdles for tens of millions of voters

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At least 250 new laws have been proposed in 43 states to limit mail, early in-person and Election Day voting.

The GOP’s national push to enact hundreds of new election restrictions could strain every available method of voting for tens of millions of Americans, potentially amounting to the most sweeping contraction of ballot access in the United States since the end of Reconstruction, when Southern states curtailed the voting rights of formerly enslaved Black men, a Washington Post analysis has found.

In 43 states across the country, Republican lawmakers have proposed at least 250 laws that would limit mail, early in-person and Election Day voting with such constraints as stricter ID requirements, limited hours or narrower eligibility to vote absentee, according to data compiled as of Feb. 19 by the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice. Even more proposals have been introduced since then.

Proponents say the provisions are necessary to shore up public confidence in the integrity of elections after the 2020 presidential contest, when then-President Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of election fraud convinced millions of his supporters that the results were rigged against him. Continue reading.