Last week, Senator Ted Cruz met with Republican state lawmakers in an invitation-only call to call on them to fight on the issue of the right to vote.
Democrats are trying to extend the right to vote to “illegal aliens” and “child molesters,” he claimed, and Republicans must do everything they can to stop them. If they pass far-reaching electoral legislation before the Senate now, the GOP will not win elections for generations, he said.
Asked if there was room to compromise, Cruz was blunt: “No.”
“The sole purpose of HR 1 is to ensure that Democrats can never lose an election again, that they will gain and maintain control over the House of Representatives and the Senate and over the legislature of the state for the next century,” said Cruz against the group. organized by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a business-backed conservative group that provides model legislation to state legislatures.
Cruz’s statements, recorded by a person on the call and obtained by The Associated Press, reflect the intensity behind the Republicans’ nationwide campaign to limit access to the ballot. From state houses to Washington, the battle for who can vote and how – often pronounced “vote integrity” – has spurred a Republican party to seek a unifying mission in the post-Trump era. For a powerful network of conservatives, voting restrictions are now seen as a life or death political debate, and the struggle has pretty much eclipsed traditional Republican issues like abortion, gun rights and tax cuts as an organizing tool.
That potential draws influential figures and money from across the right, making the clash over Washington legislation biased and costly.
“It feels like an all-hands-on-deck moment for the conservative movement as the movement writes grandly that the sanctity of our elections is paramount and voter mistrust is unprecedented,” said Jessica Anderson, executive director of Heritage Action, an influential conservative advocacy group in Washington. “We’ve had a bit of a rallying cry from the base urging us to choose this fight.”
Several prominent groups have recently entered the fray: the anti-abortion rights group, the Susan B. Anthony List, has partnered with another conservative Christian group to fund a new organization, the Election Transparency Initiative. FreedomWorks, a group formed to push for a smaller government, has called for $ 10 million for tougher state voting laws. It is headed by Cleta Mitchell, a prominent Republican lawyer who advised former President Donald Trump.
Meanwhile, Heritage Action has announced a new effort that is also targeting changes to state voting laws. It included a $ 700,000 ad campaign to support GOP-written bills in Georgia, the group’s first attempt to advocate for state policy.
So far states have been at the center of the debate. More than 250 bills have been filed in 43 states that would change the way Americans vote, according to a count by the Brennan Center for Justice, which advocates extended voting rights. That includes measures that would limit postal voting, shorten polling hours hours of open polls, and impose restrictions that Democrats say are the biggest attack on the right to vote since Jim Crow.
That pressure was fueled by Trump’s lies that he lost the presidential election as a result of fraud – claims rejected by the courts and by prominent Republicans – and the January 6 attack on the Capitol fueled by those baseless claims.
But the battle over voting laws now goes well beyond Trump and is shifting to Washington, where the Democrat-led Senate will soon consider a series of voting changes. The package, known as HR 1, requires states to automatically register eligible voters and offer same-day registration. It would limit the ability of states to purge registered voters from their lists and restore the right to vote for former criminals. In addition to dozens of other provisions, it would also require states to offer 15 days early voting and allow absenteeism votes without excuse. Democrats, pooling their own resources behind the bill, argue that it is necessary to block what they describe as attempts to repress voters in the states.
Republicans argue it’s a grab bag of long-awaited Democratic goals aimed at tilting elections in their favor. Cruz claimed it would lead to votes by millions of “criminals and illegal aliens”.
The bill “says America would be better off if more killers voted, and America would be better off if more rapists and child molesters voted,” Cruz said.
He added that he had recently taken part in an all-day strategy call with national conservative leaders to coordinate the opposition. Leaders agreed that Republicans would try to rename the Democrat-backed bill the “Corrupt Politicians Act,” he said.
The focus on voting is evident in the conservative movement, even among groups that have no apparent interest in the voting debate. In February, prominent Christian conservative Tony Perkins posed several questions about voting on television in a town hall before addressing the social issues that his Family Research Council typically focuses on.
Perkins answered the question by recalling how the voting laws in his native Louisiana were tightened after a 1996 race in the Senate won by the Democrats. He noted that the state now votes firmly Republican.
“If you have free, fair elections, you will get positive results,” Perkins said before urging viewers to push state legislatures to “restore the integrity of the election.”
Tighter voting rules have long been a conservative goal, driven by the old – and some say outdated – conventional wisdom that Republicans thrive in lower-turnout elections, and Democrats in higher-voter elections. That has translated into the GOP’s efforts to tighten voter identification laws and require more frequent clearing of voter rolls. Both attempts tend to disproportionately exclude black and Latino voters, groups that tend to be democratic.
As a sign of growing attention to the issue last year, Leonard Leo, a Trump adviser and one of the strategists behind the conservative focus on the federal judiciary, formed The Honest Elections Project to push for ballot restrictions and push the GOP efforts. coordinate to oversee the 2020 vote.
But the issue went beyond what many conservatives expected. When Trump unfoundedly blamed the fraud for his loss, and he and his allies lost more than 50 lawsuits in an attempt to overturn the election, his conservative base became convinced of vague “irregularities” and holes in the voting system.
While Leo’s group, like other parts of the established GOP, kept its distance from such claims, state lawmakers quickly intervened with bills designed to solve phantom problems and restore confidence in the system.
“We are confident that our vote will count, we are confident that our vote is secure, we are confident that our system is fair and has no nefarious activity of any kind,” said Iowa Rep. Bobby Kaufmann, a Republican who launched a broad-based election bill that shortened the state’s early voting period.
Leo’s group has since released a list of his favorite changes to the voting law.
Likewise, other outside groups quickly jumped into the debate stirring their activists who write the letters, phone and send the small donations to keep the groups relevant.
“It’s gone higher,” said Noah Wall, executive vice president of FreedomWorks, who trained 60 top activists in Orlando on voting issues last weekend. If you were to question our activists now, the integrity of the election will be at the top of the list. This was not the case twelve months ago. “