But they're just concerrned about election security. Also, Republicans are shameless.In a private meeting last month with big-money donors, the head of a top conservative group boasted that her outfit had crafted the new voter suppression law in Georgia and was doing the same with similar bills for Republican state legislators across the country. “In some cases, we actually draft them for them,” she said, “or we have a sentinel on our behalf give them the model legislation so it has that grassroots, from-the-bottom-up type of vibe.”
The Georgia law had “eight key provisions that Heritage [Action for America, a sister organization of the Heritage Foundation,] recommended.” [...] Those included policies severely restricting mail ballot drop boxes, preventing election officials from sending absentee ballot request forms to voters, making it easier for partisan workers to monitor the polls, preventing the collection of mail ballots, and restricting the ability of counties to accept donations from nonprofit groups seeking to aid in election administration.
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[A] leaked video reveals the extent to which Heritage is leading a massive campaign to draft and pass model legislation restricting voting access, which has been swiftly adopted this year in the battleground states of Georgia, Florida, Arizona, and Iowa.
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To “create this echo chamber,” as [Jessica Anderson, Heritage Action executive director,] put it, Heritage is spending $24 million over two years in eight battleground states—Arizona, Michigan, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Nevada, Texas, and Wisconsin—to pass and defend restrictive voting legislation. Every Tuesday, the group leads a call with right-wing advocacy groups like the Susan B. Anthony List, Tea Party Patriots, and FreedomWorks to coordinate these efforts at the highest levels of the conservative movement. “We literally give marching orders for the week ahead,” Anderson said. “All so we’re singing from the same song sheet of the goals for that week and where the state bills are across the country.”
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Anderson said Heritage Action wrote “19 provisions” in a Texas House bill that would make it a criminal offense for election officials to give a mail ballot request form to a voter who hadn’t explicitly asked for one and would subject poll workers to criminal penalties for removing partisan poll challengers who are accused of voter intimidation.
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“We are going to take the fierce fire that is in every single one of our bellies,” Anderson told the donors in April, “to right the wrongs of November.”
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The Heritage Foundation was co-founded in 1973 by Paul Weyrich.
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“I don’t want everybody to vote,” he said [in 1980 at a meeting of evangelical leaders in Dallas]. “Elections are not won by a majority of the people. They never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” [...]
"[W]e provided testimony, expert witnesses, analysis, and actually how to draft these bills so that they were legally tight,” Anderson said. “So, [Democratic voting rights lawyer] Marc Elias, if you know that name from the progressive left, he’s like their legal pit bull. He goes after all of this with lawsuits, so that Marc Elias can’t find any holes.”
Elias has filed a suit challenging the Georgia law. “The Georgia law violates both the Voting Rights Act and the US Constitution,” Elias told Mother Jones. “Heritage Action claiming that this is legally tight is like hearing from the Titanic shipbuilders about how much confidence they have in its maiden voyage. This law is based on a Big Lie, denies Black, Brown, and young voters of their rights, and will be struck down in court.”
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Anderson also took credit for a Arizona law enacted in early April that prohibits election officials from accepting private funding, which was used in 2020 in both red and blue counties for things like opening more polling locations and drop box sites, saying, “We’re kicking Mark Zuckerberg out of all of our state and federal elections.” And she claimed that another bill signed by Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey on Tuesday, which could purge more than 100,000 people from the state’s list of voters who automatically receive a mail ballot, was “straight from the Heritage recommendations.”
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Other measures Anderson said Heritage drafted included “three provisions” in legislation adopted by Iowa Republicans a few weeks before Georgia’s law, including one placing voters on inactive status if they sit out one election cycle and removing them from the rolls if they fail to take action, a system that could lead hundreds of thousands of voters to be purged.
“Iowa is the first state that we got to work in, and we did it quickly and we did it quietly,” Anderson said. “We worked quietly with the Iowa state legislature. We got the best practices to them. We helped draft the bills. We made sure activists were calling the state legislators, getting support, showing up at their public hearings, giving testimony…Little fanfare. Honestly, nobody even noticed. My team looked at each other and we’re like, ‘It can’t be that easy.’” (Elias has also filed suit against the Iowa law.)
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To Elias, the video from the Heritage summit is proof that Republican state lawmakers are pursuing voting restrictions not in response to real local problems, but at the behest of well-funded Washington insiders. “It’s not being run by a coalition of state legislators,” he says. “It’s not being run by election administrators. It’s being run out of an office in Washington, DC, by people whose sole agenda is to make it harder for Black, Brown, and young voters to participate in the electoral process. Republicans who adopt these model laws should be ashamed of themselves.”
Mother Jones
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
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