Democrats want to end filibuster, expand voting rights: A look inside the agenda

Democrats say democracy and voting rights are under attack, and that they will take measures to protect the franchise if they win a sweep in this year's election.

"It’s clear that the people’s voices are being squeezed out of our democracy and that it’s impacting our ability to address a whole range of problems facing the American people," said Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia.

When Vice President Kamala Harris accepted the nomination for president, she pledged to sign into law two voting rights bills if they pass Congress: the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, an update of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act; and the Freedom to Vote Act, a sweeping bill that targets voting access, money in politics, and how congressional maps are drawn.

Democrats have been trying to pass these measures since 2021. "We swore to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, and we will," Harris said in Atlanta in 2022. "We will fight. We will fight to safeguard our democracy. We we will fight to secure our most fundamental freedom — the freedom to vote."

Versions of these bills passed the House two years ago but failed in the Senate, never making it to President Joe Biden’s desk because Republicans used the filibuster, which requires 60 votes to overcome, to block the measures. All 50 Democrats at the time supported the new voting laws, but two senators, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who later left the party to become independents, were unwilling to change procedural rules in order to pass the bills.

“One of the first things I want to do, should we have the presidency and keep the majority, is change the rules and enact both the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Act,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer told a panel in Chicago, according to the Washington Post.

“This is vital to democracy,” Schumer told the Post about the two bills. “This is not just another extraneous issue. This is the wellspring of it all.”

Implementing the agenda is an uphill battle that requires the Democrats to win back the House from the Republican Party, keep a majority in the Senate, and win the White House. The Senate may be their biggest obstacle because three Democratic seats are up for election are in states that Republicans consistently carry — Montana, Ohio, and West Virginia.

But if the Democrats can pull it off, what they're proposing is the biggest expansion of voting rights in a generation. Here's a look at their plans.

Bringing back federal preclearance

The bill named for civil rights activist and former Democratic Congress member John Lewis would bring back major pieces of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that courts have struck down over decades of litigation. A key one would require states with a history of racial discrimination at the ballot box to get approval from the U.S. Department of Justice or a federal court before enacting new voting laws.

That policy, called preclearance, was designed to stop discrimination before it happened, and was a key part of overturning Southern states' laws that functionally stopped most Black citizens from voting. But the Supreme Court decided in 2013 that the federal government could no longer use decades-old standards to decide whether states should be subject to preclearance because times were no longer "extraordinary" and the states in quest no longer needed such "strong medicine."

“That’s part of why in many places, we are seeing a real surge in voting discrimination and a real increase in voter participation gaps between white voters and nonwhite voters,” Wendy Weiser, the vice president of democracy at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan good government group whose lawyers have sued to protect voting rights. “[It’s] because of this — because we've lost our protections against voting discrimination so hard won back in 1965.”

A study from the Brennan Center earlier this year found that while voter participation has increased overall across the United States, white voters have been driving the trend. The turnout gap between white voters and nonwhite voters increased from 10% to 12% from 2012 to 2020.

In Texas, a photo ID law that was subject to preclearance went into effect immediately after the 2013 decision. A federal court later overturned the law as discriminatory.

The Democrats' bill would create a modern formula for determining which places would be subject to preclearance based on whether a state, county or city has recent evidence of discrimination. The 2013 decision said the old standards were only supposed to last five years but lasted nearly 50.

The political activism arm of the right-wing Heritage Foundation urged lawmakers to vote against the package in 2022, saying the Democrats’ proposal would allow the federal government to “overturn voter ID laws and prevent states from ensuring the integrity of their own elections.”

Ending gerrymandering

The Freedom to Vote Act takes aim at the longtime practice of partisan politicians drawing congressional districtss in unusual shapes so that their party is likely to win more seats. Democrats and Republicans alike have used this practice, called gerrymandering, and ended up in lengthy court battles as people fight the maps.

While it’s illegal to draw maps that discriminate based on race, the Supreme Court has said it’s legal to draw maps that benefit a party. The bill would make partisan map-drawing illegal. As part of the revival of preclearance, the bill would also require certain states to have the federal government review the boundaries before they go into effect.

“There’d still be districts that were heavily Democrat and districts that are heavily Republican, but it wouldn’t allow for some of the shenanigans that we’re seeing now where we have these bizarrely drawn districts that really don’t keep communities cohesively represented,” said Rep. Colin Allred, D-Texas, who helped the House pass the bill in 2021 and is now running for Senate.

“What may be in the interest of one part of the district may not be in the interest of the other part, and that’s counter to the idea of a representative,” said Allred.

Twenty-one states have had their congressional maps challenged in court since they redrew them in 2022, according to the Brennan Center. The majority were drawn by Republicans to benefit Republicans, but Democratic strongholds such as New York were also accused of gerrymandering. As of August, 10 states had ongoing lawsuits.

In Alabama and Louisiana — two states that would have had to have their maps precleared under the old version of the Voting Rights Act — legal challenges arguing gerrymandering led to under-representation of Black voters mean the Nov. 5 ballot will have new majority-Black seats that Democrats are likely to win.

States have tried to end gerrymandering with mixed success, the Brennan Center found. Ohio amended its constitution to prevent gerrymandering, but left politicians in charge of drawing maps, leading to Republican-leaning districts that courts found unconstitutional. An anti-gerrymandering measure will appear on the Nov. 5 ballot in Ohio.

Voter registration

The Freedom to Vote Act would make it easier to register to vote, which almost all states require before casting a ballot. Instead of just being allowed to register to vote when getting a drivers license, motor vehicle offices would be required to register a person to vote unless they specifically opt out.

The bill would also allow people to register to vote on Election Day, ending state cutoff dates that block people from voting if they suddenly decide to vote on or shortly before Election Day. In the aftermath of the 2020 election, some states have moved up those cutoff dates as part of election administration bills.

It would be the most significant expansion of voter registration access since the 1993 law that first required states to allow people to sign up at the motor vehicle offce. But election administration has historically been a local issue, and conservatives call the proposal federal government overreach.

"It would have federalized and micromanaged the election process administered by the states, imposing unnecessary, unwise and likely unconstitutional mandates on the states,” wrote Hans von Spakovsky, an election reform expert at the Heritage Foundation, after the bill failed.

Weiser from the Brennan Center said automatic voter registration is a best practice that’s the law of the land in more than half the country that increases how many people can vote.

Weiser also pointed to an administrative benefit that conservatives have targeted in recent years — accurate voter rolls. She said the automatic voter registration process is all electronic, and the burden goes on the government to update records, not on the citizen to fill out the application.

“You don’t have all of the errors when people are typing in information, when people are deciphering handwriting, when people are assisting people in filling out forms,” she said.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Here's what's in the Democrats' democracy and voting rights agenda