This week, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law a bill that will create new restrictive barriers to the freedom to vote for Texans.
As CLC’s Caleb Jackson — a Texan himself who has been closely tracking these bills for months — explained on Twitter on Tuesday, this new law makes it harder for voters in Texas's most diverse counties to vote, criminalizes the work of local officials who attempt to make voting more accessible and makes it harder to remove over-partisan poll watchers who aggressively harass voters.
As we have seen, this is just the latest effort this year by state politicians to enact barriers to silence voters’ voices based on what they look like, where they live or who they vote for.
CLC has filed lawsuits this year to block anti-voter laws in states like Georgia and Kansas where we think CLC’s expertise would be most helpful, and we’ve also been monitoring changes to the national voting landscape.
Last month, for example, we graded states that had completed their 2021 legislative sessions on their vote-by-mail and early voting laws — the first report to zoom in on these types of laws specifically.
Some of our findings were troubling: out of the 39 states we surveyed, we graded 15 states as having “Restrictive” vote-by-mail and early voting policies, and 11 states received “Most Restrictive” vote-by-mail and early voting grades.
Importantly, as CLC’s Valencia Richardson explains in this great Twitter thread, inaccessible policies do not always track neatly with “red” states and “blue” states: framing as a purely partisan issue often obscures the challenges voters of both parties face across the country.
But while conducting our research, CLC saw glimpses of what a 21st century democracy could look like.
While many states do have restrictive voting laws, 13 states CLC graded received “Least Restrictive” vote-by-mail and early voting grades. Two states — Illinois and Washington — received perfect grades for vote-by-mail and early voting on our ten-point scale, and no state received a 0/10. Nine states changed their laws for the better during this past legislative season. The outlook for democracy in those states is promising, and states like Texas should look to them for inspiration, rather than pass anti-voter laws like the one Gov. Abbott just signed into law.
What we need now is for more states to step up and make voting accessible, and, likewise, we should have national standards to ensure voters can vote without barriers, no matter their race, background, party affiliation or ZIP code.
This fall, Congress has the opportunity to pass legislation to protect the freedom to vote for Americans in all 50 states. The House has passed the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. The Senate now has the opportunity to consider both a new proposed For the People Act — a compromise by Senator Manchin and supported by all 50 Democrats — as well as the John Lewis bill. As the new Texas law shows, these need to be top-priority pieces of legislation. CLC's research also shows that some of the state laws passed this year would have been blocked by either of these federal bills if they had been enacted, evidence that congressional action is imperative to ensuring a 21st century democracy for Americans. CLC continues to work hard to support the passage of both bills.
In the meantime, what we all can do now is continue to stand up for democracy and for the importance of pursuing truth in the face of anti-voter politicians seeking to divide us. I had a video conversation this week with Jonathan Rauch of the Brookings Institution about his new book, “The Constitution of Knowledge,” and our discussion highlighted the good news — that there are ways to defend democracy from disinformation — and highlighted the importance of doing so. You can watch a recording of the book event here, and I think you’ll find it quite interesting.
As the Texas law shows, after the passage of similar laws in other states, we have a lot of work to do to protect the freedom to vote in this country. My hope is that the bright spots we saw in our research will help point the way forward for state-based advocacy and that the U.S. Senate passes legislative solutions to protect the freedom to vote for Americans so President Biden can sign them into law.
The nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center is dedicated to advancing democracy through law at the federal, state and local levels, fighting for every American’s rights to responsive government and a fair opportunity to participate in and affect the democratic process.
