Congressional Democrats are pushing a bill that would expand voting rights, but they’ve done nothing to deal with the rising threat of state legislatures making it easier to change election results after voters have cast their ballots.
A new report released on Thursday offered the latest warning about a serious threat to election integrity and democracy itself, activists argue — one that has gone largely overlooked as Democrats have focused their attention on making it easier to vote.a left-leaning legal advocacy group
Many of these provisions are being pushed by Republican lawmakers who claim to believe former President Donald Trump’s baseless claims about the 2020 election being stolen. The group argued that these new provisions are a direct response to what happened in the 2020 election, when Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger rejected calls from Trump and his allies to throw out the results of the election in Georgia. The new law, the report said, “is a clear effort by legislators to wrest control of the state’s elections into their own hands.”
In Arizona, the group has identified 18 separate proposed bills that would “allow state legislatures to politicize, criminalize, or interfere with elections.”“There is a bill that would bring a legislature into special session after every election. ... That’s clearly a response to what happened in 2020,” Jess Marsden, counsel for Protect Democracy, said in an interview on “The Long Game,” a Yahoo News podcast.
“It takes hundreds of thousands of people, many of them volunteers, and what these bills do is put a sword over their head, so as they’re making day-to-day decisions about, how do you run an election in uncertain circumstances, in a pandemic, in a natural disaster, what are the changes that they’re allowed to make? What can they do to make sure that the election runs smoothly?” Ian Bassin, co-founder of Protect Democracy, said.
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