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The Multipronged Red-State Attack on Voting Rights

Red states aren’t just gerrymandering away voting rights—they’re working overtime to suppress the vote in as many ways as possible.

Editor’s note: This piece was written before the Louisiana v Callais decision removed the necessity to pretend that the Voting Rights Act mattered at all.

In his quest to hold on to power, Donald Trump has been working hard to force through policies to suppress the vote and rig elections. His principal vehicle has been the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, which requires proof of citizenship to vote. Another Trump-inspired proposal, the Make Elections Great Again, or MEGA, Act (so named because these people are in a cult), would ban universal voting by mail. Trump has also turned to his favorite tool, the executive order, to direct the Department of Homeland Security, among other agencies, to compile a list of US citizens that the states can use to establish voter eligibility. The order also curtails the use of mail-in voting.

So far, Trump is closer to taking over Greenland than he is to taking over the federal elections system. His executive order is legally inert; it basically says that citizens, and only citizens, are allowed to vote—which is already a well-established legal principle—and then offers mere suggestions for how states can enforce that principle. The SAVE Act has passed the House of Representatives but is dead in the Senate, where Democrats have filibustered it. The MEGA Act hasn’t even passed the Republican-controlled House yet. Trump can huff and puff as much as he wants, but he cannot, by executive fiat, blow down the entire structure of federal elections.

The states may be a different matter. They can try to pass parts of the SAVE Act, the MEGA Act, and other Trump policies, rigging our elections state by state—which is precisely what some have been doing.

Voting Rights Lab, a national nonprofit, has been doggedly keeping track of all these state-level attempts to suppress voting. As of late April, five states (Florida, Mississippi, South Dakota, Utah, and Kentucky) have passed laws requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote, and six have taken Trump’s executive order to heart, adopting the DHS “citizenship list” to reorganize their voter rolls. In all, 17 states have considered—or are still considering—proposals to require proof of citizenship, while 26 states have considered—or are still considering—adopting the “citizenship list.”

So far, no state has prohibited universal mail-in........

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