CHICAGO — Democratic leaders say passing sweeping legislation to expand voting rights and curb gerrymandering will be at or near the top of their governing agenda should Vice President Kamala Harris win the presidency this fall in a blue wave that also ushers in unified control of Capitol Hill.
To enact the measures, they say, they are even willing to bypass the filibuster, a staple of the Senate that the party increasingly sees as one among a litany of tools that Republicans have used to thwart the popular will.
The focus on changing the systems for elections and governance that undergird American democracy reflects widespread frustration among Democrats that they have been unable to accomplish more on issues such as guns, abortion and the climate — despite polling that suggests many of their policy positions have widespread support.
In recent years, Republican-led states have limited mail voting and Supreme Court rulings have reduced the reach of the Voting Rights Act. Democrats describe the proposed bills as an antidote to voter suppression and as springboards that would allow them to pass other parts of their agenda.
“This is vital to democracy,” said Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) in an interview here Wednesday on the margins of the party’s convention. “This is not just another extraneous issue. This is the wellspring of it all.”
Earlier Wednesday, Schumer said that if the party keeps the Senate majority, it will have the votes necessary to “change the rules” and make voting rights legislation a top priority, a reference to carving out an exception to the filibuster.
“One of the first things I want to do, should we have the presidency and keep the majority, is change the rules and enact both the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Act,” Schumer said at a panel discussion in Chicago on voting rights.
Among other things, the two bills would guarantee early voting, make it easier to register to vote, outlaw partisan gerrymandering, require greater disclosure of political donors, provide additional public funding for campaigns and bolster the Voting Rights Act.
To pass the legislation, which Republicans adamantly oppose as an illegitimate power grab that deprives states of their authority, Harris would need to win the presidential race, and Democrats would need to hold onto the Senate and retake the House. Even if they are able to set aside the filibuster and enact the legislation, Democrats would be likely to soon face a showdown over voting rights with a skeptical Supreme Court.
GOP nominee Donald Trump, who unsuccessfully sought to overturn the results of the 2020 election, has long called for tightening voting laws and has questioned the use of early and mail voting. His campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the legislation Harris is backing.
Democrats tried to pass the bills early in Joe Biden’s presidency when they held both houses of Congress. A lack of support for changing the filibuster rules from two moderate Democrats, Sens. Joe Manchin III (W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.), kept them from advancing their plans. Both have since left the party and are retiring.
Harris has long embraced the measures. As a senator, she signed onto a precursor to the Freedom to Vote Act. At a February meeting with voting rights advocates she called for passing that measure and the legislation named after Lewis, the late civil rights champion and congressman. Harris at the time said pushing for such legislation was “about upholding fundamental principles, about democracy, the importance of all people being able to express their voice in every way, including through their vote.”
Rep. John Sarbanes (D-Md.), the House sponsor of the Freedom to Vote legislation, said he’s confident about the bill’s prospects, especially after seeing 48 Democrats vote to change the filibuster rules in 2022. New senators will be inclined to support a rule change, he said, and those who previously voted for it will be unlikely to switch their position.
“The playbook is there,” he said. “As a lawmaker, I can tell you lawmakers love to have put in front of them something that says, ‘This is what you did last time.’”
But Richard Hasen, a UCLA law professor and director of the university’s Safeguarding Democracy Project, expressed skepticism that Democrats would stay unified. “There are people who didn’t have to stick their neck out because Manchin did,” he said. “So I’m not so confident that the Democrats could blow up the filibuster rule for this if they wanted to.”
He described the Freedom to Vote legislation as a wish list with many provisions, “some of which were better thought out than others.” If they have a chance to pass voting rights legislation next year, he said, they will need to think carefully about what they want to include — and what can pass muster with the conservatives who hold a majority on the Supreme Court.
“Although the [Constitution’s] elections clause power is broad, we’ve seen the Supreme Court rein in Congress in voting rights and the Voting Rights Act and campaign finance and lots of other places,” Hasen said.
Changing election laws is complicated, and overhauling online voter registration systems or electronic voter rolls could create logistical and technological challenges that would be costly and time-consuming. That’s led some to suggest members of Congress should take their time if they want to change voting rules.
“If we’re going to have a massive overhaul of election policy in the United States implemented by Washington, the most important voices to be heard are election officials,” said David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research. “And those voices have to be bipartisan and reflect regional diversity as well.”
Republicans say they are eager to challenge any new law’s legitimacy and warn it could weaken efforts to tighten election rules in a way that makes it hard to cheat.
“I would be first in line to file litigation on this,” said Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose (R).
He called the legislation a “massive federal power grab” that would turn the Department of Justice into a “national election czar” and take authority away from state officials who have long been responsible for setting voting rules.
“You can strike that balance between security and convenience, and I think that’s what Ohioans, what Americans really want,” LaRose said.
While Republican elected officials like LaRose have opposed the bills, supporters of the measure said they believe the general public — including Republican voters — would get behind them.
“This bill is good for democracy, and it is also extraordinarily popular,” said Michael Waldman, the president of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. “It’s polarized in Congress, but it’s not polarized in the country.”
Before he was chosen as Harris’s running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) signed legislation creating state-level protections similar to the Voting Rights Act, allowing voters to sign up to receive absentee ballots for every election and restoring voting rights to more than 50,000 people who had been convicted of felonies.
In Michigan, voters amended the state constitution to guarantee nine days of early voting and expand the use of ballot drop boxes. Democratic state lawmakers followed up that action with legislation to protect election officials from intimidation and strengthen the process for certifying accurate results.
Lavora Barnes, the chairwoman of the Michigan Democratic Party, said Congress should follow her state’s lead by giving people more opportunities to vote.
“It opens the doors for people who have other obligations that sometimes get in the way of making it possible to go vote,” she said.
The Freedom to Vote legislation is wide-ranging and would establish new rules for congressional and presidential elections. States would have to allow no-excuse mail voting, provide at least two weeks of early voting, expand the types of identification they accept under voter ID laws, establish automatic voter registration programs, allow people to register to vote at the polls so they could immediately vote, limit purges from their voter rolls and make sure voters don’t have to wait more than 30 minutes in line to cast their ballots. States would have to allow felons to vote when they get out of prison, ending a patchwork state-based system.
The measure would make Election Day a federal holiday and make it a crime to lie about polling hours and voting rules. It would set new standards for drawing congressional districts and ban gerrymandering them for partisan gain.
In an effort to curb “dark money” in politics, the bill would require groups to disclose their major donors and put in place new rules meant to ensure they do not coordinate with candidates. It would also provide more public funding for congressional candidates who focus their fundraising on small donors.
The legislation named for Lewis is a response to Supreme Court decisions that struck down provisions of the Voting Rights Act. In 2013, the court ended the ability to enforce a key portion of the act that required the Department of Justice or a court to sign off on changes to election policies made by jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination. Eight years later, the court made it harder to win discrimination lawsuits brought under the Voting Rights Act.