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Hi Friend,
2020 is off to quite the start. We have encouraging pro-democracy developments out of Virginia, which—as part of the Swing Left family—our community helped flip blue in November. The newly Democratic-controlled state Senate has advanced bills that would allow no-excuse absentee voting in any election and make Election Day a holiday. In the House of Delegates, Democratic legislators have also introduced bills that would enable automatic and same-day voter registration.
 Democrats in the Virginia House of Delegates, which flipped to Democratic control in November.
But in states where the GOP either controls all three branches of government or both chambers of the legislature, democracy is under even greater threat:
In Florida, legislators have ignored the will of voters who passed Amendment 4, which sought to restore voting rights to returning citizens. Rather than enact Amendment 4, GOP lawmakers instead passed measures that require formerly incarcerated Floridians with felony convictions to repay all fines and fees before regaining their right to vote. And last week, the Florida Supreme Court ruled that those restrictions were constitutional.
Georgia ended 2019 by purging 309,000 voters from its rolls in December. Earlier this month, in response to a lawsuit filed by Fair Fight Action that challenged the removal of nearly 100,000 inactive voters, a federal judge ruled that the purging was constitutional.
In Wisconsin, the GOP is trying to remove over 200,000 people from the voter rolls before the November elections. Conservatives are appealing to the state supreme court in an attempt to force the Election Commission, which is evenly split between Republicans and Democrats, to purge the rolls. Democrats, arguing that the purge aims to reduce the number of voters likely to support Democratic candidates, want an appellate court to weigh in on the issue.
All three of these states have a history of GOP-led gerrymandering, and we’ve seen what happens as a result of rigged maps. Unpopular laws become the norm while popular bills and ballot amendments stagnate in committee or become diluted by the GOP. Together, with Swing Left we’re working to flip chambers in each of these states—as well as in Arizona, Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, North Carolina, and Texas—to prevent another harmful decade of GOP gerrymandering-facilitated policies.
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By donating to the Flippable Fund today, you can support Democratic candidates running to flip seats and chambers in the aforementioned states. Your donation will provide a much-needed boost of early funding to candidates in competitive races. And together, we can help build a stronger democracy for years to come.
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