The BulleTin • Sunday, March 21, 2021 A9
ACCESS TO THE BALLOT
GOP rallies behind voting limits in the states
BY NICHOLAS RICCARDI AND
MICHAEL BIESECKER
Associated Press
On an invitation-only call
this month, Sen. Ted Cruz
huddled with Republican state
lawmakers to call them to bat-
tle on the issue of voting rights.
Democrats are trying to ex-
pand voting rights to “illegal
aliens” and “child molesters,”
he claimed, and Republicans
must do all they can to stop
them. If they push through
far-reaching election legisla-
tion now before the Senate, the
GOP won’t win elections again
for generations, he said.
Asked if there was room to
compromise, Cruz was blunt:
“No.”
“H.R. 1’s only objective is
to ensure that Democrats can
never again lose another elec-
tion, that they will win and
maintain control of the House
of Representatives and the Sen-
ate and of the state legislatures
for the next century,” Cruz said
told the group organized by the
American Legislative Exchange
Council, a corporate-backed,
conservative group that pro-
vides model legislation to state
legislators.
Cruz’s statements, recorded
by a person on the call and ob-
tained by The Associated Press,
capture the building intensity
behind Republicans’ nation-
wide campaign to restrict ac-
cess to the ballot. From state-
houses to Washington, the fight
over who can vote and how —
often cast as “voting integrity”
— has galvanized a Republican
Party in search of unifying mis-
sion in the post-Trump era. For
a powerful network of conser-
vatives, voting restrictions are
now viewed as a political life-
or-death debate, and the fight
has all-but eclipsed traditional
Republican issues like abortion,
gun rights and tax cuts as an
organizing tool.
That potency is drawing in-
fluential figures and money
from across the right, ensuring
that the clash over the legisla-
tion in Washington will be par-
tisan and expensive.
“It kind of feels like an all-
hands-on-deck moment for
the conservative movement,
when the movement writ large
realizes the sanctity of our
elections is paramount and
voter distrust is at an all-time
high,” said Jessica Anderson,
executive director of Heritage
Action, an influential con-
servative advocacy group in
Washington. “We’ve had a bit
of a battle cry from the grass-
roots, urging us to pick this
fight.”
Several prominent groups
have recently entered the fray:
Anti-abortion rights group,
the Susan B. Anthony List, has
partnered with another con-
servative Christian group to
fund a new organization, the
Election Transparency Initia-
tive. FreedomWorks, a group
formed to push for smaller
government, has initiated a $10
million calling for tighter vot-
ing laws in the states. It will be
run by Cleta Mitchell, a prom-
inent Republican attorney who
advised former President Don-
ald Trump.
Meanwhile, Heritage Ac-
tion has announced a new ef-
fort also focused on changes in
state voting laws. It included a
$700,000 ad campaign to back
GOP-written bills in Georgia,
the group’s first foray into ad-
vocating for state policy.
States at heart of debate
So far, the states have been
the center of the debate. More
than 250 bills have been intro-
duced in 43 states that would
change how Americans vote,
according to a tally by the
Brennan Center for Justice,
which backs expanded voting
access. That includes measures
that would limit mail voting,
cut hours that polling places
are open and impose restric-
tions that Democrats argue
amount to the greatest assault
on voting rights since Jim
Crow.
That push was triggered by
Trump’s lies that he lost the
presidential election due to
fraud — claims rejected by
the courts and by prominent
Republicans — and the Jan.
6 attack on the U.S. Capitol
that those groundless claims
sparked.
Greg Nash/Pool via AP, file
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, speaks
during a Senate Committee on
Homeland Security and Govern-
mental Affairs hearing March 3.
Cruz is among Republicans who
oppose Democratic efforts to ex-
pand voting rights.
But the fight over voting
laws now extends far be-
yond Trump and is shifting to
Washington, where the Dem-
ocratic-led Senate will soon
consider an array of voting
changes. The package, known
as H.R. 1, would require states
to automatically register el-
igible voters, as well as offer
same-day registration. It would
limit states’ ability to purge
registered voters from their
rolls and restore former felons’
voting rights. Among dozens
of other provisions, it would
also require states to offer 15
days of early voting and allow
no-excuse absentee balloting.
Democrats, who are marshal-
ing their own resources behind
the bill, argue it is necessary
to block what they describe as
voter suppression efforts in the
states.
Republicans contend it’s a
grab bag of long-sought Dem-
ocratic goals aimed at tilting
elections in their favor. Cruz
claimed it would lead to voting
by millions of “criminals and
illegal aliens.”
The bill “says America
would be better off if more
murderers were voting, Amer-
ica would be better off if more
rapists and child molesters
were voting,” Cruz said.
He added that he had re-
cently participated in an all-
day strategy call with national
conservative leaders to coor-
dinate opposition. The leaders
agreed that Republicans would
seek to rebrand the Democrat-
ic-backed bill as the “Corrupt
Politicians Act,” he said.
Conservative focus
The focus on voting is visible
across the conservative move-
ment, even among groups with
no clear interest in the voting
debate. At a televised town hall
in February, leading Chris-
tian conservative Tony Perkins
fielded several questions about
voting before tackling topics
on the social issues his Family
Research Council typically fo-
cuses on.
Perkins answered the ques-
tion by recalling how voting
laws were made stricter in his
native Louisiana after a close
1996 Senate race won by Dem-
ocrats. He noted that the state
now votes solidly Republican.
“When you have free, fair
elections, you’re going to have
outcomes that are positive,”
Perkins said before urging
viewers to push state lawmak-
ers to “restore election integ-
rity.”
Stronger voting regulations
have long been a conserva-
tive goal, driven by old — and
some say outdated — conven-
tional wisdom that Republi-
cans thrive in elections with
lower turnout, and Democrats
in ones with more voters. That
has translated to GOP efforts
to tighten voter identification
laws and require more frequent
voter roll purges. Both efforts
tend to disproportionally ex-
clude Black and Latino voters,
groups that lean Democratic.
In a sign of the increasing
attention to the issue last year,
Leonard Leo, a Trump advisor
and one of the strategists be-
hind the conservative focus on
the federal judiciary, formed
The Honest Elections Project
to push for voting restrictions
and coordinate GOP effort to
monitor the 2020 vote.
But the issue expanded be-
yond what many conservatives
expected. As Trump ground-
lessly blamed fraud for his loss,
and he and his allies lost more
than 50 court cases trying to
overturn the election, his con-
servative base became con-
vinced of vague “irregularities”
and holes in the voting system.
While Leo’s group, like other
parts of the establishment
GOP, kept a distance from
such claims, state lawmakers
stepped in quickly with bills
aimed at fixing phantom prob-
lems and restoring confidence
in the system.
“We’re certain our vote will
count, we’re certain our vote is
secure, we’re certain our sys-
tem is fair and not having any
sort of nefarious activities,” said
Iowa Rep. Bobby Kaufmann,
a Republican who authored a
wide-ranging election bill that
shortened the state’s early vot-
ing period.
Leo’s group has since re-
leased a list of its preferred vot-
ing law changes.
Similarly, other outside
groups soon jumped into the
debate that’s roiling their activ-
ists who write the letters, make
phone calls and send the small
donations that keep the groups
relevant.
“It’s gone up the chain of pri-
ority,” said Noah Wall, execu-
tive vice president of Freedom-
Works, which trained 60 top
activists in Orlando last week-
end on voting issues. “If you
were to poll our activists right
now, election integrity is going
to be near the top of the list.
Twelve months ago, that wasn’t
the case.”
An elections worker
sorts secrecy sleeves
from counted ballots
at the Multnomah
County Elections Divi-
sion in Portland for the
2020 Oregon primary
election in May. Ore-
gon elections are held
entirely by mail. In
dozens of other states,
more than 250 bills
have recently been in-
troduced either to limit
mail voting or other-
wise change how elec-
tions are conducted.
Bradley W. Parks/OPB file
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