Voting reform advocates won’t give up the fight after U.S. Senate defeat; they say they’ll switch strategy

WASHINGTON, D.C. — As chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, U.S. Rep. Joyce Beatty of Columbus has been at the forefront of Democratic demands for new voting rights legislation. She was with President Joe Biden when he visited Atlanta earlier this month to deliver a speech that urged passage of a voting bill named for former Georgia congressman and civil rights advocate John Lewis and was arrested at a July voting rights demonstration in Senate office building.

Last week, she led Black Caucus members to the U.S. Senate floor before its passage was blocked. On Tuesday, she told reporters she's pressing forward despite the defeat.

"I remain optimistic about the fight for voting rights," says Beatty, who believes facets of the package could pass the Senate if they're broken off from the larger bill. "Nothing is off the table. I remain engaged with not only our U.S. Senators but with the White House. And the fight continues."

The John Lewis Act that Beatty supported would have expanded automatic and same-day voter registration, early voting and voting by mail, and limited removal of voters from rolls. It would have made Election Day a federal holiday and made it a crime to "corruptly hinder, interfere with, or prevent another person from registering to vote or helping someone register to vote." It would have expanded a prohibition on campaign spending by foreign citizens and required states to conduct post-election audits for federal elections. It would also set criteria for congressional redistricting and block mid-decade redistricting.

In addition, it would have set new rules to determine which states and political subdivisions are required to get federal approval before changing their voting laws. Democrats have sought those changes since the 2013 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder invalidated part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which forced parts of the country with historic discrimination to clear any voting changes with the Department of Justice or federal courts to ensure they don't harm minority voters. The decision invited Congress to develop a new formula to decide which areas' voting laws should get oversight.

Foes of the plan say it would undermine voter ID laws, put unaccountable bureaucrats in charge of our elections and allow election-day voter registration without any verification, as South Carolina GOP Sen. Tim Scott put it.

"[It's] hard to deny progress when two of the three [Black senators] come from the southern states that people say are the places where African American votes are being suppressed," said Scott, who is Black. "Not to mention that 2020 was a banner year for minority participation in the greatest nation on earth from a voting perspective."

Why advocates want the bill

Beatty and other advocates of the proposal say it's needed because of widespread voter suppression efforts throughout the country. She told reporters that state legislators in 49 states introduced more than 400 bills that would discourage voting. An analysis released last year by the liberal Brennan Center for Justice found that 19 states passed 33 new laws last year to make voting harder.

In Ohio, Beatty said the state's Republican-controlled legislature tried to pass efforts to reduce early voting, bar most voters from using mail-in ballots, cut precinct hours and limit ballot drop boxes.

Activists have repeatedly challenged Ohio voting laws in court. In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the legality of the state's process for purging ineligible voters from its rolls, with a decision authored by Justice Samuel Alito saying that states can use "whatever trigger they think best" to start the voter removal process, including failure to vote, as long as the trigger for sending voter removal notices is "uniform, nondiscriminatory, and in compliance with the Voting Rights Act."

When the legislation hit the Senate floor last week, Ohio Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown - who served two terms as Ohio Secretary of State - delivered a speech in favor of its passage that claimed Ohio politicians have been "making it harder and harder to vote. And since the last election, it's only gotten worse."

"The right to vote – and to have that vote count – is the right that makes all the others possible, "said Brown. "And it's under assault with a ferocity we have not seen since Dr. (Martin Luther) King and John Lewis marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. ... New tactics have emerged. These efforts are no longer just about who votes – they're about which votes get counted and who does the counting. We cannot allow politicians in state legislatures to dismantle the democracy that so many risked their lives to make real for everyone."

Ohio Republican Sen. Rob Portman delivered his own speech to oppose the bill and defend existing voting laws. He called the bill an "attempt by Democratic leadership to fan the flames of distrust" and to "further divide an already splintered country." He suggested Democrats who attacked Republicans for falsely claiming that voter fraud changed the 2020 presidential election results were "perpetuating their own election narrative that does not fit the facts, but serves to push both sides deeper into their own camps and in particular, now leads Democrats to think elections are illegitimate."

Portman said the fact that the 2020 presidential election had the highest voter turnout in decades shows that there's no voting crisis. According to Portman, many of the state legislative proposals that upset Democrats "entail tightening up procedures pertaining to registration, mail and absentee voting and voter ID laws that were loosened in 2020 in the name of making it safer for people to vote amid the COVID pandemic." Comparing them to the Jim Crow era's violent intimidation of black voters is "irresponsible demagoguery," Portman said. He described the Democrats' bill as "an unprecedented federal takeover of our election system," and said Republicans and most Democrats oppose it.

"I'm very proud of the job that my state of Ohio and our bipartisan election officials in every county do in our elections," said Portman. "In the last election, we had a record 5.97 million Ohioans cast a vote. More voters than ever. It represented 74 percent of eligible voters in our state, the second-highest percentage in the history of Ohio. Despite the challenges of running the highest turnout election in our state's history during an unprecedented pandemic, it was widely regarded as the most secure and most successful Ohio election ever. Now is not the time to take the responsibility away from Ohio state and local officials."

Portman also criticized Democrats for trying to change Senate filibuster rules to pass the legislation because it did not have the 60 votes necessary for passage if the filibuster was invoked. He called the filibuster "good for our country," as it encourages bipartisanship and prevents the passage of legislation "that is too far out of the mainstream." The effort to change the filibuster rules failed along with the legislation.

Brown supported changing filibuster rules.

"The filibuster is not in the Constitution, and it was used to stop voting rights for generations," said Brown, who told Ohio reporters the procedure has also been used to protect special interests like drug companies, big oil, big, tech and Wall Street. "If people want to filibuster, they should have to go to the floor and speak."

He said Democrats wouldn't quit on seeking voting reforms.

"Dr. King had dozens and dozens of disappointments," he said. "Disappointments are finite. Hope is infinite. He said it way better than that because he was a great wordsmith. But we don't quit on this. We don't give up on this."

A piecemeal reform approach

Portman said he'd support making "overdue reforms to the Electoral Count Act," to ensure that it can't be interpreted in a way that would allow a Vice President to overturn any state's certified election results, as former President Donald Trump had urged ex-Vice President Mike Pence to do during Congress' official tally of 2020 electoral votes, which was disrupted by the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. He said he's working with a small group of Senate Democrats and Senate Republicans on an effort to fix it and make "some other reasonable updates to federal election procedures."

Niles-area Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan, who backed the legislation, said he thinks the next step needs to be "an up or down vote on Election Day as a federal holiday," which would ensure that working people have the day off their jobs to vote. He said the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives approved the election bills his party desires, so the changes will ultimately be decided by the Senate.

"They need to determine the things that we can get done, and we should move on them," said Ryan. "That's going to be the goal. Move on what you can move on. Some of that stuff shouldn't be very controversial, and they should move on it."

That's exactly what Beatty says she plans to do. Beatty said that she and the Congressional Black Caucus will meet with Portman and Brown next week to discuss the legislation.

"We're going to dissect the bill," she said. "We're going to take those things that (West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe) Manchin and (Arizona Democratic Sen. Kyrsten) Sinema and other Democrats and maybe even a few Republicans have been on the record that they support ... We may have to take those eight or nine key points in the bill and put them, one at a time, to the Senate and then go back to the House to get voting rights passed. So we're not giving up. There are several options."

Beatty said she believes it might be possible to pass legislation to ensure that drop boxes still exist and that the amount of time people have to vote isn't reduced. Other possibilities include enacting automatic voter registration through each state's motor vehicle agency, requiring states to use voter-verified paper ballots, providing grants for more secure voting systems, and standardizing the congressional redistricting process do to away with partisan gerrymandering. She also wants to restore federal election voting rights for people who have served prison time for felonies, which is allowed in Ohio but forbidden in some other states.

"This is the first step to progress," said Beatty. "And remember this: When John Lewis and Martin Luther King started out for that Bloody Sunday, they got halfway across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and when the obstacles hit them, and the obstacles then were police officers with hoses and dogs, they turned around. But they didn't give up. They came back, and we got voting rights."

This article was originally published by Cleveland.com on Janaury 26, 2022.