Why America may be unprepared for a Trump-led assault on voting rights
By Michael Jones
In Atlanta, Black and brown people make up 54 percent of the city’s population. For Philadelphia, the amount is 59 percent. And the figure spikes to almost 84 percent in Detroit.
So it should come as no surprise that former President Donald Trump would target these cities as spots where his Republican supporters would need to “guard the vote” in the upcoming election next year, as he instructed them to do during a campaign event in Iowa last week.
“We gotta watch those votes when they come in,” the twice-impeached frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination and the subject of 91 federal criminal indictments, including for election interference, said. “We’re like a third-world nation and we can’t let it happen.”
Terri Sewell, the only Democrat in Alabama’s congressional delegation whose district includes Selma, the city known as ground zero in the fight for voting rights, says Trump’s anti-democratic rhetoric is part of a broader attack on suffrage.
For example, a federal court in Missouri held that private individuals and groups can no longer challenge violations of Section 2, a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
“I’m very troubled. At a time when the threat to the ability of African Americans or people of color to vote is dire, we’re at a crisis stage right now,” Sewell told me during an interview at the US Capitol this week. “I just want the public to understand the ramifications of a legal ruling like that on the VRA.”
At the state level, Democrats have accelerated efforts to expand and protect access to the ballot.
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed a voting rights package last Thursday that would register eligible individuals to vote upon their release from prison, allow 16- and 17-year-olds in the state to preregister to vote, ban deepfakes and AI in campaign advertisements and criminalize violence towards election workers.
On the one hand, the new Michigan law is a reminder of how woefully unprepared the US is for the 2024 election in the wake of Trump’s dog whistles and the lower courts’ hostility to the Voting Rights Act. On the other hand, the fact that the law exists resulted from Democrats winning a trifecta in 2022 that gave it control of both state legislative chambers and the governor’s mansion. Sewell told me that Michigan demonstrates that local and state elections offer an opportunity to increase citizens’ access to the ballot box.
“We have to realize that voting is the derivative of all other rights,” she added. “And so if we want to really want to protect this democracy and expand access to the ballot box, we have to know that every election matters, especially state and local and federal elections.”
At the outset of his administration, President Joe Biden invested the early political capital he earned from defeating Trump in the 2020 election into advancing national voting rights legislation. He and Vice President Harris traveled the country giving speeches on the issue. When Senate Republicans withheld the votes required to move forward voting rights bills that passed the Democratic-controlled House, Biden publicly expressed his support for changing Senate rules to allow the bills to pass the upper chamber.
The evolution was remarkable: Biden served in the Senate for 36 years and remained a staunch institutionalist even after he left the body to serve as Barack Obama’s running mate and, ultimately, the nation’s commander in chief.
But the carveout proposal was rejected by Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema, the Arizona senator who has since left the Democratic Party to become an independent. So Biden turned his attention to signing his sprawling economic agenda into law to much success but at the expense of an issue critical to the key groups that comprise his winning coalition.
With Republicans holding a slim House majority and Senate rules requiring at least nine Republican votes to pass most bills, the prospects of any meaningful national voting rights legislation moving out of this Congress are nil.
House Republicans introduced the American Confidence in Elections Act this summer, a bill that its lead sponsor touted as the “most conservative election integrity bill to be seriously considered in the House in 20 years.”
It includes 50 standalone bills sponsored by House GOP members and with provisions that require photo ID to vote in federal elections, ban unsolicited mail ballots, and allow weaponized conservative political speech.
Following the rollout of the ACE Act, congressional Democrats reintroduced the Freedom to Vote Act. This landmark bill would set minimum national standards to protect voting rights and expand ballot access while strengthening protections for local election workers, banning secret money in elections and ending extreme gerrymandering.
And this week, Rep. Ayanna Pressley and Sen. Peter Welch, two progressive Democrats from Massachusetts and Vermont, respectively, introduced a bill that would guarantee the right to vote to the approximately 4.6 million Americans denied the opportunity due to criminal convictions.
Sewell acknowledged the frustration among voters and advocates working to expand the franchise. But she said comments like Trump’s in Iowa, opposition to bills like the ACE Act, and the progress made in states like Michigan should motivate people to go to the polls and vote.
“We’re feeding right into what they want—this complacency, this apathy, is an immediate and dire threat. I think that we need to light a fire because the stakes are too high,” she said. “In fact, I think it’s important that those of us who are in positions where we understand the true implications, we need to really make our young folks really understand that this is our watershed moment. And are we going to be deterred or are we going to fight?”
Michael Jones is an independent Capitol Hill correspondent and contributor for COURIER. He is the author of Once Upon a Hill, a newsletter about Congressional politics.
