State Republican-Dominated Legislatures Are Destroying Voting Rights…Again
Voter restrictions and voter ID laws are right out of the conservative lobbyist playbook. This year, a slate of absurdly prohibitive voter ID laws are flooding state legislatures in states with a one-party republican majority. This time, there’s a specific attention to absentee and mail in ballots, the very type that many American voters throughout the country took advantage of to protect their health and safety this past November during the coronavirus pandemic. (Also, we told you this was going to happen.)
Despite there never, ever, ever being a single shred of empirical evidence that ballot tampering or voter fraud is a thing, down-ballot Republicans (likely doubling down on Trump’s increasingly insidious bullshit that the election was stolen from him) continue to insist that it is.
Here in Missouri, after courts demolished 2016 voter ID law, this session, a Washington, MO republican John Simmons introduced another voter ID law last week, which is already headed to the MO Senate, where it will surely be signed into law.
Simmons, towing this party line (and likely parroting the very talking points he was fed by the lobbyist who presented him with the bill) said that Missourians “don’t want their votes to be disenfranchised by fraudulent votes.”
Too bad that it’s more likely that the real disenfranchisement at the polls is almost always committed to, and not by, people of color.
This law looks and smells a lot like similar pieces (of shit) legislation that have already been dashed by various court rulings since MO passed its first shambolic voter ID law in the mid 2000s. This one requires a state ID to be presented at the polls. Without one, a voter would only be allowed to cast a provisional ballot and have that vote properly counted when they return with the proper documentation…on the same day.
What makes this law more troubling, is that the Missouri court 2016 ruling that nullified that voter ID law specified that it violated MO law. This bill essentially changes the letter of that existing law, doing away with the mandate that the voter sign an affidavit to receive a regular (vs a provisional) ballot.
Shockingly, among those the critics in the House of the bill was a rep from a solidly republican district. Rep. Shamed Dogan said that forcing poor and elderly people to jump through the financial and logistical hoops to get a state ID serves as a modern day “poll tax.”
According to the Missouri Secretary of State’s office, nearly 140,000 state citizens do not currently have a state-issued ID and another 140,000 have expired IDs. The argument against forcing older and usually poorer voters from getting an ID is that it can be costly and time consuming, often requiring financial and logistical resources that many Missouri citizens simply don’t have.
Missouri is Far From Alone
Throughout the country’s republican-controlled Midwest, state legislatures are passing similar voter suppression laws. One state over from Missouri in Iowa, the Republicans passed a law that does not establish new voter ID mandates. Instead, it narrows the window in which people have to vote on Election Day. Polls close at 8 p.m. instead of 9, and all absentee ballots have to be counted if the polls close on time.
Per the Des Moines Register:
“If the legislation, Senate File 413, is signed into law, Iowans would have 20 days of early voting, down from 29 under current law. Polls would close at 8 p.m. for all elections, instead of the current 9 p.m. cutoff for primary and general elections.
Absentee ballots would have to arrive by poll close in order to be counted, rather than counting as long as they were placed in the mail the day before Election Day. And county auditors could face criminal charges for disobeying state law or failing to follow state guidance.”
Republican Governor Kim Reynolds has already stated her support and she is expected to sign it.
Missouri’s western neighbor Kansas (which has a democratic governor and a republican-controlled assembly) is considering a law which mandates that absentee ballots have to be received within three days after the date of an election instead of current law, which stipulates that a ballot needs to be postmarked by Election Day.
Right now, the bill has only being considered in the Senate and since governor Laura Kelly would likely veto, it’s not a serious threat.
Another Kansas bill would make it illegal for anyone to deliver an absentee ballot to an election office. It’s currently legal in most states for caretakers and family members of disabled or infirm voters to hand deliver their ballots for them. Often referred to by detractors as “ballot harvesting”, it’s one of the foundations of Donald Trump’s big lie that he lost the election due to this practice, instead the pesky reality of his receiving less actual votes than President Joe Biden.
In Georgia, the very state where Donald Trump is now the subject of a criminal investigation for appearing to influence the state Secretary of State to toss votes, its republican Senate majority leader introduced a bill that would do away with no-excuse absentee voting entirely. Many elderly voters rely on absentee voting due to mobility issues.
Because republicans fared so well in down ballot races, and because U.S. Senate republicans were so successful at stacking the Federal courts with conservative judges, this barrage of anti-voter legislation is not likely to stop. Many may get bounced back by state courts, but it’s anyone’s guess if appeals to higher courts will prevail and end up being argued in front of the SCOTUS. Speaking of…
Voting Rights Act Remains in the Balance
As of the time of this blog post, the US Supreme Court is preparing to hear arguments that would undermine what’s left of the Voting Rights Act, the tentpole and one of the most significant achievements of the Civil Rights Act. At the heart of the case is a 2016 Arizona law that undermined the ability for caregivers and family members of delivering ballots to the polls. Arizona has a large Native American population, and a very impoverished one, that is underserved by mail and internet services.
What’s at stake is Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which specifically prohibits voting discrimination based solely on race. From a piece in The Guardian:
“Such a ruling would take away one of most powerful tools that voting rights groups have to challenge discriminatory voting laws. Section 2 was elevated after the supreme court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v Holder that struck down another Voting Rights Act provision requiring certain places with a history of voting discrimination, including Arizona, to submit voting laws to the federal government for pre-clearance before they went into effect.”
The conservative leaning SCOTUS justices will hear the case tomorrow (or Tuesday, March 2).
Voter ID Laws Shadow Trump’s Big Lie
Beyond the “business as usual” aspect of voter ID laws and voter suppression in general, there seems to be something else brewing here, something new. With Trump speaking at the ultra right wing CPAC conference this week and the entire attendee list issuing verbal support of his pathological belief about his election losses, these laws appear to be, in part, a performative gesture to the country’s most influential republican. The ex-president, despite having lost the Oval and the Senate, is still weilding significant influence.
And state party members seem to want to get in on the act.
Here in Missouri, until republican voters either stop believing that voter fraud is real (it’s not) or until we’re able to elect a democratic governor and a veto-proof balance in the assembly, we have to assume that this assault on voting rights will continue.
What Can YOU Do?
For more reading: the Brennan Center that just issued a report that tracks state efforts to block and expand voting access. That report found that as of its publication date (2/24/21) there were 253 bills to restrict access and 704 to expand across 43 states. You can check out the summary (with a link to the full report) here.
If you live in Kansas, do every humanly available thing at your disposal to make sure that Laura Kelly is reelected in 2022. If you don’t live in Kansas, we’re pretty sure that the voters there who support Kelly as a bulwark against the GOP-controlled assembly will appreciate your help. (Also, if you live on the coast and she doesn’t smell like a “perfect” democrat to you, we’d appreciate your shutting the fuck up about that now.)
Call your Senator and ask them to support the John Lewis Voting Rights act.
All politics is local. Act like it. Start giving way more of a shit about state politics in your state and red states.
Move to a progressive city within a red state before the next midterm election. If that sounds unreasonable, consider that we’re never going to save the planet with the current makeup of the senate or the state houses. People have done more batshit things to save democracy before, and they are doing that in places around the world as of this very second. Perfect world? Locate yourself in a tony suburb in a swing district in one of those states.