Conn. not immune to fight on voting rights

Last year, for the first time in nearly 30 years, Georgia voted for a Democratic presidential candidate. In the January runoff, Democrats won both of Georgia’s Senate seats, also for the first time in nearly 30 years. Unable to tolerate a loss of power, Georgia Republicans resorted to a familiar playbook: suppress the votes of Black and brown citizens and youth, all of whom lean Democratic. As state Rep. Barry Fleming, the Republican principal sponsor of the just-passed measures, confessed, “We as legislators decide how we will actually be elected.” That flies in the face of a bedrock principle of our democracy: the freedom to vote for the representatives of our choice, no matter who we are or where we live, and to have our votes matter.

Acting on that strategy, in case their restrictions still don’t deliver Republican election victories, the Republican-controlled Georgia legislature voted to give themselves sweeping new powers over state and county election boards, including the ability to fire members in the midst of an election, and for good measure, stripping authority from the secretary of the state. The objective is to give legislators the power they lacked in the 2020 presidential election, when some Republican state legislators pressured Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp to call a special session to allow them to overturn election results by appointing their own slate of Electoral College members. Kemp’s refusal to play ball came on the heels of Trump’s effort to prevent election results from being certified, in what a U.S. District Court judge declared was “perhaps the most extraordinary relief ever sought in any federal court in connection with an election.”

Georgia is not an anomaly. Following the spectacular failure of Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 election (they lost 61 of 62 cases), Republican legislators are taking matters into their own hands. Jessica Anderson, executive director of Heritage Action, sister organization to the conservative Heritage Foundation, noted that Georgia’s voter suppression and election interference measures “put Georgia in a leadership role for other states.” In more than 40 states, Republicans have introduced hundreds of bills to make voting harder and give them control over election administration. Historians are saying the measures represent the most dramatic scaling back of voter access since the beginning of Jim Crow in the 1870s.

These attempts aren’t limited to Republicancontrolled state houses. Here in Connecticut, Republican legislators are putting forward similar measures, led by ranking members of the Government Administration and Elections Committee, Sen. Rob Sampson and Rep. Gale Mastrofrancesco.

In one bill, HB 5540, seven Republicans propose eliminating the presumption that the secretary of the state correctly interprets state election law, instead vesting that authority with the legislature. They go further, prohibiting the secretary from calling on the judicial branch to enforce orders issued by the secretary. In spirit, this is precisely what Georgia Republicans just achieved: stripping authority over election administration from the secretary of the state and vesting it in the legislature — putting partisans in control of their own election results.

Across the nation, Republican legislators are implementing harsh new restrictions to make it harder for people of color, young people and lowerincome people to vote. As an Arizona state legislator explained, “we don’t mind putting security measures in that won’t let everybody vote.” In a display of twisted logic, GOP lawmakers claim that making it more difficult to vote is needed to restore voter confidence in the integrity of elections, confidence they themselves sabotaged, mainly among voters in their own party, by relentless and baseless claims about a stolen election.

Connecticut’s Sen. Sampson, not satisfied to take the word of Trump’s own Department of Homeland Security that declared the election the “most secure in American history,” has made unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud occurring in his district. Inconveniently for him, not a single claim of fraud was made to the State Elections Enforcement Commission from anywhere in Connecticut.

The “Big Lie” has infiltrated the highest levels of the Connecticut Republican Party. Newly appointed vice chair of the Connecticut Republican Party, Mary Ann Turner, accused Republican State Rep. Devin Carney of “drinking the Kool-Aid” in response to his assertion that Jan. 6 was the worst day he’d ever seen. She went on to remark that the rally-turned-insurrection, which she attended, was “peaceful.”

Among the measures proposed by Republicans are extreme ones such as requiring mail-in ballots to be postmarked before Election Day (Arizona and Iowa), even if they arrive before polls close; curtailing early voting on weekends (Georgia), a direct attack on Black voters who are encouraged to go to the polls after church; substantially cutting back on early voting days and closing polls an hour earlier (Iowa); requiring absentee ballots to be notarized (Arizona); making illegal 24-hour and drive-through voting centers (Texas); eliminating mail-in ballots altogether (Arizona); and banning ballot drop boxes (Florida). In a flagrant move to disenfranchise voters, a bill in Oklahoma would allow the legislature to appoint Electoral College members if there isn’t a federal voter ID law.

Mimicking the restrictions sought by Republicans in other states, the GAE Committee Republican ranking members introduced a second bill, HB 6325. It would prohibit mailing absentee ballot applications if not requested by the voter (as the secretary of the state did in 2020). It would force the secretary to pilot an unnecessary signature verification on returned absentee ballots and prohibit registrars from contacting voters for the purpose of correcting unsigned absentee ballots, a measure mandated by 19 states.

Not only are Connecticut Republicans advancing measures to restrict voting and wrest control over elections away from the secretary of the state, they have shown a complete lack of support for measures to make it easier to vote, reforms supported by large majorities of Connecticut voters.

Sensing their broadly unpopular position, Sen. Sampson proclaimed, “We are all in favor of allowing people to vote and expanding access to voting. I can’t say it enough times.” Yet neither he nor a single other Republican member of GAE voted in committee for the ballot resolutions to let voters amend the state constitution to allow early and no-excuse absentee voting. Of the 43 cosponsors of the two resolutions, there is not a single member of the Republican caucus.

Actions speak louder than words, and to date, beyond the rhetoric, there’s no evidence that Republicans in Connecticut are interested in making it easier to vote. As President Biden said at his first press conference, “If you have the best ideas, you have nothing to hide. Let the people vote.”