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“House Democrats passed sweeping voting and ethics legislation over unanimous Republican opposition… House Resolution 1, which touches on virtually every aspect of the electoral process, was approved Wednesday night on a near party-line 220-210 vote.” AP News
Highlights of the bill:
The right opposes the bill, arguing that it would create incentives for fraud.
“States would be effectively barred from mandating the use of a photo-ID to establish that a person is the registered voter they claim to be, instead permitting a prospective voter to merely sign a sworn affidavit. States would also be required to adopt same-day voter registration in federal elections, even during early voting, so that a person could show up at a poll, sign a registration form and cast a vote without any checks to ensure the person was actually eligible to vote…
“[The bill] bars any state from requiring identification for a mail ballot and also prohibits states from requiring that a ballot be notarized or witnessed… [The most recent proven instance of mass voter fraud was] when a Republican operative cast fraudulent votes for candidates who paid him by collecting unsealed mail ballots from voters and then filling them out for the preferred person. H.R.1 would make it much likelier that unscrupulous operatives of both parties could try to use this scheme to tip the scales in their favor…
“Democrats’ claims that there have been no large-scale cases of voter fraud to date are beside the point. Incentives matter, and H.R. 1 creates massive incentives for people to cheat.”
Henry Olsen, Washington Post
“H.R.1 would overrule state laws against ballot harvesting, letting Americans nationwide ‘designate any person’ to return a vote, provided the carrier ‘does not receive any form of compensation based on the number of ballots.’ Also, states ‘may not put any limit on how many voted and sealed absentee ballots any designated person can return.’ Yes, paid partisan operatives could go door to door, amassing thousands of votes, as long as they billed by the hour…
“The goal after the wild election of 2020 should be to restore voter confidence. Mr. Trump’s unsubstantiated charges of widespread fraud did a great deal of harm. Yet even people who fought his claims were uneasy about how fast the normal voting rules went out the window last year. If the race had been closer, the ensuing Pennsylvania recount might have made the 2000 Florida mess look like croquet at Mar-a-Lago. Ballot access is important, but so is ballot integrity.”
Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal
“Jonathan Chait’s recent New York magazine piece [alleges] that former vice president Mike Pence is laying the ‘blueprint’ for a fascistic GOP state in his new Heritage Foundation op-ed. What ‘authoritarian’ diktats does Herr Pence have in store for our fragile American democracy? For starters, the former vice president argues that states, as they always have, should conduct their own elections rather than permit a narrow partisan majority led by Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer to unilaterally nationalize and dictate the rules for every locality in perpetuity…
“Terms such as ‘voting restrictions’ are tantamount to calling traffic laws ‘driving restrictions.’ They are conveniently ominous sounding… Democrats rely on these distorted terms because the vast majority of Americans support some basic voter-integrity laws…
“80 percent of Americans support photo-ID laws. Now, we can disagree in good faith about the effects of forcing Americans to get a photo identification before helping decide the fate of the nation, but requiring a citizen to prove his identity falls well short of any definition of ‘authoritarian.’ Or, if it is, then nearly every Western European country admired by the Left should be deemed an autocratic state.”
David Harsanyi, National Review
“The bill would also require politically-active organizations, including 401(c)3 nonprofits, to disclose donors who give $10,000 or more… While Democrats’ railing against ‘dark money’ has convinced Americans there is something inherently sleazy about groups of Americans spending money to advocate for causes they believe in, Americans do not lose their right to free speech when they enter the political arena. The mandated disclosure of an organization’s donors, in particular, undercuts this fundamental right…
“‘It is beyond debate that the freedom to engage in association for the advancement of beliefs and ideas is an inseparable aspect of the ‘liberty’ assured by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment,’ The Supreme Court wrote in the landmark case NAACP v. Alabama (1958). The State of Alabama had ordered the NAACP to hand over a list of its members during the era of segregation when the Ku Klux Klan held tremendous power in the state. The Supreme Court defended the NAACP from this government harassment.”
Tyler O’Neil, PJ Media
The left supports the bill, arguing that it would strengthen democracy by making it easier for people to vote.
The left supports the bill, arguing that it would strengthen democracy by making it easier for people to vote.
“Number one, it makes it easier to vote; number two, it makes everybody’s vote count more equally, particularly by reducing gerrymandering; and number three, it makes the ability of people without much money to affect elections, much greater. It amplifies the power of small donations. And so those three things would really change a lot…
“[The bill] makes it much harder to conduct the weird voter purges that Republicans have engaged in for quite a while at this point, like the cross-check system where they tried to solve a non-existent problem, the idea that people are registered to vote in multiple states…
“Republicans over the past 50 years have done everything in their power to create political structures that advantage them: They gutted campaign finance reform with Citizens United. They destroyed ACORN, a community organizing group that registered millions of voters a year. They took gerrymandering to a level of science in order to disenfranchise black voters… They overturned key portions of the Voting Rights Act. They introduced voter ID rules, shut down polling locations, and threw up all manner of obstacles to make it harder for struggling people to vote.”
Ryan Grim, The Intercept
“What [Republicans are] saying is that early voting — which many people find convenient — would help Democrats. Eliminating gerrymandering would help Democrats. Limiting states’ ability to throw thousands of people off the voter rolls en masse would help Democrats. Restricting dark money would help Democrats. If we saw every presidential nominee’s tax returns, it would help Democrats. Getting the picture? Republicans are explicitly arguing that if the electoral system were not restrictive, exclusionary and corrupt, then they would be put at an unfair disadvantage. What does that say about their party?…
“H.R. 1 doesn’t give Democrats a ‘thumb on the scale’ in redistricting; it would mandate that independent, nonpartisan commissions do the job. But Republicans cry that independence and nonpartisanship are unfair to them. They need gerrymandering, or else they’ll be deprived of the advantage that allows them to win even when more voters prefer their opponents. So, viewed another way, Republicans are right: The creation of an even playing field would indeed disadvantage them relative to the status quo, because they’ve successfully created an uneven playing field in so many states.”
Paul Waldman, Washington Post
“Right now, [Senators] Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, they’re saying we’re not going to get rid of the filibuster. So [the bill is] dead as of now. What Democrats are betting is that if Republicans block enough legislation and if Republicans do enough extreme things at the state level, these senators might change their tune. In Arizona, Kyrsten Sinema’s home state, they have introduced more restrictions on voting than any other state, even more than in Georgia. They’re trying to roll back mail voting in all sorts of ways. They’re trying to cut in-person voting. They’re trying to get rid of automatic registration…
“There’s even a bill in Arizona that would allow the Legislature there to appoint its own electors no matter what the voters do, so basically that would render the presidential election completely void if the Legislature can just step in at any moment to overturn it. So I think at some level, Kyrsten Sinema and other Democrats in Arizona have to view these as an attack on democracy, but also as an attack on them, an attack on their ability to get reelected…
“And so these federal bills, yes, they’re not going to pass the Senate now. Democrats are betting that in six months, the political situation, the political calculus of these senators, might be different.”
Ari Berman, Slate
“At least 33 states have introduced, prefiled, or extended bills to make voting harder since the start of this year. In Georgia — ground zero for Donald Trump’s ‘stop the steal’ campaign — Republicans have taken direct aim at the Black electorate by proposing a law against early voting on Sundays, when African-American churches have historically led their congregations to the ballot box, in a tradition known as ‘souls to the polls.’…
“If the Senate has a special filibuster exemption for budgetary bills, why shouldn’t it also have one for democracy reforms? Protecting the rights of the Senate minority might be a worthy aim, but surely, protecting the voting rights of America’s racial minorities is even worthier.”
Eric Levitz, New York Magazine
