Voting & Elections

Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections at Common Cause, said the dissent appears to suggest that state supreme courts are not qualified to decide election issues in their state, which she described as a "direct violation" of the division of power between the states and federal government. "The state legislature does not have free reign to limit access to the ballot without judicial review," Albert said. "In this case, the court found that the laws as written in the current state of a global pandemic were unconstitutional infringements on the right to vote."

Aunna Dennis, executive director of Common Cause Georgia, said she found one provision in the Fleming bill particularly loathsome: the ban on early voting on Sundays. Republicans said the measure is intended to level the playing field between wealthier counties that can afford to provide weekend voting hours and poorer rural counties that can’t. But Dennis, who is Black, said she sees a more nefarious purpose to the proposal, which would upend Souls to the Polls, a long-standing tradition in Black communities to vote right after church on the Sunday before election. “There is such pride in being able to dress up in your Sunday best and cast your ballot with your family and your community,” Dennis said. As a working single mother, Dennis said, she also believes that the proposal would eliminate options for voters juggling complicated schedules.

“We cannot comprehend where they’re coming from,” said Anjenys Gonzalez-Eilert of Florida Common Cause, noting the GOP has long been a supporter and beneficiary of mail voting in the state.

MSNBC host Jonathan Capehart and Mother Jones reporter Ari Berman discuss new proposed voter suppression legislation in Georgia and Common Cause Georgia executive director Aunna Dennis' criticism of the bill as "Jim Crow with a suit and tie."

More than 150 bills proposing new voting restrictions have been introduced in state legislatures since the November election, according to Sylvia Albert, voting and elections director for good-government watchdog Common Cause. “What we saw in this election was record turnout, and Republican legislators have responded by saying, ‘We didn’t actually want you to come vote,’” Albert said. Albert said her group is particularly concerned about new restrictions in states where Republicans control the governorship and both houses of the legislature, such as Georgia, giving Democrats less chance to block them.

According to Common Cause Senior Counsel Stephen Spaulding, the implications of not getting H.R. 1 passed could be extremely serious. Spaulding, who helped write H.R. 1 while serving as Senior Elections Counsel to the Committee on House Administration, warned that the damage Republicans could inflict on democracy in the absence of federal action could be irreparable. “For democracy in general, the danger of not taking action is potentially catastrophic, given the precision and targeting and manipulation of the rules that some state legislators are doing to make it harder to vote,” he said. Spaulding explained that Republican efforts to restrict voting took off after the Supreme Court’s decision inShelby County v. Holder, which invalidated the 1965 Voting Rights Act’s requirement for states with a history of racial discrimination to submit changes in voting rules to the Justice Department for pre-clearance. But he added that establishing uniform standards for voting across all 50 states would not have a partisan tilt one way or another. Until Trump started attacking the validity of postal ballots, Republicans had made use of them in greater numbers than Democrats in many key states. “Ever since then, we know that there are elected officials at the state level who have been working tooth and nail to make it harder to vote, so this is an opportunity to really level the playing field,” he said. “I think these are basic, common-sense solutions to make voting more convenient no matter what party you’re in…. We just had the most the highest turnout election… in the middle of a global pandemic, and that’s because people took steps across the country to make voting more convenient. Now we need to lock those in.”