Tell your Senators: The Deadline for Democracy is coming—fight back against radical voting restrictions!
Call BOTH of your Senators.
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Call Script
Hi, my name is _____ and I live in ZIP code _____ and I’m a member of Indivisible SF.
Passing the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act is now even more urgent because of the Supreme Court’s decision to undermine the “Disparate Impact” standard in Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Weakening that standard makes it harder for court challenges to block the 389 bills with restrictive provisions on voting moving through 48 state legislatures (as of May 21, 2021). Some states have even criminalized voter registration drives. Many of those laws are designed to have a disparate impact on the voting rights of Democrats’ most loyal and rising voting blocs: people of color, young people, and seniors. Please do whatever it takes, including abolishing or amending the filibuster, to pass these two essential voting-rights bills and save our democracy!
Background
Turnout in the 2020 election was high; at 66.8%, it was 5 points higher than in 2016. Votes of young people and people of color increased dramatically, which alarmed Republicans, because, while turnout by white non-college voters (an important Republican demographic) also increased in 2020, it has declined from 51.5% of the electorate in 2004 to just 39.7% today. (*1)
Republicans have ruthlessly restricted Democratic electoral power for decades (*14), including instituting voter suppression measures after the Supreme Court’s Shelby v. Holder decision in 2013 gutted the Voting Rights Act (*2), pre-planning partisan redistricting in advance of the 2010 (*3) and 2020 Census (r*4), and running campaigns for decades to use absentee voting to their advantage (*5).
Now in 2021, ruthless Republicans are using the deadly Big Lie as a pretext to enact a new assortment of voting restrictions that will have a depressing effect on Democratic voter turnout. As was the case in the Jim Crow era (*13), these laws are designed to appear neutral, but in real life they impact Democratic constituencies far more. As of May 21, 2021, Republican legislatures had introduced 389 bills with restrictive provisions in 48 states (*7), including:
Tightening Requirements for Mail-In Ballots and allowing voters to be purged from lists if they miss the postcard demanding they re-register.
Tightening Voter ID Laws, allowing IDs that Republican voters are more likely to have (like gun permits), while disallowing IDs more likely to be held by Democratic voters, like university/college IDs.
Reduction in Voting Hours: Polling places are determined by where we live, not by where we work, which limits the time for working people to get to the polls before they close. This places a greater burden on hourly-wage workers, who tend to be lower income, than on higher-income salaried workers, who are not tied to a time clock and can far more easily take off work early.
Reducing the Number of Drop Boxes also has a disparate impact on urban voters as opposed to rural voters and can be seemingly neutral, with “one box per county,” while actually serving very different sized populations.
Tossing Out Votes Cast in the Wrong Precincts can seem neutral, but precincts are drawn by partisan officials, and in some states, they’ve developed the practice of shifting precinct boundaries in urban areas at the last minute. Post-pandemic staffing issues could also make it necessary to shift or merge urban precincts at the last minute for nonpartisan reasons.
Changing the Hours of Sunday Voting has been done to impact churches accustomed to running “Souls to the Polls” to help their congregations vote.
Voter Registration Restrictions: Historically, Republicans tend to register themselves on an individual basis, but Democrats tend to become registered through registration drives by churches, unions, League of Women Voters, civil rights groups, etc. Some states like Kansas have now made voter registration drives illegal (*8).
Restrictions on Third-Party Ballot Submissions have a major impact on Tribal reservations with limited locations to submit ballots. (This was done purportedly to reduce “ballot harvesting” fraud, although the only instance of that was done by Republicans in North Carolina (*10)).
Overruling The Will of the Voters (*11): In case Democratic voters overcome all those obstacles, Republican legislatures in Texas, Georgia, Arkansas, Florida, Kansas, Kentucky, and Montana have given themselves the power to overturn the votes of their electorates.
Civil rights organizations and Democratic groups have fought laws like this by applying the “Disparate Impact” standard to Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, but on July 1, 2021, Justice Alito argued that wasn't sufficient cause to make voting laws illegal. “The decision on Thursday signals that a conservative-dominated judiciary—which includes three Supreme Court justices nominated by Donald Trump—will not stand in the way of the greatest rollback of voting rights since the end of Reconstruction.”(*12)
References
Turnout in 2020 election spiked among both Democratic and Republican voting groups, new census data shows Brookings Institution, May 5, 2021
Discriminatory voter laws have surged in last 5 years, federal commission finds, CNN, September 12, 2018
Step One: Redraw the Maps. Step Two: Win Elections. Step Three: Suppress the Vote. – BillMoyers.com, May 15, 2020 about Republican 2010 REDMAP campaign
'This Is a War': Republicans Ramp Up Bid to Control Election Maps for Next Decade – BillMoyers.com , June 5, 2020
The Truth About Trump, Republicans, and Vote-by-Mail The Atlantic, June 5, 2020
New voting laws: Here's where and how state lawmakers are creating hurdles to the ballot box Washington Post, June 2, 2021
State Voting Bills Tracker 2021 Brennan Center
Kansas groups halt voter registration drives to avoid being jailed under new law, Kansas Reflector, July 1, 2021
How Fannie Lou Hamer Created a Tool to Fight Voter Suppression Fascinating possible solution
McCrae Dowless, involved in 2018 absentee ballot fraud case, pleads not guilty, Fox 46 website, January 29, 2021
14 GOP-Controlled States Have Passed Laws to Impede Free Elections – Mother Jones, Ari Berman, June 14, 2021
Supreme Court Gives Green Light to GOP Voter Suppression Laws – Mother Jones, Ari Berman, July 1, 2021
Jim Crow Killed Voting Rights for Generations. Now the GOP Is Repeating History. – Mother Jones, Ari Berman, June 2, 2021
Inside John Roberts’ Decades-Long Crusade Against the Voting Rights Act