Voting Rights

“It’s a false choice. It has to be both,” said Stephen Spaulding, senior counsel for public policy and government affairs at Common Cause, a government watchdog group. “They’re both critically important pieces of legislation and it’s a false choice to say I’m for the other and not for this. Because only together will we fully rebalance the state of voting in America to favor access.” Advocates are heartened by polling that shows the measure is extremely popular and the fact that Democrats have held together so far and brought the bill to the verge of a Senate floor vote despite some grumbling from their own caucus. “What you’re seeing is a commitment to a floor vote and getting people on record,” Spaulding said. If Democrats went into the 2022 midterms without doing anything to protect voting rights, it would be disastrous, advocates said. “Voters showed up in record numbers to choose new leadership. There were commitments made across multiple Congresses on both bills and so saying ‘we tried’ isn’t going to work,” Spaulding said. “If these bills weren’t to go to President Biden’s desk, they’d have … to articulate why they did nothing when they had the power to do so.”

Aunna Dennis, executive director of Common Cause Georgia, said the lawsuit is another attempt to sow doubt about the 2020 election results — and raise “lots of money” in the process. She suggested that the examination would be used to try to justify more voting restrictions in the state after the GOP-majority legislature passed a sweeping voting law earlier this spring. “It’s a cynical strategy,” she said in a statement. “Create artificial ‘doubt’ about our election processes, and then use that doubt to make voting harder for the voters you don’t think will vote for you.”

Sylvia Albert, voting and elections director for the voter access advocacy group Common Cause, said curtailing ballot collections would hurt those living in rural areas, native communities, nursing homes, colleges and anyone who lives far from polling sites or doesn’t have the economic means to get there. “Just like everything else, these kinds of illusions and lies about there being problems are being used to suppress access to the ballot for millions of Americans,” she said, referencing the national GOP push to rollback voting rights. “When we don’t allow for access for everyone we’re letting legislators choose their voters, as opposed to letting the voters choose the legislators.”

Today, the Senate Rules Committee took a historic step in considering the For the People Act (S. 1), comprehensive legislation to protect our freedom to vote, ensure that our voices are heard by preventing billionaires from buying our elections, and enable us to elect leaders who represent our interests by making sure district lines are drawn by nonpartisan commissions rather than behind closed doors by incumbent politicians. The bill now heads to the Senate floor. Although congressional Republicans and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell continue to obstruct this bill, the For the People Act remains popular among Republican, Democratic, and independent voters. In fact, key provisions of the bill have already been passed and proven successful in red, blue, and purple states.

Sylvia Albert, Common Cause Director of Voting & Elections, discusses The For the People Act on ABC News Live the day before the bill was scheduled for markup in the Senate Rules Committee.