Private jets fraud and the Civil War lots of smoke but little fire in US voter debate

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Washington: It’s a hard task for state politicians to seize the national spotlight in America. But Democratic members of the Texas House of Representatives achieved that this week by fleeing their home state for Washington to avoid voting on proposed changes to electoral laws.

In order to pass a bill, the Texas state House requires a “quorum” of at least 100 members to be present in the 150-person chamber. Because most House Democrats have left the state, an attempt by Texas Republicans to tighten voting laws in the state has now stalled.

The Texas Democrats, who will have to remain out of the state until early August to pull off their gambit, have been greeted as heroes in left-leaning Washington. Vice-President Kamala Harris met with the legislators on Thursday (AEDT) and praised them for their “bold, courageous action”.

US Vice President Kamala Harris compared the Texas Democrats to anti-slavery crusader Frederick Douglass.Credit:Bloomberg

Harris said the Texas Democrats were in line with the legacy of anti-slavery crusader Frederick Douglass and “all those folks who shed blood” in efforts to pass the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act.

This was a big overreach: staying at a plush hotel in the US capital for a month is hardly putting one’s life on the line for democracy. Harris’s comments were just the latest example of the hyperbole that dominates America’s high-pitched debate on voting rights - both on the left and the right.

A day earlier President Joe Biden described Republican attempts to tighten election laws across the country as “the most dangerous threat to voting and the integrity of free and fair elections in our history”.

Biden later called the push “an assault on democracy, an assault on liberty, an assault on who we are as Americans”.

President Joe Biden delivers an impassioned speech on voting rights at the National Constitution Centre in Philadelphia. Credit:AP

There’s no doubt that the attempt by Republican legislators to toughen voting rules is sweeping. According to the Brennan Centre for Justice, a think tank that focuses on voting rights, 17 US states have enacted new laws restricting access to the vote this year - and more will follow.

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Republican state legislators have justified the laws by arguing they need to safeguard election integrity and prevent fraud - even though, despite Donald Trump’s false claims, there was no evidence of meaningful voter fraud in the 2020 election. The Department of Homeland Security described last year’s election as “the most secure in American history”.

But when you dig into the detail of the laws being proposed in various states, they’re often far less significant than the Democrats’ alarmist rhetoric suggests.

Republican-controlled Texas, for example, already has some of the toughest voting laws in the country (and among the lowest voter rates of voter turnout).

The latest proposals - the ones that prompted the Democratic legislators to flee to Washington - would create new ID requirements for those who choose to vote by mail. Those using a postal vote would have to provide their driver’s licence number or the last four digits of their Social Security number.

The bill would also ban drive-thru voting and 24-hour voting - two innovations that were tested in the Dallas area last year to make it easier for people to vote in a pandemic.

Texas state Representative Jessica Gonzalez speaks after House Democrats pulled off a dramatic, last-ditch walkout.Credit:AP

These changes represent a tinkering at the margins rather than a fundamental overhaul of voting laws in Texas or a return to the Jim Crow laws that blocked African Americans in southern states from voting. The Dallas Morning News explained this in an editorial headlined “Hyperbole is drowning the facts”.

“We’ve repudiated the narrative pushed by former President Donald Trump that the election was stolen from him,” the paper said this week. “But we shouldn’t dismiss any effort to curb voter fraud as illegitimate. It is possible to make elections safer without disenfranchising voters.”

A similar brouhaha occurred earlier this year when Georgia Republicans tightened voting laws in the now pivotal swing state. Biden’s claim at the time that the new law “ends voting hours early so working people can’t cast their vote after their shift is over” was found to be completely false by The Washington Post’s fact-checking team.

The truth is that both Republican and Democrats are playing to their bases in the voting rights debate: they are trying to raise donations from party activists and gin up enthusiasm ahead of next year’s midterm elections.

The party in power usually struggles in the midterms, and the Democrats are hoping that their arguments about voter suppression will fire up their supporters to show up to vote. Texas Democrats also hope their theatrical arrival in the US capital will increase the pressure on Senate Democrats to scrap the 60-vote “filibuster” threshold, thereby allowing the party to pass their own federal voting rights bill.

To be sure, few Australians would trade their country’s voting system for America’s complicated, decentralised and politically-charged electoral laws. And Trump’s attempts to reverse the outcome of the election exposed weaknesses in America’s electoral system, including the potential for state legislatures to override the will of voters and his supporters’ willingness to storm the Capitol to disrupt the certification of Biden’s victory.

But claims that changes to voting rules in states like Texas and Georgia pose an existential threat to American democracy are detached from reality - just like the argument there was widespread fraud in last year’s election.

Matthew Knott is North America correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

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