046 The Erickson Report for January 20 to February 2, Page 3: The Threat to Voting Rights

046 The Erickson Report for January 20 to February 2, Page 3: The Threat to Voting Rights

Okay, this is our first installment of what promises to be a long series, one my intent is to have as part of every or at least most every show. It's called The Threat.

To start, I want to lay out what I mean by the term and the sort of things this series will cover. We are faced with a wide variety of internal threats to our functioning as a free society driven by the reactionary - which these days pretty much means the entire - right sometimes in pursuit of power and sometimes in a pathetic but still damaging effort to keep the future from happening.

There are for example the threats to our ability to vote coupled with moves to turn election administration and vote counting into a partisan enterprise.

There are the attacks on the right to abortion and on the rights and dignity of LGBTQ+, now particularly transgender, people.

There are attacks on First Amendment rights relating to press, speech, and assembly.

Threats to our personal privacy, those coming as much from corporations as government.

Basic social services, particularly right now public education, are under attack.

And of course, there is the very major overlying, existential threat of climate change.

The idea is that every show I will address and cover some news and commentary relating to one or more such issues. This time, as you might have been expecting, it the threats to our right to vote.

We start by noting that a new analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice finds that GOPper state legislatures are showing no signs of slowing down what the report calls the "tidal wave of restrictive voting legislation" that we saw in 2021.

That tsunami of bills involved 49 states seeing a total of 440 proposed laws restricting the right to vote introduced between January 1 and December 7. Nineteen states passed 34 such laws, more than in any year since the Brennan Center began tracking such laws in 2011.

The group's analysis pointed to several categories of anti-voting restrictions, including restricting access to voting by mail, new or expanded voter ID requirements, the criminalization of "ordinary, lawful behavior by election officials" who try to help voters, and laws allowing voter purges.

It also highlighted what the Center called "a new trend" in which "legislators introduced bills to allow partisan actors to interfere with election processes or even reject election results entirely." That surely will continue in 2022: In at least five states, six bills that have been pre-filed aim to establish "illegitimate partisan review boards of election results." Pre-filed means they are already on record to be introduced in the 2022 legislative session. Revealingly of the actual intention here assuming it wasn't already obvious, four of those six focus on continuing reviews of the 2020 election results.

And all of this in the name of "election integrity" despite zero states having found any evidence of any level of voter fraud worth mentioning.

A big target of the attacks has been mail-in voting and there is every reason to expect that will continue in 2022. There are dozens of carryover bills, ones carried over from the 2021 session to this year's, that focus on restricting access to mail-in voting, ranging from shortening deadlines for applying for and delivering mail ballots to imposing criminal penalties for election officials who mail out unsolicited ballots or even for individuals who assist voters - including people with disabilities - with returning mail ballots.

In addition, there are at least 74 pre-filed bills assailing voting rights in various ways, at least seven of which specifically target voting by mail, including among others eliminating reasons that justified voting by mail and expanding the grounds on which a submitted absentee ballot can be rejected.

These efforts are already seeing results. Texas has one of the harshest laws attacking voting rights, one which among other provisions tightens the requirements for requesting an absentee ballot. Those are already hard to get in Texas, available to only a handful of categories, including residents 65 years and older, disabled residents, or voters who will be absent from their county during the entire period of early voting plus Election Day.

But one of the new demands is that the person making the request supply either their driver's license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number, which must match the number they supplied when they registered. Which not only means a single-digit mistake could get your request denied, voters often face what Travis County clerk Dana DeBeauvoir called "a guessing game" because they can't recall which number they used to register in some cases decades earlier and there is no easy way to find out.

The result has been that Travis County officials said they have rejected around half of the requests for vote-by-mail applications they have received. Harris County has rejected over a quarter, Bexar County nearly the same.

Note that the primary is in March, leaving little time for a voter to determine what the error is and correct it.

By the way, some other new restrictions in Texas are barring residents from obtaining applications for other people, including relatives and spouses; making it harder for voters with disabilities or language access barriers to get help; constraining election workers’ ability to stop harassment or intimidation of voters by partisan poll watchers; and banning 24-hour and drive-thru voting.

Meanwhile, there also has been action in the courts on related matters.

In December, the NAACP and other civil rights groups filed suit in federal court, looking to overturn South Carolina's new and gerrymandered map of its state legislative districts. They charge that the map was created "in a flawed and nontransparent process" with the deliberate intent of disempowering Black voters and solidifying GOPper control of the state legislature.

The map used a mixture of "packing," the practice of placing people of color in the same district in order to prevent them from having greater political power in surrounding districts, and "cracking," the splitting of communities of color to dilute their power in a given district. The idea is to find the mixture that leaves Black South Carolinians with as little power as possible.

A similar story is playing out regarding Georgia, where voting rights groups and Georgia voters sued in federal court early in January charging that three of the districts in the state's newly drawn congressional map were packed and cracked to intentionally deny Black communities in Georgia fair representation and so are unconstitutional.

There was bad news out of North Carolina, where on January 11 a three-judge Superior Court panel ruled that Republicans' newly drawn political districts, which will give GOPpers an edge in future elections, do not violate the state's constitution - despite finding that the proposed districts were obviously drawn with and had heavy partisan advantage. As too often happens, the judges threw up their hands and declared that "redistricting is an inherently political process" that does "not impinge on the right to vote." Perhaps not in a narrow legalistic sense, but it surely impinges on the right to fair representation, which is after all what voting is all about.

On the other hand, some of the news is even good, as there was a double victory in Ohio.

On January 12, the Ohio Supreme Court threw out GOPper-drawn state legislative district maps. A majority of the justices found the map violated the state constitution because failed to "draw legislative districts that correspond with the statewide voter preference of Ohioans." That is, they were gerrymandered for partisan advantage.

Then just two days later, that same court also struck down the new GOPper-drawn map of congressional districts on the same basis.

The decision called the map "infused with undue partisan bias" which "perhaps explains," the ruling went on, "how a party that generally musters no more than 55% of the statewide popular vote is positioned to reliably win anywhere from 75% to 80% of the seats in the Ohio congressional delegation. By any rational measure, that skewed result just does not add up."

The advantage that voting rights advocates had here is that in 2018, Ohio voters overwhelmingly - by 75-25 - approved an amendment to the state constitution intended to limit as much as possible partisanship in redistricting, so the "it's all political" dodge wasn't available to the court and it was clear what voters wanted done.

Finally on this wrap for this time, a warning: There is a "bipartisan" proposal - assuming we can regard agreement of Fishface McConnell and Joe Maniac as being "bipartisan" - proposal to reform the 1887 Electoral Count Act. This is the one that despite have functioned just fine for 35 presidential elections still had sufficient vagueness to be the basis for the claims that Mike NotWorthAFarthing could overturn the vote of the Electoral College or throw that vote to the House.

So there is the idea of reforming it so we don't risk facing in 2024 what we could have faced in 2020.

Which is fine but beware of conservatives bearing compromises. Because there is also a fear that such a reform would be presented as a substitute for election law reform rather than an addition to it. That is, that the anti-voter faction in Congress would agree to this and then say "Okay, we've dealt with election law reform. Let's move on." We can't let that happen.