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john lewis voting rights advancement act
The GOP Has Already Cheated in the 2024 House Race
A Brennan Center analysis found that gerrymandering in 2024 will give Republicans approximately 16 additional seats in the House of Representatives compared to fairly drawn maps.
Oct 03, 2024
Gerrymandering is as old as the republic. In the very first congressional election, Patrick Henry drew a map to try to keep James Madison from being elected to Congress. (That was before the word “gerrymandering” was even coined.) Today, both parties do it with gusto when they can.
And now gerrymandering may decide control of the House of Representatives.
Once, gerrymandering was an art. Phillip Burton, the legendary Democratic House member from San Francisco who served from the 1960s to the 1980s, used to draw the state’s maps on a tablecloth at a Sacramento restaurant. He proudly called one misshapen district “my contribution to modern art.” Now, however, it’s a science. Digital technology has reshaped the drawing of maps. Partisans can craft districts to quash competition in a way that lasts throughout a decade.
Gerrymandering may be as old as the republic, but so is the fight for fair maps.
Once, there was hope the courts would step in. In 2019, however, the Supreme Court ruled that federal judges were barred from policing partisan gerrymandering. And while it is still illegal to draw district lines to discriminate based on race, judges have often winked and allowed politicians to racially gerrymander so long as they shrug and say, “It’s not about race, it’s just politics.”
Rampant district rigging has blocked fair representation in many states, especially in the South. Nearly all the population growth in the United States over the past decade took place in the South and Southwest, and most of that came from communities of color—the very voters who should be represented and who are being shut out of power.
Now, we know that there are direct partisan consequences too. All the map drawing, all the lawsuits, are done for 2024. The dust has settled. And the Brennan Center’s experts have analyzed the effects of gerrymandering. Attorney Michael Li and political scientist Peter Miller have checked and rechecked the data.
Here’s what they found: Gerrymandering in 2024 will give Republicans approximately 16 additional seats in the House of Representatives compared to fairly drawn maps. That is well more than the margin of control in this Congress or in the one before it. There can be no question that this was done deliberately and with scientific precision—and comes especially at the expense of communities of color. In most of the gerrymandered states, there were hundreds or thousands of fair maps that could have been drawn.
What can be done about it?
One answer comes from Ohio. Seven times, the state supreme court there struck down unfair maps drawn by the Republicans. (The Brennan Center represented a broad coalition of Ohio voters.) Each time, partisan map drawers simply ignored the court. Then the state’s esteemed Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor, a prominent Republican, retired due to term limits. Now she leads a statewide drive for a ballot measure to create a strong, independent, citizen-led redistricting commission. This conservative stalwart teamed up with the progressive grassroots Ohio Organizing Collaborative. It’s a buddy movie for the ages.
Republicans tried to change the number of votes needed to pass a measure like this, but citizens rejected that sneaky move. Then state officials rewrote the language to say that the initiative was designed to support gerrymandering. No matter. Polls look strong, and there is a good chance that in Ohio, voters will untilt the legislature and congressional maps. Ohio would join Arizona, California, Colorado, and Michigan with their independent commissions. It is a prime exhibit of why voters should be able to overrule politicians.
There’s a national solution too. The Freedom to Vote Act would ban partisan gerrymandering in congressional redistricting. The John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would strengthen that vital law against racially discriminatory rules. Both bills came achingly close to passing in the last Congress.
Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), at a Brennan Center event with Democracy SENTRY in Chicago this summer, announced that Democrats would make these voting rights bills the first order of business—and that they would change the filibuster rules so they could pass. The next night, Vice President Kamala Harris pledged to sign them (the only bills mentioned by name in her convention speech).
Gerrymandering may be as old as the republic, but so is the fight for fair maps. At the constitutional convention in Philadelphia in 1787, James Madison insisted on the provision used to give Congress the power to override local politicians. It used “words of great latitude,” he explained, because “it was impossible to foresee all the abuses” that might come. “Whenever the State Legislatures had a favorite measure to carry, they would take care so to mould their regulations as to favor the candidates they wished to succeed.”
Meanwhile, voters will go to the polls to choose their representatives—but too often, the representatives will choose the voters. And the Congress that would consider reform will be one disfigured by biased rules and manipulative maps.
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2024 Trifecta Imperative to Win Key Democracy Reforms
We must repair and revitalize the rules of our democracy in order to reflect our democratic values, to ensure the opportunity for every eligible citizen to vote, and to protect against political money corruption of our democracy.
Sep 06, 2024
On January 5, 2021, two Democrats won Senate runoff elections in Georgia. This flipped the Senate and resulted in an unexpected “trifecta”—Democratic control of the White House, the House, and the Senate.
Could a trifecta happen again in 2025?
The odds currently are against it, primarily because of the Senate races.
But if Democrats win the presidency, a trifecta is possible and, if that happens, historic democracy reforms that nearly passed in the last Congress would be on the doorstep for quick passage in 2025.
Whether the Democrats obtain a trifecta in November is in the hands of the voters, and possibly the courts if Trump refuses to accept the election results as he did in 2020.
The presidential race is currently close, with U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris inching ahead of former President Donald Trump in recent polls.
A Harris victory could provide down-ballot support, especially in key House races, including races in California and New York. Democrats need to pick up just four seats to flip the House.
Holding the Democrats’ two-vote majority in the Senate, which includes four Independents who caucus with them, is much more difficult—but not impossible.
Of the 34 Senate seats up for election in November, 23 are currently held by 19 Democrats and the four Independents, and just 11 by Republicans.
Senate Democrats and Independents currently hold a 51-49 edge over Republicans.
It’s widely expected that Democrats will lose the seat currently held by retiring Sen. Joe Manchin (I-W.Va.). To maintain control of the Senate, Democrats would need to hold all of their remaining seats that are up this year, along with a Harris win to preserve the vice president’s tie-breaking vote.
Democrats and Independents running for reelection generally are polling ahead of their challengers, except for Sen. John Tester in Montana, who currently trails Republican businessman Tim Sheehy.
There are two crosscurrents at work in the Senate races, which include a handful of Democratic incumbents running in red and purple states.
On the one hand, ticket-splitting for President and Congress has become increasingly rare, and there are Democratic Senators seeking reelection in Ohio and Montana, states where Trump is expected to win easily.
On the other hand, incumbents typically enjoy an edge. In 2022, all 29 Senate incumbents won reelection. In 2020, 84% of Senate incumbents won.
The Democratic trifecta in 2021 resulted in Congress coming close to passing historic democracy reforms dealing with voting rights, money in politics, partisan gerrymandering, and other core reform issues.
If Democrats beat the odds and obtain a trifecta in November, Congress is expected to move quickly to pass the democracy reform measures.
In 2021, after the House passed early versions of the Freedom to Vote Act and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, Senate Democrats failed by just two votes to pass an exception to the filibuster rule that would have allowed the democracy reform legislation to pass the Senate with a simple majority and go to President Joe Biden for his signature.
Ironically, the two Democrats who voted against the filibuster rule exception, Sens. Manchin and Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema, voted just weeks earlier for an exception to the filibuster rule in order to pass an increase in the debt ceiling. And both senators were supporters of the democracy reform legislation.
But for these two Senators opposing the filibuster exception, historic democracy reforms would be protecting our democracy and our elections today.
Both Manchin and Sinema are retiring this year.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) recently said, “One of the first things I want to do, should we have the presidency and keep the majority, is change the [filibuster] rules and enact both the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Act.” Schumer said the Democrats will have the votes needed to “change the rules,” should Democrats keep control of the Senate.
“This is vital to democracy,” Schumer said, “This is not just another extraneous issue. This is the wellspring of it all.”
House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) also has indicated that the two democracy reform bills would be an early House priority if Democrats flip the House. Indicating its top priority status, Jeffries assigned H.R. 11 to the Freedom to Vote Act in this Congress, the lowest number he, as House Minority Leader, could give to a bill.
Vice President Harris is a longtime supporter of these core democracy measures. At last month’s Democratic convention, Harris said in her acceptance speech: “[T]he freedom that unlocks all the others [is] the freedom to vote. With this election, we finally have the opportunity to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and the Freedom to Vote Act.”
For decades, there has been bipartisan leadership and support for numerous democracy reforms. They include the Watergate reforms of the 1970s; the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and its regular reauthorizations and amendments in 1970, 1975, 1982, 1992, and 2006; and the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002.
Since the Supreme Court’s Citizen United decision in 2010, however, congressional Republicans have almost unanimously opposed democracy reforms, leaving Democrats to support them alone.
Polls have shown these democracy reforms have strong public support among both Democrats and Republicans.
The Freedom to Vote Act would be the most comprehensive pro-democracy law enacted in decades. It would:
>> Reverse voter suppression laws that have flooded red states since the 2020 presidential election, using as justification Trump’s continuing false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
- Increase access to the ballot, including early voting requirements in all states for federal elections.
- Require each state to provide for no-excuse vote by mail.
- Provide for accessible voting by individuals with disabilities.
- Provide for automatic voter registration.
- Establish nonpartisan standards to prevent extreme partisan gerrymandering.
- End secret “dark money” contributions from being spent in federal elections.
- Establish a voluntary system of matching small donations with public funds, but not taxpayer funds, for House races.
- Strengthen enforcement of federal campaign finance laws.
The John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would strengthen the legal protections against discriminatory voting policies and practices by restoring the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and repairing the damage done by recent Supreme Court decisions. It would:
- Revitalize the Voting Right Act’s preclearance provisions, after the Supreme Court gutted these rules, to require preclearance for new voting laws in certain states and localities to ensure they are not discriminatory.
- Provide a new way for determining which states and localities are covered by the preclearance provisions.
- Repair Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, also gutted by the Supreme Court, to allow voters to sue to block voting rules that are discriminatory or will create discriminatory results.
- Provide an expedited means for covered states to “bail out” of coverage to be released from the preclearance requirement if they have not engaged in discriminatory behavior for a specified period of time.
Whether the Democrats obtain a trifecta in November is in the hands of the voters, and possibly the courts if Trump refuses to accept the election results as he did in 2020.
But one thing is clear—we must repair and revitalize the rules of our democracy in order to reflect our democratic values, to ensure the opportunity for every eligible citizen to vote, and to protect against political money corruption of our democracy.
This begins with the enactment of the two historic democracy reform bills, the Freedom to Vote Act and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.
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The GOP’s Voter Intimidation Strategy Is Straight Out of the Confederate Playbook
Republicans have come to genuinely believe that they cannot retain political power without resorting to morally criminal, nakedly unethical voter suppression tactics.
Aug 28, 2024
The Republican attorney general of Texas sent armed police officers after Hispanic voters—some in their 80s—to intimidate, threaten, and destroy them financially by forcing them to hire lawyers to defend themselves, even though they are perfectly legal voters.
It’s a manifestation of the new unofficial Republican slogan:
If you can’t win on the issues, cheat. And if cheating doesn’t get you over the top, intimidate!
As is the case with so many bad Republican ideas (outlawing labor unions, ending welfare programs, banning abortion, gutting women’s voting and economic rights, etc.), this one started during the failure of Reconstruction in the 1870s. White supremacists had taken over the federal government and, in the states, Black voters were routinely threatened with violence and imprisonment when they tried to vote.
We thought those days were over. But in August of 2022, three months before he would face voters for reelection, Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis reprised the neo-Confederate strategy of using the levers of official state power to intimidate Black voters.
DeSantis put together a special police force to go after “voter fraud,” and they executed a number of arrest warrants against Black voters who’d been told by various state officials that they could vote even though they had a felony conviction. They all believed they were eligible, and apparently most were. There was absolutely no effort to commit voter fraud involved, and there hasn’t been a single conviction.
The Texas attorney general bragged that Republicans only held power in Texas as a result of voter suppression, and added that if voter suppression were to end, Republicans would never again seize power in that state.
(With a 64% margin of victory, Florida’s voters had approved a ballot measure in the 2018 election giving voting rights back to the roughly 20% of Florida Black citizens—1.5 million potential voters—who’d had a felony conviction. The Republican-controlled state legislature then—quietly—essentially overturned the ballot measure in 2020, although many Black voters never got the memo.)
With cameras rolling, around 20 Black former-felon voters were arrested for “illegal voting” and paraded before the media in shackles.
As a result, many Black voters that November concluded showing up at the polls just wasn’t worth the risk. As the Palm Beach Daily Newsnoted shortly after the 2022 election:
In 2018, before the new voting laws were enacted, the state had a 63% turnout among registered voters in the midterms. This year, turnout dropped to 54%...
DeSantis’ brutal intimidation strategy was so effective at suppressing the Black vote in Florida that year that he even won Miami-Dade County, which had been a Democratic stronghold since 2002, and Palm Beach County, which had not voted Republican since 1986.
But what starts in Florida rarely stays in Florida, particularly if it helps a white Republican administration stay in power in a state with a large minority population.
Now the “notoriously corrupt” Republican attorney general of Texas, desperate to hang onto his party’s majority in this 2024 election, has picked up on DeSantis’ strategy of intimidating minority voters in August to keep them away from the November polls.
After putting 2 million people on the “suspense” list—forcing those mostly urban voters into provisional ballots which won’t be countered unless they take time off work to show up at a county office to confirm their identities in the week after the election—Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is now sending police officers into Hispanic neighborhoods to kick in doors and arrest Latino voters.
In 2021, Paxton bragged to right-wing hate purveyor and now-imprisoned criminal Steve Bannon that he’d successfully prevented Harris County—home to Houston and its 2.4 million mostly-Democratic voters—from voting by mail in 2020, thus keeping Republicans in charge of the state.
That’s right. The Texas attorney general bragged that Republicans only held power in Texas as a result of voter suppression, and added that if voter suppression were to end, Republicans would never again seize power in that state.
His effort forced the few willing brave souls among Houston’s citizens—fully 14.5% of the entire state’s registered voters—to navigate crowded polling places in person during a deadly pandemic before vaccines were available.
“If we’d lost Harris County” by allowing people to vote by mail, Paxton crowed, “Harris County mail-in ballots that they wanted to send out were 2.5 million… and we were able to stop every one of them.
“Had we not done that, we… would've been one of those battleground states… and Donald Trump would’ve lost the election.”
After purging over a million Texas voters, most from big cities, off the voting rolls over the past few years, putting 2 million on the “suspense” list, and then preventing Houstonians from voting by mail in 2020, Paxton’s newest trick to keep the GOP in charge of Texas is a naked rip-off of DeSantis’ minority voter intimidation strategy.
One of the members of LULAC Texas (League of United Latin American Citizens, one of the oldest Latino voting and civil rights groups in the country), retired schoolteacher 87-year-old Lidia Martinez, had publicly spoken out against Paxton when he forbade Texans from getting mail-in ballots in 2020.
He got his revenge this past week.
At six in the morning, according to The New York Times, nine officers, some with guns, showed up at her home after having broken down a door to raid the home of Manuel Medina, the chair of the Tejano Democrats. Martinez asked who was at the door and, the Times noted, the officers “then pushed open the door” and invaded her home:
Ms. Martinez said that the officers told her they came because she had filled out a report saying that older residents were not getting mail ballots. “Yes, I did,”she told them. For 35 years, Ms. Martinez has been a member of LULAC, the civil rights group, helping Latino residents stay engaged in politics. Much of her work has included instructing older residents and veterans on how to fill out voter registration cards…
Two of the agents went to her bedroom and searched everywhere, “my underwear, my nightgown, everything, they went through everything,” Ms. Martinez recalled. They took her laptop, phone, planner and some documents.
All across the state, apparently, police were raiding the homes of Hispanic voters. The head of Texas LULAC Gabriel Rosales, who was on my radio/TV program Monday, told me and the Times, “It’s pure intimidation.”
When asked for an explanation, AG Paxton told the Times, without a trace of irony:
Secure elections are the cornerstone of our Republic.
Reporter Greg Palast, who’ll be premiering his new movie Vigilantes, Inc: America’s New Vote Suppression Hitmenon Sunday, September 8 in Los Angeles (I’ll be there, too), has pointed out that the former Confederate slave states of Texas, Georgia, and Florida would all be Blue were it not for voter suppression, voter purges, and the intimidation of Black and Hispanic voters.
“There is no doubt about it,” Palast told me recently on the air. “It’s just demographics.”
As I detail in my book The Hidden History of the War on Voting, this has been a fundamental, core strategy for Republican efforts to hold power once they take over a state since the 1960s. Heritage Foundation co-founder Paul Weyrich laid it out when he told a group of Texas Republicans in 1980, as they prepared to suppress votes during the Reagan campaign:
I don’t want everybody to vote. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.
The late Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist, for another example, started his rise in Republican politics in the Goldwater/Johnson election of 1964 standing outside Hispanic and Native American polling places to challenge and intimidate would-be voters. His program was called Operation Eagle Eye, and over the next decade it expanded to multiple Republican-run states.
Voter suppression is now a primary political tool for Republicans, which is why when Arizona’s Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs signed an executive order last week expanding locations across the state where people can vote, the Arizona Republican Party sued to prevent them from opening to voters.
Republicans have come to genuinely believe that they cannot retain political power without resorting to morally criminal, nakedly unethical voter suppression tactics.
As former President Donald Trump toldFox “News” about unsuccessful Democratic efforts to offer mail-in ballots to registered voters nationwide during the 2020 pandemic:
They had things, levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again…
Because of a series of bizarre rulings by five Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court over the past two-plus decades, America is the only country in the world where a state must go to court to take away your gun but doesn’t even need to inform you if it prevents you from voting or keeps your vote from being counted.
Vice President Kamala Harris has promised to make voting rights a top priority if she’s elected president and Democrats take both houses of Congress. This is part of what Democrats mean when they say that democracy itself is on the ballot this fall.
The John Lewis Voting Rights Enhancement Act, for example, will outlaw most of these types of voter suppression by making voting a right, rather than simply a privilege.
The stakes for this election couldn’t be higher. Tag, you’re it!
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