Sunday, Jan. 23, 2022 | 2 a.m.
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When voter rights legislation died in the U.S. Senate last week, the divisive politics that prompted Democrats Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona to join all 50 Republicans to defeat the bill were well-covered by the media.
What didn’t draw much focus, however, was what was actually in the bill — the details of its provisions to protect voters.
That’s too bad, because Americans deserve to know exactly which voting guarantees these 52 senators denied them by voting against removing the filibuster and taking a simple-majority vote on the legislation. Here are some of the voting protections the senators rejected by killing the bill, which combined the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act:
• Requiring a minimum of 15 days for early voting and submission of mail-in ballots
• Allowing all eligible voters to request to vote by mail
• Establishing new automatic voter registration programs, similar to Nevada’s “motor voter” law in which voters are automatically registered to vote when doing certain kinds business with the Department of Motor Vehicles, such as obtaining or renewing a driver’s license
• Allowing same-day voting registration and online registration across the country
• Making Election Day a national holiday
• Enacting the Election Worker and Polling Place Protection Act, which creates penalties for people who threaten, harass or commit violence against election workers
• Allowing anyone to drop off and/or collect the ballots of voters on Native American tribal lands, and banning states from placing limits on collection of these ballots
• Requiring at least one voter registration site to be set up on tribal lands
• Re-establishing reviews by the Justice Department or federal courts of proposed voting-law changes from jurisdictions with a history of voting discrimination. Any changes by these jurisdictions must be federally approved before they can be put in place, a process known as preclearance.
• Creating a new formula to determine which jurisdictions will be required to undergo federal preclearance. This new formula would have added protections against voter discrimination targeting communities of color.
• Establishing a statutory ban on gerrymandering and requiring nonpartisan review of redistricting plans
• Requiring states to replace outdated voting machines with modern ones with such features as paper printouts of voting results
• Requiring states that require voter ID to expand the types of identification that can be accepted.
These and other provisions in the bill are politically neutral measures, and many of them were needed to restore provisions of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act that have been gutted by a series of Supreme Court rulings over the years.
Polling has shown that a majority of Americans support various elements of the Senate measure.
That certainly stands to reason. Protecting the vote is baked into our national conscience. Notwithstanding Republican extremists, Americans understand that broadening voter access and ensuring equal access for all voters help strengthen our democracy.
GOP leaders, on the other hand, are working feverishly to diminish voting rights and access. Last year, 19 Republican-led states enacted a total of 34 laws that made voting more difficult, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.
The wall of GOP opposition in the Senate is another outcropping of the party’s nationwide push to undercut voting access, disempower minority communities, seize the structure to verify voting results, and establish permanent minority rule.
Americans simply can’t let that happen. We can’t vote for anyone who wants to limit balloting, which effectively means not voting for nearly any member of the GOP until it repudiates the anti-democracy wing that dominates the party today.
