Read the legislation that Republicans have been passing to stop people from voting

Ear­ly this year, the Repub­li­can Par­ty lost con­trol of the White House and the Unit­ed States Sen­ate to the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty after Joe Biden, Kamala Har­ris, the Rev­erend Raphael Warnock, and Jon Ossoff were sworn into office.

Since then, Repub­li­can state leg­is­la­tors in sev­er­al states, espe­cial­ly across the Sun Belt, have been work­ing furi­ous­ly on schemes aimed at stop­ping peo­ple from vot­ing in future elec­tions. And not just any peo­ple, but peo­ple who would most like­ly sup­port Demo­c­ra­t­ic can­di­dates and pro­gres­sive causes.

Four states so far have adopt­ed or are poised to adopt sweep­ing anti-vot­er and anti-par­tic­i­pa­tion bills: Geor­gia, Flori­da, Iowa, and Texas. These schemes have right­ful­ly been sub­ject­ed to crit­i­cism and scruti­ny in the mass media, with analy­sis of harms and deep dives into the agen­das of the Repub­li­cans devis­ing the harms.

But while cov­er­age of these bills isn’t too far to find — a quick news search will yield plen­ty of arti­cles — the actu­al bills them­selves are hard­er to find.

That’s why I’ve writ­ten this post. As a research-dri­ven orga­ni­za­tion, we are believ­ers in the use­ful­ness of pri­ma­ry sources. Even a pri­ma­ry source that con­tains pro­pa­gan­da and improp­er state­ments of leg­isla­tive intent can be useful.

So, here are the texts of each one of these anti-vot­ing bills. Note that many of the most oner­ous pro­vi­sions are buried deep with­in. You’ll need to read care­ful­ly to find them. You may want to scroll to the end of each bill and read backwards.

We’ll start with Iowa, the Hawk­eye State, which was first out of the gate.

Iowa: Senate File 413

Gov­er­nor Kim Reynolds signed SF 413 back in March. Among oth­er things, this bill reduces the hours of polling places and requires that bal­lots returned by mail be received before polls close, which is designed to increase dis­qual­i­fi­ca­tion rates.

“This is the first major sup­pres­sion law since the 2020 elec­tion. Expect lit­i­ga­tion here and else­where [as] GOP leg­is­la­tures fol­low this path,” Demo­c­ra­t­ic lawyer Marc Elias tweet­ed on March 8th. (Elias sub­se­quent­ly par­tic­i­pat­ed in the fil­ing of a law­suit against this leg­is­la­tion; the orig­i­nal com­plaint is avail­able here.)

Georgia: Senate Bill 202

Next up is the Peach Tree State. Due to the state’s Demo­c­ra­t­ic flip last year, SB 202 has prob­a­bly received the most atten­tion of any of the bills dis­cussed in this post. SB 202 was adopt­ed back in April by Geor­gia Repub­li­cans and Gov­er­nor Bri­an Kemp. Here’s a two minute run­down from Stacey Abrams on what’s in it. You can watch Stacey’s com­ments either before or after you read the bill.

Two law­suits are pend­ing against the State of Geor­gia that con­tend SB 202 is uncon­sti­tu­tion­al. One was filed by a coali­tion that includes the SCLC, Geor­gia Adapt, Geor­gia Mus­lim Vot­er Project, and Lati­no Com­mu­ni­ty Fund Geor­gia. You can read the amend­ed com­plaint from that coali­tion here.

Florida: Senate Bill 90

We move now to the Sun­shine State. Gov­er­nor Ron DeSan­tis was so proud of his state’s adop­tion of leg­is­la­tion to dis­en­fran­chise vot­ers and so intent on pleas­ing Don­ald Trump that he arranged for the Fox Noise Chan­nel to have exclu­sive access to the bill sign­ing venue and asso­ci­at­ed “media avail­abil­i­ty”.

Elias and the Democ­ra­cy Dock­et team filed a law­suit against the State of Flori­da min­utes after DeSan­tis signed SB 90. The ini­tial com­plaint can be read here.

Texas: Senate Bill 7

Unlike the oth­er states, Texas’ assault on vot­ing is not yet final because Gov­er­nor Greg Abbott has not signed it. How­ev­er, there is no ques­tion that Abbott will sign it — he has repeat­ed­ly stat­ed how eager he is to put his sig­na­ture on it.

The text below is the con­fer­ence com­mit­tee’s report, from yesterday.

At over two hun­dred pages, it’s a rather lengthy piece of leg­is­la­tion. The Texas Tri­bune describes it as “an expan­sive bill that would touch near­ly the entire vot­ing process, includ­ing pro­vi­sions to lim­it ear­ly vot­ing hours, cur­tail local vot­ing options and fur­ther tight­en vot­ing-by-mail, among sev­er­al oth­er provisions.”

“It was nego­ti­at­ed behind closed doors over the last week after the House and Sen­ate passed sig­nif­i­cant­ly dif­fer­ent ver­sions of the leg­is­la­tion and pulled from each chamber’s ver­sion of the bill,” the Tri­bune report­ed. “The bill also came back with a series of addi­tion­al vot­ing rule changes, includ­ing a new ID require­ment for mail-in bal­lots, that weren’t part of pre­vi­ous debates on the bill.”

Here in the Pacif­ic North­west, which has two Demo­c­ra­t­ic tri­fec­tas (locat­ed in Wash­ing­ton and Ore­gon, respec­tive­ly), we have most­ly been work­ing to get rid of bar­ri­ers to vot­ing instead of putting up new ones.

Attempts to take us back­ward have gone absolute­ly nowhere.

For exam­ple, Doug Erick­sen (R‑WA-42nd Dis­trict: What­com Coun­ty) intro­duced a bill to get rid of vote at home, but it died a moment after it went into the hop­per. It nev­er received a hear­ing and non­par­ti­san staff spent no time ana­lyz­ing it.

Ida­ho is sad­ly a dif­fer­ent story.

Repub­li­can leg­is­la­tors made assault­ing the right to vote and peti­tion a cen­tral focus of the 2021 ses­sion, as this arti­cle from the Ida­ho States­man dis­cuss­es.

A lot of effort went into mak­ing it much more dif­fi­cult to qual­i­fy a statewide ini­tia­tive to the Gem State bal­lot with Sen­ate Bill 1110, because ini­tia­tives can be used to put ideas direct­ly in front of the peo­ple for adop­tion and there­by bypass Ida­ho’s Repub­li­can-con­trolled Legislature.

Repub­li­can Gov­er­nor Brad Lit­tle signed SB 1110 into law on April 19th.

The adop­tion of SB 1110 did not draw any com­ment or protest from neigh­bor­ing Wash­ing­ton-based Repub­li­cans such as failed guber­na­to­r­i­al can­di­date Tim Eyman, who claim to be staunch defend­ers of direct democracy.

Nor have attempts to pass sim­i­lar bills in more than a dozen oth­er states — a nation­wide effort being tracked by our friends at the Bal­lot Ini­tia­tive Strat­e­gy Cen­ter which recent­ly drew the atten­tion of The New York Times.

From Repub­li­cans’ point of view, the ini­tia­tive, ref­er­en­dum, and recall are appar­ent­ly only worth hav­ing in states with Demo­c­ra­t­ic tri­fec­tas or Demo­c­ra­t­ic gov­er­nors. Oth­er­wise, they’re more trou­ble than they’re worth.

The pres­ence of Orwellian lan­guage in the afore­men­tioned Texas, Iowa, Geor­gia, and Flori­da bills (e.g. the use of the name Elec­tion Integri­ty Pro­tec­tion Act) sug­gests that Repub­li­cans are wor­ried about their schemes hold­ing up in court, even if they’re con­fi­dent that they will ulti­mate­ly not be held account­able for pre­vent­ing most­ly Demo­c­ra­t­ic vot­ers from vot­ing in the court of pub­lic opinion.

The law­suit filed by the League of Women Vot­ers against Flori­da’s SB 90 observes in one of its open­ing pas­sages that Repub­li­cans real­ly did­n’t both­er to devel­op a pol­i­cy ratio­nale for the bill. That’s because there isn’t one. SB 90, sim­ply put, is designed to please Don­ald Trump and the cult that wor­ships him.

Togeth­er, these fore­go­ing pro­vi­sions (“Chal­lenged Pro­vi­sions”) tar­get almost every aspect of the vot­ing process, and they do so with­out a legit­i­mate pur­pose, much less a com­pelling state inter­est that can jus­ti­fy their restric­tions on the franchise.

State Sen­a­tor Per­ry Thurston was cor­rect when he described the bill as just one more chap­ter in Florida’s “sor­did his­to­ry” of “try­ing to make it hard­er for peo­ple to vote.”

As Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Omari Hardy apt­ly observed, the bill is “about mak­ing sure that bal­lots cast by eli­gi­ble vot­ers don’t count because they didn’t jump through the myr­i­ad hoops that this bill cre­ates,” and amounts to noth­ing more than “leg­isla­tive engi­neer­ing of the elec­torate to shave off in par­tic­u­lar peo­ple of color.”

The pro­po­nents of the bill had no mean­ing­ful rebuttal. 

The leg­is­la­tor who led the efforts to pass SB 90 in the Flori­da Sen­ate, Sen­a­tor Den­nis Bax­ley, effec­tive­ly acknowl­edged as much, offer­ing instead this glib ratio­nale for the bill: “Some peo­ple say ‘why?’ and I say ‘why not?’ Let’s try it. We can always do it dif­fer­ent­ly next week or next month or next year, but why not try this?”

The answer is because it will deprive law­ful Florid­i­ans of their most fun­da­men­tal rights, under­min­ing the integri­ty of the state’s elec­tions, and once bal­lots are cast, there will be no mean­ing­ful redress for injured vot­ers. The states may be “lab­o­ra­to­ries of democ­ra­cy,” but those “exper­i­ments” must stay with­in the con­fines of the fed­er­al con­sti­tu­tion. This one does not. 

It should be declared invalid and enjoined.

The Unit­ed States bad­ly needs new fed­er­al leg­is­la­tion that would address these state-based attacks on vot­ing. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, H.R. 1 (the For the Peo­ple Act) is present­ly stuck in the Sen­ate because sen­a­tors like Dianne Fein­stein, Joe Manchin, and Kyrsten Sine­ma would rather keep the fil­i­buster than keep our Repub­lic. Unless they can be per­suad­ed to change their minds, the only avail­able means of over­turn­ing these attacks on vot­ing will be judi­cial or bal­lot based.