Craig Holman: 2022 will rebuild or break our democracy | Columns
Across the country, civic groups, religious leaders and alarmed citizens are holding hundreds of candlelight vigils and voting rights marches and contacting Congress to mark one year since the rampage of the U.S. Capitol.
Originally, the Stop the Steal movement sought to reverse the 2020 election results and organized the January 6 attack. But the insurrection was not over: it was a dress rehearsal for what was to follow. The movement is still thriving and is redoubling its efforts at the state level for another effort to overthrow our democratic system of government.
Here are some things we can look forward to for the coming year:
m State-level Republicans will continue to pass more voter suppression laws and take steps that allow them to reject election results they don’t like.
Already, the Stop the Steal movement is taking control of the offices that oversee the elections; obstruct postal voting; limit the number, hours and availability of electoral polling stations; impose more stringent voter identification requirements; extend the purges of electoral lists; and provide partisan oversight over the final election tally.
According to the Brennan Center, so far 19 states have enacted 33 laws to make it harder for Americans to vote, and we can expect more. Many of these anti-voting laws are pretty extreme, and all will disproportionately affect minorities and low-income people – targeting ridings that tend to vote Democratic.
For example, residents of Georgia may be accused of distributing water to voters who line up at the polls. In Texas, election administrators can face felony charges if they encourage voters to request mail-in ballots. And in Iowa and Kansas, people could face criminal charges for helping voters hand in their ballots, for example, if they are helping voters with disabilities.
In other states, Republican legislatures have undermined non-partisan election administration by elevating the role of state lawmakers in overseeing election officials and even enlisting in the election count.
m Saving our democracy from these attacks – and facing the filibuster – will be the most crucial fight of 2022, and it is not at all clear whether our democracy will survive.
Democracy is not yet out of steam, but it is getting dangerously late.
Two key pieces of legislation were introduced in Congress that would overturn many state voting restrictions: the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.
The Freedom of Voting Law would protect and expand postal voting, enact automatic voter registration, simplify voter identification laws, make polling stations easily accessible and require paper ballots, limit voter registration. secret political spending, etc. The Voting Rights Advancement Act would reinstate the Voting Rights Act of 1965, ensuring that no eligible citizen is denied the right to vote.
The United States House has already passed the Freedom to Vote Act and the Voting Rights Advancement Act. In the Senate, they enjoy the support of a slim majority, but have so far been blocked by Republican obstruction.
Calls to change the filibuster rules to push through these voting rights measures are growing, even with President Biden speaking. This will be the decisive fight of 2022, with consequences that will likely spill over into decades to come.
m If the election results are close, Republicans at the state level will attempt to topple those who do not follow their path by using bogus claims of “voter fraud” as a pretext.
Stop the Steal efforts are coordinated across states by a network of pro-Trump election lawyers, touting their goal of bringing voter fraud under control, despite the fact that there is no significant record of voter fraud.
Conspiracy theories of voter fraud have been widely refuted by election officials, legislative hearings, academics and the courts. More recently, three Trump supporters from a Florida retirement community have been accused of voting more than once. But the crazy idea that voter fraud is rampant and affected the 2020 election results is known accurately as the Big Lie.
Michigan is one of the key states where Republicans hope to take control of the electoral process and decide it for themselves. Under pressure from Republican lawmakers, the state ultimately conducted three separate election audits and found nothing. Now Republicans are running a Trump election fraud lawyer for the state attorney general.
2022 is the year that either will reshape our democracy for the 21st century – leveling the playing field and ensuring that everyone can participate – or will break it altogether. It is up to all of us and our legislators to save it.
Craig Holman is the government affairs lobbyist for Public Citizen. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.