Opinion | Wait, isn't voting rights legislation missing something? - The Washington Post

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President Biden has pointed out in virtually all his remarks on voting rights that the problem is not limited to efforts by state legislatures to impede voting by certain communities. “It’s no longer just about who gets to vote or making it easier for eligible voters to vote,” he said in his voting rights speech last week. “It’s about who gets to count the vote. … It’s about moving from independent election administrators who work for the people to polarized state legislatures and partisan actors who work for political parties.” He added, “It’s the most dangerous threat to voting and the integrity of free and fair elections in our history.”

The problem is not addressed in either the For the People Act or the John Lewis Voting Advancement Act. That is a mistake, as voting rights activists around the country have figured out. Democrats should listen to them.

The Post reports on a Senate Rules Committee hearing held in Georgia on Monday, which focused on the state’s voter suppression law:

While each of those testifying decried the new ballot-access provisions, multiple witnesses raised special alarms about the risk that, under the law, an election could be overturned entirely by partisan actors. Countermeasures against such “election subversion” is not included in the For The People Act, the Democratic bill that was blocked in the Senate last month, but [Democratic Sen. Raphael] Warnock and other senators have introduced separate legislation to address it.

State Rep. Billy Mitchell (D) told the panel that the Georgia law had in effect created “cheating umpires” by allowing the replacement of nonpartisan state and county officials with political appointees, “whose only concern is the will of the person who appointed them.”

That separate legislation proposed by Senate Democrats contains some straightforward provisions. As they explained in a press release, the bill would:

Limit arbitrary and unfounded removals of local election officials by requiring a “for cause” standard to be met before suspension and provide a federal cause of action to enforce this standard;

Allow a local election official who has responsibility for federal elections and who has been subjected to removal proceedings by a state board of elections to remove that proceeding to federal district court for redress;

Make it a federal crime for any person, whether acting under color of law or otherwise, to intimidate, threaten, coerce, harass, or attempt to intimidate, threaten, coerce, or harass an election worker;

Establish a minimum buffer zone to limit how close a poll observer may come within a voter or ballot at a polling location during an early vote period or on Election Day; and

Require challenges to a voter’s eligibility to register to vote or to cast a ballot, other than from an election official, to be supported by personal knowledge with respect to each individual challenged.

There are two other problems not yet covered in the Democratic legislation. First, the phony audit underway in Arizona (which may be imitated elsewhere) poses a threat of repeated, bogus challenges to elections conducted by partisans well after they have already been professionally reviewed. This can be addressed both by requiring all states to have a paper ballot backup and maintaining minimum standards for post-election audits.

Pressure mounts for Congress to pass federal voting rights legislation amid a Supreme Court voting rights ruling and Texas Democrats' arrival in D.C. (Mahlia Posey/The Washington Post)

Second, to address the Justice Department’s failure to investigate Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) or the former president for their attempts to pressure election officials in Georgia and Michigan to change election results, Congress should make any such contact with voting officials illegal. If a candidate has inquiries or challenges regarding an election, he or she should raise them in open court, in court pleadings or in audit proceedings pursuant to whatever standards Congress sets.

To date, much of the talk about the For the People Act has been to narrow it down to a manageable number of issues. Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) made a proposal seconded by voting rights activist Stacey Abrams that included voter ID requirements, banned partisan gerrymandering, made Election Day a holiday, adopted the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act (which would restore Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act) and preserved uniform standards for early and absentee mail.

Democrats have every reason to embrace Manchin’s proposal, along with proposals to prevent election rigging, standardized audit proceedings and a ban on strong-arming local officials. And if they really want to do a complete job, Congress can clarify Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act to correct the Supreme Court’s erroneous interpretation and nix Justice Samuel A. Alito’s “guidelines” (which makes it almost impossible for Section 2 challenges to succeed). That would be an extraordinary win for voting rights. In that regard, the added time and full-scale effort needed to bypass the filibuster would have been worthwhile.

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