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Targeting State Restrictions, House Passes Landmark Voting Rights Expansion
The omnibus voting, ethics and campaign finance bill would roll back barriers to voting enacted by Republican statehouses, but it faces an uphill battle in the Senate.
- March 3, 2021
House Democrats pushed through a sweeping expansion of federal voting rights on Wednesday over unified Republican opposition, opening a new front in a raging national debate about elections aimed at countering G.O.P. attempts to clamp down on ballot access.
The bill, adopted 220 to 210 mostly along party lines, would constitute the most significant enhancement of federal voting protections since the 1960s if it became law. It aims to impose new national requirements weakening restrictive state voter ID laws, mandate automatic voter registration, expand early and mail-in voting, make it harder to purge voter rolls and restore voting rights to former felons — changes that studies suggest would increase voter participation, especially by racial minorities.
The vote was the latest bid by Democrats to beat back Republican efforts in statehouses across the country to enact new barriers to voting that would consolidate power for the Republican Party amid false claims of rampant election fraud heralded by former President Donald J. Trump and many of his allies in Congress.
But the measure, which is supported by President Biden, appears to be doomed for now in the Senate, where Republican opposition would make it all but impossible to draw the 60 votes needed to advance. Democratic leaders have vowed to put it up for a vote anyway, and progressives were already plotting to use Republican obstruction of the bill to build their case for jettisoning the legislative filibuster in the months ahead.
“Everything is at stake. We must win this race, this fight,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, said as Democrats rallied on the Capitol steps before the vote. “At the same time as we are gathering here to honor our democracy, across the country over 200 bills are being put together, provisions are being put forward to suppress the vote.”
The 791-page bill, designated H.R. 1 by Democrats to reflect its importance to their agenda, would also eliminate partisan gerrymandering, impose new transparency on dark money used to finance campaigns, tighten government ethics standards and create a public financing option for congressional campaigns.
The prominence of the debate demonstrated the immense stakes of the fight over election laws, both for how Americans exercise their right to vote and how both parties aggregate political power. While Congress has worked for decades to expand access to the ballot, often with bipartisan support, the issue has become a sharply partisan one in recent years, as shifting demographics and political coalitions have led Republicans to conclude that they benefit from lower voter participation rates, particularly around cities.
“You can win on the basis of your ideas and the programs you put forward, which is what we choose to do,” said Representative John Sarbanes, Democrat of Maryland and a leading author of the bill. “Or you can try to win by suppressing the vote, drawing unfair districts across the country and using big money to spread disinformation.”
Republicans made remarkably similar arguments, but sought to turn them back on Democrats. While they did not outright argue for making it harder to vote, they said that states — not the federal government — were best positioned to determine how to conduct their elections with integrity, and that the bill would lead to rampant fraud benefiting liberal candidates.
Study after study, including by Mr. Trump’s own Justice Department, has concluded no widespread fraud exists.
“In this country, if the people who win elections want to hold onto power, they need to perform well, pass sound policies and earn the support of the voters again,” said Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader. “House Democrats do not get to take their razor-thin majority — which voters just shrunk — and use it to steamroll states and localities to try and prevent themselves from losing even more seats next time.”
For now, Republicans appear to have the upper hand.
States under conservative control have succeeded in recent years in imposing new strictures that studies suggest disproportionately affect Black voters and those living in urban areas. Proponents argue that the steps are necessary to combat potential election fraud. But the effort has been turbocharged in some places since Mr. Trump’s loss in November, with states racing to strengthen voter ID laws, to make it harder to vote by mail or vote early, and to limit the role outside groups can play in helping Americans vote.
And on Tuesday, the conservative-dominated Supreme Court signaled it was likely to uphold two restrictive Arizona election measures and potentially chip away further at the Voting Rights Act of 1965. A 2013 ruling by the justices struck down key enforcement provisions in the law and helped pave the way for the success of many Republican-led states in putting in place new rules.
All told, state lawmakers have introduced more than 250 bills in 43 states that would tighten voting rules, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. The most prominent may be Georgia, where Republican leaders reeling from Democrats’ unexpected statewide victories have unabashedly sought to clamp down on ballot access by advancing sharp limits to voting by mail and early voting on Sundays, when many Black voters cast ballots after church services.
“Standing in line to vote is not voter suppression,” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from the state, said on Wednesday during the debate in Washington. “It’s just part of the voting process. Just like people stand in line to buy groceries at the grocery store.”
Final consideration of the voting bill took place just after the House passed another leading liberal priority, a major policing bill aimed at combating racial discrimination and excessive use of force in law enforcement. Lawmakers first passed the legislation last summer, in an effort to respond to an outpouring of demands for racial justice after the killings of Black Americans across the country, but then, like now, it faced opposition among Republicans proposing more modest changes. The vote was 220 to 212, largely along party lines.
House Democrats and Senate Republicans with competing bills were expected to restart talks next week in an attempt to sort out disagreements over Democrats’ proposed restrictions on the use of deadly force and changes to make it easier to prosecute police officers for wrongdoing. But there was little optimism for an immediate breakthrough.
H.R. 1’s voting provisions were originally drafted by Representative John Lewis, the Georgia Democrat and civil rights icon who died last year.
If the bill were to become law, states would be required to automatically register eligible voters, hold at least 15 consecutive days of early voting for federal elections and provide drop boxes for absentee ballots like the ones Mr. Trump falsely claimed led to fraud. It would make it far easier to vote by mail and far harder to purge voters from the rolls.
The legislation also targets partisan gerrymandering of House seats, requiring states to use independent commissions to draw districts based on apolitical metrics rather than ones that would maximize the influence of one party over another. Both parties gerrymander, but the practice has benefited Republicans more over the past decade. With new districts set to be drawn this fall, Republicans are expected to make even greater gains.
Democrats intend to hold a separate vote in the coming months on legislation to restore the enforcement provisions of the Voting Rights Act that the Supreme Court struck down.
The challenge for Democrats is moving any of the bills through a 50-50 Senate, where 10 Republicans would have to vote yes. Under Mr. Trump’s leadership, the Republican Party adopted increasingly hard-line tactics on voting and other government overhaul initiatives, rallying around his winner-take-all political style and the outright lies on which he based his attempt to overturn his election loss.
“This monster must be stopped,” Mr. Trump said of the Democratic bill last weekend at the Conservative Political Action Conference. “It cannot be allowed to pass.”
Democrats have so far rejected changing the Senate rules to allow them to move legislation with 51 votes rather than 60. But advocates of scrapping the filibuster believe the stalled voting bills could eventually prove the most persuasive in winning over moderate senators who are reluctant to support the move.
“Voting rights is preservative of all other rights, and we have to do everything we can to preserve the voices of the people in our democracy,” said Senator Raphael Warnock, one of the Georgia Democrats whose victory has prompted the state’s new election laws. “I think the issues are urgent enough to leave all options on the table.”
Catie Edmondson contributed reporting.
Nicholas Fandos is congressional correspondent, based in Washington. He has covered Capitol Hill since 2017, chronicling two Supreme Court confirmation fights, two historic impeachments of Donald J. Trump, and countless bills in between. @npfandos
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