Senate debates voting-rights bill
WASHINGTON — Democrats renewed their efforts Wednesday to pass the largest overhaul of U.S. elections in a generation.
Democrats and Republicans both see the legislation, which touches on nearly every aspect of the electoral process, as fundamental to their parties’ political futures. The Senate bill, similar to a version passed by the House earlier this month, could shape election outcomes for years to come, striking down hurdles to voting, requiring more disclosure from political donors, restricting partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts and bolstering election security and ethics laws.
Democrats, in control of both chambers of Congress, say they are trying to rebuild trust in the ballot after two tumultuous election cycles. Republicans say the bill would strip power from the states and cement an unfair political advantage for Democrats.
Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said Wednesday that it took “mighty movements and decades of fraught political conflict” to achieve the basic dignities of current election laws and “any American who thinks that the fight for a full and fair democracy is over, is sadly and sorely mistaken.”
Democrats see the measure as a forceful response to voting rights restrictions advancing in Republican-controlled statehouses across the country in the wake of former President Donald Trump’s claims of a stolen 2020 election.
Senate Rules Committee Chairwoman Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., opened the hearing on the legislation Wednesday by invoking the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, in which hundreds of Trump’s supporters interrupted the electoral count after Trump told supporters to “fight like hell” to overturn his defeat.
“In the end, that insurrection was about an angry mob working to undermine our democracy,” Klobuchar said. “And it reminds all of us how very fragile our democracy truly is, and how it is on all of us to not just protect that democracy, but to ensure that it thrives.”
Similar to the House bill that passed on a party-line vote, the Senate legislation would create automatic voter registration nationwide, allow former felons to vote, and limit the ways states can remove registered voters from their rolls. It would expand voting by mail, promote early voting and give states money to track absentee ballots. Millions of people took advantage of those practices during the pandemic last year after some Republican states tried to restrict them in favor of voting in person.
The bill would increase oversight for election vendors and boost support for state voting system upgrades after Russia attempted to breach some of those systems in the 2016 election. It would overhaul federal oversight of campaign finance and encourage small donations to campaigns, while requiring more disclosure of political donations. And it would require states to adopt independent redistricting commissions to draw congressional districts and give more teeth to federal ethics enforcement.
The legislation is meant to counter the more than 250 bills have have been introduced in 43 states that would change how Americans vote, according to a tally by the Brennan Center for Justice, which backs expanded voting access. Some measures would limit mail voting, cut hours at polling places and impose restrictions that Democrats argue amount to the greatest assault on voting rights since the Jim Crow era.
Republicans say the new mandates would amount to a federal takeover of elections, which have traditionally been left to states.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., a longtime opponent of restrictive campaign-finance laws, said the bill is full of “silly new mandates” that would create “an invitation to chaos” for states that would have to put them in place.