With President Biden’s $1.9 trillion pandemic aid bill now on a course for safe passage, Democrats are turning their attention to a very different emergency: the Republican-led push to make voting harder. More than 250 bills intended to tighten voting rules are currently wending their way through the legislatures of 43 states, many in response to the easing of election laws that made the record turnout in the 2020 presidential election possible.

“I don’t say this lightly,” Michael McDonald, a political scientist at the University of Florida, recently wrote. “We are witnessing the greatest rollback of voting rights in this country since the Jim Crow era.”

Here’s a look at the policy debate over how to stop it.
The rise of ‘James Crow, Esquire’

Democracy as Americans know it today has existed in the United States only since 1965, when the Voting Rights Act was passed to end the disenfranchisement of African-Americans in much of the country. But in 2013, the Supreme Court struck down the heart of that law, which required states with a history of racially discriminatory voting laws and practices to gain federal approval before making even minor changes to voting procedures, like moving a polling place, or major ones, like redrawing electoral districts.

In the years since, the Republican Party has tried to improve its electoral fortunes by reducing turnout, particularly among minorities, often using false or grossly exaggerated claims of voter fraud to justify poll closures, cutbacks to early voting, voter purges and other forms of voter suppression. That project — which some civil rights activists have dubbed “James Crow, Esquire” — gained new momentum after former President Donald Trump attributed his loss in November to the lie that the election was stolen.

The rationale is often explicit. In a Supreme Court case last week, for example, Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked why the Arizona Republican Party wanted to keep votes cast at the wrong precinct from being counted. “Because it puts us at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats,” the party’s lawyer responded. “Politics is a zero-sum game.”
The New York Times