Politico Tag

The latest failure of comprehensive voting rights reform on the federal level has prompted renewed flurries of activity from felon voting rights advocates on the state level. The Freedom to Vote Act, which failed to pass the US Senate, would have restored voting rights to any US citizen, regardless of felony status, provided they were no longer serving in prison at the time of an election. Despite this failure, activists remain cautiously optimistic - the number of states that offer automatic voting rights restoration

While Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) have been the Senators in their party most vocally opposed to eliminating the chamber’s 60-vote threshold for passing filibustered legislation, a number of other Senate Democrats have expressed their own qualified reservations more quietly. Mark Kelly, Arizona’s other Senator, says he is still not sure how he would vote on changes to the filibuster that Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) might bring to the floor. Senator Jon Tester (D-MT) favors returning to the “talking filibuster” of

Senator from Arizona Kyrsten Sinema continues to oppose her fellow Democrats’ evolving efforts to modify the filibuster in order to pass voting rights reforms. While Sinema insists that she supports both the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, she remains unwilling to weaken the 60-vote requirement for the passage of such legislation. A spokesman for Sinema says that the Arizona Senator is concerned that weakening the filibuster could mean that, in the future when Republicans once again have

Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott is insisting that his Secretary of State’s decision to audit the 2020 election results in several counties is not entirely due to former President Trump’s recent call to “get to the bottom of the 2020 election scam!” Facing questions after a much-criticized audit in Maricopa County, Arizona simply reaffirmed Biden’s victory there - and by an even greater margin than previous thought - Governor Abbott defended Texas’s decision to proceed with its own audits in broad civic terms: “Why

Democratic Leadership in the House of Representatives and the Senate are scrambling to pull off separate but related legislative gambits before new voting districts are drawn across the country, but many are doubtful that either chamber’s plans will come to fruition. In the House, Speaker Nancy Pelosi hopes to persuade her caucus to approve some version of the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act in the next few weeks - a bill to restore federal preclearance powers on state voting laws, which might have