After Republicans spent the past two years passing voter suppression bills, progressives in several states are gearing up to fight back next year with legislation that would increase voting rights.

In the last week, lawmakers in states ranging from Florida to Virginia to New Jersey pre-filed bills to help Americans access the ballot box and ensure that citizens aren’t disenfranchised.

• FLORIDA: HB 25 to ease restrictions on registration groups. Rep. Darryl Rouson (D) pre-filed legislation to undo the change last session that hamstrung voter registration groups like the League of Women Voters by requiring that they submit completed forms within 48 hours to the minute or face fines. The move had forced outside organizations to shut down their operations, which harmed minorities and other groups of voters who tend to benefit from registration drives. A federal judge invalidated the suppression law earlier this year. Rouson’s bill would remove it from the books entirely and restore previous law, which allowed 10 days for groups to submit registration forms.
• NEW JERSEY: AB 3553 to establish early voting. New Jersey is one of just 18 states that doesn’t have some form of early voting. That could change next year if AB 3553, sponsored by seven New Jersey assemblymen, is passed. The bill would establish a 28-day early voting period in the state, from the fourth Monday before the election through the final Sunday prior to Election Day.
• VIRGINIA: HB 1361 to allow anyone to vote absentee. Delegate Jim Scott (D) introduced a bill to permit “no-excuse” absentee voting in Virginia. If passed, any Virginian would be allowed to vote via absentee ballot, not just those residents who are out of town on Election Day.
• VIRGINIA: HJ 563 to restore voting rights for ex-felons. Delegate Joe Morrissey introduced legislation that would restore voting rights for individuals who were convicted of a felony but have finished repaying their debt to society. Currently, Virginia is one of just four states that strip voting rights from millions of citizens by permanently disenfranchising people who have ever been convicted of a felony.

In addition, after some Floridians were forced to wait in line more than six hours to vote, officials in Miami-Dade County sent a request to the Florida state legislature this week to extend the early voting period in populous counties.

A new study by Wisconsin’s Government Accountability Board, the non-partisan board that oversees the state’s elections, suggests a proposal to eliminate the state’s vaunted same-day voter registration system would carry a massive price tag. The plan — proposed by members of the Republican majorities in the state legislature and backed by Gov. Scott Walker (R) — would initially cost approximately $5.2 million and would not reduce the workload for local clerks, the report found.

The Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel notes:

Wisconsin has allowed people to register at the polls since 1976. Because of the state law allowing election-day registration, Wisconsin is exempt from aspects of the federal Motor Voter Act of 1993 and the federal Help America Vote Act of 2002. Eliminating election-day registration would make those provisions kick in and require people to be given voter registration forms at Division of Motor Vehicles offices and public assistance offices.

Even if lawmakers repeal the election-day registration law, those who moved within the same jurisdiction between elections would still be able to update their voter registrations at the polls under federal law. Federal law would also require Wisconsin clerks to keep names on their poll lists for longer periods of time. Removing voters from the list would be a more costly, cumbersome process that would require sending mail to all voters in an effort to weed out those who have moved, died or otherwise should come off the rolls.

Under the current system, Wisconsin has one of the highest voter participation rates in the country. But beyond suppressing voter turnout, elimination of same-day voter registration would mean millions in new costs for a state that, according to Walker, required a massive “budget repair bill” in 2011 to cut $1.25 billion in aid to education and local governments.

Local clerks and citizens groups have strongly opposed the proposed change. Among those who took advantage of the state’s same-day voter registration last month was Walker’s own son, whom Walker personally accompanied to the polls.

For the third time in as many years, Missouri lawmakers have proposed legislation to require voter ID in the Show Me State.

This week, state Sen. Will Kraus (R) pre-filed SJR 6, a constitutional amendment which would require a voter ”to identify himself or herself as a United States Citizen and a resident of the state by producing valid, government-issued photo identification.” It would face a voter referendum if approved.

A similar measure passed the legislature earlier this year, but was struck down by a state judge before it reached the ballot because of problems with the ballot language. Republicans tried to enact voter ID in 2011 as well, but the bill was vetoed by Gov. Jay Nixon (D). Nixon cannot veto constitutional amendment language, however, like Kraus has proposed.

In 2006, the Missouri Supreme Court struck down an earlier voter ID law in a 6-1 vote because it violated the state constitution’s guarantee of the right to vote. Kraus’s bill, however, would amend the state constitution to permit a voter ID requirement.

If the bill up passing, a quarter of a million Missourians could be disenfranchised. A 2009 study by Missouri Secretary of State Robin Carnahan (D) identified 230,000 registered voters who may not have the necessary government-issued photo ID.

Since Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) announced last month that eliminating the ability of residents to register on Election Day would be a top priority for his administration next year, opposition to the plan has sprung up across the state.

Immediately after Walker made public his desire to scrap Election Day Registration, which has been in place in the Badger State since the 1970s, he ran into unexpected opposition from the election clerks he claimed would benefit. “There’s no way we’d be in favor of that,” said Diane Hermann-Brown, communications chairwoman of the Wisconsin Municipal Clerks Association, noting that eliminating Election Day Registration would make their jobs more difficult.

Citizens have also begun to organize and rally against Walker’s plan to suppress the vote, including a large rally in Milwaukee this week featuring election officials, lawmakers, and other community figures. Neil Abrecht, executive director of the City of Milwaukee Election Commission, summed up what is so troubling about the proposal in his speech:

“Same day registration has been occurring in the State of Wisconsin for the last 36 years. The practice of administering this process is tightly woven into our election worker training and our Election Day procedures. A change to this practice would have tremendous ramifications to voters, particularly students, renters, and people in poverty; and would create confusion, frustration, and a disillusionment with the democratic process at our voting sites. There are numerous other opportunities to improve election systems and increase the efficiency of voting sites. I would hope that anyone interested in changing this state’s election laws would look at those opportunities before implementing a change that would reduce voter access to the ballot and actually create, not alleviate, a burden to election workers,” said Neil Albrecht, who is the executive director of the City of Milwaukee Election Commission.

Nearly 1 in 5 Milwaukee voters registered on Election Day this year. Statewide, hundreds of thousands of Wisconsinites were only able to vote because of Election Day Registration, leading to an astronomical 70.1 percent turnout rate. This was the fourth highest level in state history, according to the Government Accountability Board.

Wisconsin Republicans are exploring other avenues to make voting more difficult as well. Incoming Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R) wants to eliminate the Government Accountability Board, which has been lauded as a “model for nonpartisan election administration,” and replace it with political appointees. In addition, House Speaker-elect Robin Vos (R) has professed his desire to alter the constitution to allow voter suppression after a state judge ruled that the state’s voter ID law was an unconstitutional violation of the right to vote.

Last year, the Republican-led Florida legislature slashed the state’s early voting period in half and cut out voting on the final Sunday before the election — a day when many African American churches turned out parishioners in high numbers. As a result, long lines were the norm for Floridians this year; some even had to wait six hours or more to vote.

After witnessing the negative effects of reducing early voting from 14 days to 8, a number of state lawmakers have introduced legislation to restore those days that had been axed.

State Sens. Arthenia Joyner (D) and Gwen Margolis (D) have pre-filed two bills, SB 80 and SB 82, that would re-institute 14 days of early voting in Florida, beginning on the 15th day before an election and continuing through the Sunday prior to Election Day.

The News Service of Florida has more:

More voting hours also could be available under the bills. Current law requires at least six hours of voting per day, while the bills would require 12 hours per weekday and 12 hours total on the weekend.

In another change proposed by Joyner and Margolis, local supervisors of elections could expand the types of places where early voting is allowed. Currently, supervisors must offer early voting in the supervisor’s offices, and can allow voting in libraries and city halls. The bills would allow supervisors, if they want, to also offer early voting in other government facilities such as a courthouse, as well as colleges, churches, or community centers. The bills would also prevent counties from reducing the number of early voting sites from what they used in 2008.

Though Republicans control both chambers of the legislature, both incoming Senate President Don Gaetz (R) and incoming House Speaker Will Weatherford (R) have “promised that lawmakers will try to figure out what went wrong on Election Day that led to the long lines, and do something about it.”

The Wisconsin state constitution forbids nearly all laws that restrict the franchise. In its words, “[e]very United States citizen age 18 or older who is a resident of an election district in this state is a qualified elector of that district.” This is why two Wisconsin courts struck down that state’s voter ID law, and it is why 132 years of Wisconsin Supreme Court precedent forbid voter suppression laws such as voter ID.

Wisconsin state Rep. Robin Vos (R), who will serve as Speaker of the Wisconsin State Assembly next year, thinks such robust protection of the right to vote is a problem — and it’s a problem he’s wants to solve:

VOS: I do think that having photo ID is something that is broadly supported by the public. It’s something that I really hope we have in place by the next general election. If there were some serious issues raised by the Dane County court I’m looking to fix those, but ultimately I want to make sure photo ID is the law of Wisconsin.

QUESTION: Very briefly, would you favor beginning the process of changing the state’s constitution to require photo ID because of some of the legal uncertainty around the law?

VOS: Yes, I would favor that. It also takes two sessions, so that wouldn’t be until 2015 even if we did begin that process. Hopefully we can get a statute passed that will be in effect for the 2014 election or sooner.

Watch it:

In the same interview, Vos also endorsed a proposal by Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) to make it harder to vote by eliminating same-day voter registration.

For the record, voter ID laws do not simply violate the Wisconsin Constitution, they also violate the U.S. Constitution. As the Supreme Court explained in Burdick v. Takushi, laws that place a high burden on voters in order to address a particularly weak state interest are unconstitutional. Voter ID laws potentially disenfranchise thousands of voters; and though their supporters attempt to justify them by claiming that they are necessary to prevent voter fraud, the truth is that a person is more likely to be struck by lightning than to commit voter fraud at the polls. One study of Wisconsin voters determined that just 0.00023 percent of votes are the product of in-person fraud.

Nevertheless, in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board the Roberts Court refused to strike down an unconstitutional voter ID law. If President Obama has an opportunity to replace one of the Court’s conservatives, correcting the error in Crawford should be a top priority.

[HT: Amanda Terkel]

After sending poll-watchers to record any suspicious activity at polling locations on Election Day, Tea Party group True the Vote is apparently having some trouble proving their allegedly widespread reports of voter fraud in the presidential election. According to their newsletter, the organization is “still collecting reports of election fraud and process failure” and is waiting for local election officials to respond to their requests for data. While they wait, True the Vote is switching gears to attack a 30-year-old agreement by the Republican and Democratic National Committees meant to stop the Republican Party from caging African American voters.

In a post-election webinar, Catherine Engelbrecht, founder of True the Vote, reported a meeting with RNC chair Reince Priebus in which he explained the RNC could not directly do anything to combat voter fraud because of this agreement. In 1982, the RNC and the New Jersey Republican State Committee agreed not to pursue “ballot security activities” in minority districts, or to target suspected voter fraud based on racial or ethnic criteria. This agreement was necessary because the RNC was caught compiling lists of mostly Black and Latino voters to challenge at the polls and hiring armed guards to police polling places. The consent decree has been employed many times since to protect minority votes. But True the Vote claims the consent decree “robs” poll watchers of their power:

First, the decree effectively robs poll watchers (and the ballot stakeholders that put them there) of their most important function: spotting and neutralizing attempted voter fraud.Indeed, poll watchers will mostly make note of procedural errors that could have negative impacts on voters. However, poll watchers also improve overall faith in the system when electors know that ALL of the rules are being enforced…The RNC is effectively jammed: choosing between developing a system that the federal court and the DNC agree would be flawless or spending time and energy on developing issue ideas or get out the vote efforts. Time and money being finite, the RNC picks GOTV over “Ballot Security.” [...] However, in this Decree comes opportunity. The RNC, DNC and federal courts have basically created a void where true, disinterested election integrity and ballot security can be created. The answer is in YOU. Should citizens fight to have the Decree overturned? No – such action only legitimizes the agreement. Federal law, the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 in particular, empowers you to fight for clean registrations and fair elections in your own communities. Take this whole episode for what it is: an example of how the established political parties and governing interests jockey to consolidate power.

True the Vote is encouraging its volunteers to circumvent the consent decree while distancing itself from the legally-handicapped GOP. Yet the group had no problem coordinating with the GOP during the election, even providing poll watchers for Republican candidates. This coordination could prove complicated not only for True the Vote, which is currently under criminal investigation, but for the RNC. Brentin Mock at Colorlines notes that the RNC could have violated the consent decree through the actions of True the Vote and Tea Party surrogates. A Pittsburgh Tea Party group working for the local Republican Party actively trained poll watchers to target African American neighborhoods as “historical places of fraud” — closely resembling True the Vote language on minority communities. The RNC has not disavowed these surrogates.

Meanwhile, party members not constrained by the decree seem to be jumping at the chance to accuse minorities of voter fraud. Since the election, state-level GOP members have complained that the turnout of “people of color” and “dozens of black people” alone is cause for suspicion.

After his voter suppression tactics landed in him court several times in the lead-up to the 2012 elections, Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted (R) proposed a new scheme to rig the 2012 elections. But following significant criticism for his idea to eliminate Ohio’s status as a swing state, he has backed off the idea.

Two days after the election, Husted said if the state wanted to avoid controversies like the ones he caused, it could change its laws to drop its winner-take-all status in presidential elections. Gov. Tom Corbett (R) and other Republicans in Pennsylvania had unsuccessfully proposed a similar scheme in 2011 to allocate electors based on who wins each gerrymandered Congressional district — and also found with significant opposition. Now, Husted is distancing himself from his own proposal.

In an interview with the Cincinnati Inquirer, Husted claimed his original remarks were “badly taken out of context” and that he does not intend to push such a change:

“My response was that as long as Ohio was a winner-take-all state and maybe the most important swing state in the country, there is no election system that won’t be controversial,” Husted said Wednesday. “I said if the sole goal was to make Ohio elections less controversial, you could fix redistricting so that districts are drawn fairly and more competitive, and then apportion our electoral votes according to congressional districts. That was just a comment, not a proposal.”

Husted added, “I’ve got enough on my plate that needs to be done. … This isn’t one of those things.” Just two small states — Maine and Nebraska — allocate their electors based on Congressional districts.

It is noteworthy that Husted — who fiercely opposed a ballot initiative to create a non-partisan redistricting process in Ohio — tacitly concedes that the Republican gerrymander of the state was not “drawn fairly.” Even though Ohioans voted to re-elect President Obama and Sen. Sherrod Brown (D) statewide, the party won 12 of the state’s 16 Congressional seats in this year’s general elections.

Floridians endured election chaos and marathon voting lines this year, largely thanks to reduced early voting hours, voter purges, and voter registration restrictions pushed by Republican legislators. In an exclusive report by the Palm Beach Post, several prominent Florida Republicans are now admitting that these election law changes were geared toward suppressing minority and Democratic votes.

Former governor Charlie Crist (R-FL) and former GOP chairman Jim Greer (R-FL), as well as several current GOP members, told the Post that Republican consultants pushed the new measures as a way to suppress Democratic voters. Crist expanded early voting hours in 2008 despite party pressure, but Gov. Rick Scott (R-FL) targeted early voting almost immediately when he took office in 2011. Scott’s administration claimed the new laws were meant to curb in-person voter fraud, despite the fact that an individual in Florida is more likely to be struck by lightning than commit voter fraud.

Current party members and consultants confirmed the motive was not to stop voter fraud but to make it harder for Democrats and minorities to vote:

Wayne Bertsch, who handles local and legislative races for Republicans, said he knew targeting Democrats was the goal. “In the races I was involved in in 2008, when we started seeing the increase of turnout and the turnout operations that the Democrats were doing in early voting, it certainly sent a chill down our spines. And in 2008, it didn’t have the impact that we were afraid of. It got close, but it wasn’t the impact that they had this election cycle,” Bertsch said, referring to the fact that Democrats picked up seven legislative seats in Florida in 2012 despite the early voting limitations.

Another GOP consultant, who did not want to be named, also confirmed that influential consultants to the Republican Party of Florida were intent on beating back Democratic turnout in early voting after 2008.

[...]A GOP consultant who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retribution said black voters were a concern. “I know that the cutting out of the Sunday before Election Day was one of their targets only because that’s a big day when the black churches organize themselves,” he said.

Though the state ultimately went to President Obama, the Republican effort to suppress votes was largely successful. A post-election report found that new voting restrictions led to a huge increase in provisional ballots, which are cast when there is some question of the voter’s eligibility.

While crying voter fraud, the Florida GOP had to confront its own scandal when a voter registration firm they hired turned in hundreds of fraudulent registration forms in several Florida counties. The GOP hastily cut ties with the group when the state opened a criminal investigation into their operations.