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If you listen to some leading liberal voices, the Senate defeat of the Freedom To Vote and John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Acts could sound the death knell of American democracy.
Across the country, at the state and local level, Trump supporters are volunteering or running for local positions that would put them in charge of the mechanics of elections. According to an NPR analysis, at least 15 Republicans who doubt or deny the legitimacy of Biden’s election victory are campaigning for state secretaries of state. For anyone concerned with American democracy, defeating these candidates should be a priority.
Republicans are certainly still working to erode Democrats’ access to the ballot box, in ways that really do threaten American democracy. But their work has not been quite as effective as some dire analyses assumed (including my own), giving reformers more time to come up with solutions before the system is past the point of no democratic return.
The story is different when it comes to election subversion. Anti-democratic forces are moving to seize control over the system more swiftly than even some of the most pessimistic analyses had feared.
Across the country, Republican partisans motivated by Trump’s lies are flooding precincts and contesting election administration positions. Georgia’s new election law, SB202, gives the Republican legislature power to seize partisan control over local election administration.
And all of this is backed by a Republican base that overwhelmingly believes Trump’s lies about a stolen 2020 election and a propaganda network, ranging from Fox News to Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, aimed at ensuring their minds are never changed.
The voting rights legislation would have helped address some of the concerns about voter suppression. The Freedom to Vote Act, in particular, included chain of custody provisions that make it harder to outright manipulate vote counts and safeguards against state governments from removing election officials from their positions absent “good cause.”
In their book Dictators and Democrats, political scientists Stephan Haggard and Robert Kaufman analyze what causes countries to transition from democracy to autocracy — and vice versa. One of their core findings is that, when a democracy is tottering, laws provide less of a bulwark on their own than most people think. Rules need people to help enforce them; when it comes to democracy, one of the law’s best guarantors are the citizens themselves.
So in 2022, many of the biggest fights for democracy are hyper-local: races for county executive, judgeships, election administration positions, and statehouses. If pro-democracy candidates can win these races in large numbers, they will collectively pose a significant barrier to an election subversion campaign in 2024.
This is the kind of effort liberals need to look toward today. Paradoxically, the failure of voting rights bills in Congress could give this cause a boost by directing activist energy away from Washington.
The future looks grim for American democracy. But liberals shouldn’t allow realistic pessimism to shade into resignation or despair. Democrats in Washington may have squandered an opportunity to safeguard future elections, but many of the key battles to protect our democracy have yet to be fought.
Captain
Article URL : https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22876361/freedom-to-vote-act-senate-filibuster-what-next