Drawing The Battle Lines On Voting Rights

     It hasn't been all bad news for voting rights in the United States. We all know about attempts at voter suppression passed by the GOP as a direct response to the conspiracy theories surrounding the crushing defeat of Donald Trump in the 2020 election. Arizona, Wyoming, Montana, Iowa, Kansas, Arkansas, Florida, and Georgia have already enacted such bills. That is why, alongside the Build Back Better Agenda, voting rights is the number one policy priority in Congress, with the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, For The People Act, and Right To Vote Act having already been proposed. However, some states have actually expanded voting rights. Washington, Hawaii, Oregon, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Louisiana, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, Connecticut, New York, Vermont, North Carolina, and Maine have expanded mail-in voting and eased voter registration restrictions, with voting rights bills proposed in several other states. 

     The focus needs to be on swing states. Nevada has already expanded voting rights. North Carolina has done the same, although their expansion came from a state supreme court ruling striking down a law that prevented felons from voting. Their governor, Democrat Roy Cooper, has the power to veto any bills that attempt to restrict the vote. Governors Tony Evers of Wisconsin, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, and Tim Wolf of Pennsylvania are all Democrats who have the power to veto voter suppression bills passed by their GOP-controlled legislatures. The election of Democratic governors alone in these states could prevent this tide of legislation among the other barbaric anti-protest, anti-LGBTQ, pro-COVID bills in the Republican agenda. 

     That leaves Florida, Georgia, Texas, and Arizona as the key battleground states that have passed or will pass voter suppression legislation before 2022. (Florida, Georgia, and Arizona have done so; Texas is on the brink of doing so after a major battle between Texas Democrats who broke the quorum and the GOP, who sought arrest warrants.) Aside from the aforementioned voting rights legislation at the federal level, the Department of Justice has filed a civil rights lawsuit against the state of Georgia for their racist, anti-democracy legislation. We must do the same against Arizona, Florida, and, eventually Texas.

     Now is the time to continue expanding the vote, not resume restricting it. We cannot allow a lie be the basis of democracy for decades to come, or we will have failed as a nation. These laws are being passed by a platformless party that seeks to hold its power by preventing the will of the people from being executed. It is the most despicable slate of state-level legislation we have seen since the Jim Crow era, and we have no choice but to rise up, speak out, and meet this moment.