Democrats face long, costly battle
Millions needed to thwart GOP voting rights restrictions
With the door slammed shut this past week on federal legislation to create new protections for access to voting, Democrats face an electoral landscape in which they will need to spend heavily to register and mobilize voters if they are to overcome the hodgepodge of new voting restrictions enacted by Republicans across the country.
Democrats rode record turnout to win the presidency and control of the Senate in 2020 after embracing policies that made it easier to vote with absentee ballots during the pandemic.
But Republican-controlled state legislatures have since enacted a range of measures that undo those policies, erect new barriers to voting and remove some of the guardrails that halted former President Donald Trump’s drive to overturn the election.
Democrats’ best chance for counteracting the new state laws is gone after Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., declared her opposition on Thursday to President Joe Biden’s push to lift the filibuster to pass the party’s two voting-access bills.
That failure infuriated Democrats and left them contemplating a long, difficult year of organizing for midterm elections, where they face headwinds from Biden’s low approval ratings, inflation, congressional redistricting and the pandemic.
Democratic officials and activists say they are resigned to having to spend and organize their way around the new voting restrictions — a prospect many view with hardearned skepticism, citing the difficulty of educating masses of voters on how to comply with the new rules.
They say it would require them to compensate by spending tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars more on voterregistration and turnout programs — funds that might otherwise have gone to promoting Democratic candidates.
“All these voter protection
measures are not cheap,” said Raymond Paultre, executive director of the Florida Alliance, a statewide network of progressive donors. “This is going to draw a lot of resources away from candidates, campaigns and organizations.”
Republicans, whose decadeslong push to curtail voting access was put into overdrive by Trump’s false claims of election fraud after his defeat, are planning a renewed push to enact new restrictions during this year’s state legislative sessions.
They are also pushing to recruit thousands of Trump supporters as election workers
come November.
The bottom line, Democrats say, is that in many Republican-run states, voting in 2022 may be more difficult — and more charged — than it has been in generations, especially if the coronavirus pandemic does not subside.
The stakes are highest in key battleground states where governors and top election officials on the ballot in November will determine the ease of voting in the 2024 presidential contest.
In Wisconsin last week, a judge in Waukesha County, the largest county in the state among those run by
Republicans, ruled that drop boxes for absentee ballots are illegal statewide — a reversal of long-standing practice, and a ban set to take effect in municipal primary elections Feb. 15.
The ruling by Michael Bohren, a circuit court judge, invalidated years of guidance from the Wisconsin Elections Commission allowing municipalities to collect absentee ballots in drop boxes before Election Day.
Bohren, who routinely attests to his bona fides as a conservative, was appointed to the bench in 2000 by former Gov. Tommy Thompson, a Republican,
and presides over a courtroom displaying portraits of a handful of American presidents, all of them Republicans except for George Washington. He declined to be interviewed.
The federal voting rights legislation would have contained funding for election administration processes, including automatic voter registration. Without it, election officials say they will be hamstrung in training staff members and buying needed equipment, running the risk of
disruptions. Hundreds of officials from 39 states sent a letter to Biden on Thursday asking for $5 billion to buy and fortify election infrastructure for the next decade. The letter was organized by a group largely funded by Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and CEO of its parent company.
Despite that need, at least 12 states have passed laws preventing nongovernmental groups from financing election administration — a wide-reaching legislative response to false right-wing suspicions that $350 million donated for that purpose by another organization with ties to Zuckerberg was used to increase Democratic turnout. The money mainly covered administrative expenses, including safety gear for poll workers, and was distributed to both Republican and Democratic jurisdictions.
Some Democrats and civil rights leaders say they fear that the failure of Democrats in Washington to enact a federal voting law could depress turnout among Black voters — the same voters the party will spend the coming months working to organize.