Election law isn't voter suppression

The Democratic opposition to legislative minorities using whatever leverage they have to block legislation is highly situational.

In Washington, D.C., where Democrats control the White House and both chambers of Congress, the Senate filibuster is portrayed as a Jim Crow relic that is profoundly undemocratic.

In Austin, Texas, where Republicans control the governor’s mansion and both chambers of the Legislature, House Democrats walking out to prevent the passage of a bill with majority support is portrayed as a heroic act preserving our democracy.

The bill in question is an election reform measure that Democrats allege is the latest instance of state-level GOP voter suppression.

The only recourse, they say, is at the federal level.

The Senate filibuster should be eliminated — so much for the rights of legislative minorities — and then the narrowest-possible Democratic Senate majority should pass HR1, overriding long-standing, duly-passed election laws all around the country and essentially federalizing our elections.

Democracy, they tell us, demands nothing less.

To the contrary, this would be a power grab carried out under blatantly false pretenses.

The Texas bill is no more a voter suppression measure than the Georgia election law that passed a few months ago, which occasioned outraged accusations of the arrival of Jim Crow 2.0 that ultimately fell flat.

The least defensible part of the Texas law is its provision saying that early voting on the Sunday before the election can’t begin until 1 p.m., which could crimp the traditional “souls to the polls” turn-out efforts of black churches. A Republican legislator says this was a drafting error. Regardless, the provision should — and almost certainly will be — changed.

The rest of the legislation is unobjectionable. It pushes back against what were supposed to be temporary expedients during the pandemic, such as drive-thru voting and 24-hour early-voting marathons.

It explicitly forbids election officials implementing practices not contemplated under the state’s election statutes, as sometimes happened during the pandemic.

In many counties, it will extend the daily minimum hours for early voting by one hour.

In certain circumstances, by the way, employers are required to give employees time off to go vote.

It would ban public officials from sending out unsolicited mail-in ballots, a commonsense provision to keep excess ballots from floating around.

It would mandate that all voting systems have a paper trail on or before 2026, with a funding incentive for counties to comply early.

For sizable jurisdictions that can easily pull it off, it would require live-streaming of vote-counting proceedings.

All of this is reported as “restrictive” in the press, but none of it would actually prevent anyone from voting and there is zero chance the bill would discernibly affect turnout.

To make this proposal the triggering event for a radical change in U.S. Senate rules to pass the most far-reaching, highhanded federal election bill in the country’s history, one that would wipe out countless state laws as well as bipartisan federal election legislation passed over the last 30 years, would be absurdly pretextual and disproportionate.

The Democrats, just like the Republicans, tend to be hypocritical on legislative process questions, depending on what advances their interests. But on one thing they are admirably consistent, whether at the state or federal level, whether in the minority or majority — stirring up self-serving hysteria over GOP election laws.

Rich Lowry can be reached at:

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