• Home
  • Independent Voter News
  • Quizzes
  • Election Dissection
  • Sections
  • Events
  • Directory
  • About Us
  • Glossary
  • Opinion
  • Campaign Finance
  • Redistricting
  • Civic Ed
  • Voting
  • Fact Check
  • News
  • Analysis
  • Subscriptions
  • Log in
Leveraging Our Differences
  • news & opinion
    • Big Picture
      • Civic Ed
      • Ethics
      • Leadership
      • Leveraging big ideas
      • Media
    • Business & Democracy
      • Corporate Responsibility
      • Impact Investment
      • Innovation & Incubation
      • Small Businesses
      • Stakeholder Capitalism
    • Elections
      • Campaign Finance
      • Independent Voter News
      • Redistricting
      • Voting
    • Government
      • Balance of Power
      • Budgeting
      • Congress
      • Judicial
      • Local
      • State
      • White House
    • Justice
      • Accountability
      • Anti-corruption
      • Budget equity
    • Columns
      • Beyond Right and Left
      • Civic Soul
      • Congress at a Crossroads
      • Cross-Partisan Visions
      • Democracy Pie
      • Our Freedom
  • Pop Culture
      • American Heroes
      • Ask Joe
      • Celebrity News
      • Comedy
      • Dance, Theatre & Film
      • Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging
      • Faithful & Mindful Living
      • Music, Poetry & Arts
      • Sports
      • Technology
      • Your Take
      • American Heroes
      • Ask Joe
      • Celebrity News
      • Comedy
      • Dance, Theatre & Film
      • Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging
      • Faithful & Mindful Living
      • Music, Poetry & Arts
      • Sports
      • Technology
      • Your Take
  • events
  • About
      • Mission
      • Advisory Board
      • Staff
      • Contact Us
Sign Up
  1. Home>
  2. Voting>
  3. big picture>

Proposals to Expand Political Rights Surge in Statehouses

David Hawkings
March 13, 2019

While the congressional crusade to expand voting access now looks stalled at least until after the 2020 election, momentum in the state legislatures continues to appear strong.

That's the conclusion of the Brennen Center for Justice at NYU Law School, which is out with its latest comprehensive survey of how democracy reform efforts are faring in the state capitals.

Lawmakers in 41 states have introduced 589 bills to expand political rights so far this year, a 10 percent increase from the number of such proposals at this point in the previous legislative cycle – and 25 percent more than in the spring of 2015. At the same time, just 63 measures to restrict political participation have been proposed, and in 29 states there have been none of these.


"The key question now is whether this pro-voter enthusiasm will actually be converted into law," the center writes. "We are cautiously optimistic there will be more: 17 states have already successfully moved 34 expansive bills through one or more houses of their legislature," while only four restrictive bills have moved through either a state House or a state Senate. But it is also the case that, in the legislative season of 2017, a surge of measures to restrict voting advanced in June, when many sessions come to an end.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

So far, the most important pro-democracy changes have come in New York, the fourth most populous state. Legislators in Albany have already completed measures to expand early voting, permit people as young as 16 to pre-register to vote, expand the portability of registration records, consolidate the dates for state and federal primaries (which boosts turnout) and speed up ballot distributions to New Yorkers serving abroad in the armed forces.

The push and pull in the statehouses is all the more important now that HR 1, which the Democrats pushed through the House along party lines last week, looks destined for indefinite purgatory in the Republican Senate.

House passage "opened what is likely to be a sustained confrontation over access to the voting booth that could reshape not only the competition between the political parties but also the racial division of power in an irreversibly diversifying America," political analyst Ronald Brownstein writes for CNN. "Democrats and civil rights groups are committed to a long-range campaign to leverage federal power to overcome state-level barriers, particularly across the Sun Belt, that local Republican parties have constructed, partly to delay the political emergence of growing minority communities, critics suspect, which tend to vote Democratic."

Related Articles Around the Web
  • The voting rights manifesto: a state-by-state plan to defend ... ›
  • The State of Voting Rights Litigation (December 2018) | Brennan ... ›
  • Voting and Election Laws | USAGov ›
big picture
Get some Leverage Sign up for The Fulcrum Newsletter
Follow
Contributors

The U.S. has been seeking the center since the days of Teddy Roosevelt

Dave Anderson

Imperfection and perseverance

Jeff Clements

We’ve expanded the Supreme Court before. It’s time to do so again.

Anushka Sarkar

The ‘great replacement theory’ is nonsense

Debilyn Molineaux

Inflation will hit health of low-income Americans hardest

Robert Pearl

Caught in a draft

Lawrence Goldstone
latest News

Video: Will Trump run in 2024?

Our Staff
8m

The state of voting: May 23, 2022

Our Staff
18h

Trump looms large over Tuesday’s primaries

Richard Perrins
18h

Podcast: Abortion politics take center stage

Our Staff
23h

Your Take: Inspiring sports memories

Our Staff
20 May

GOP split: Far right gains ground in East, while losing out West

Steven Rosenfeld
20 May
Videos

Video: Helping loved ones divided by politics

Our Staff

Video: What happened in Virginia?

Our Staff

Video: Infrastructure past, present, and future

Our Staff

Video: Beyond the headlines SCOTUS 2021 - 2022

Our Staff

Video: Should we even have a debt limit

Our Staff

Video: #ListenFirstFriday Yap Politics

Our Staff
Podcasts

Podcast: Did economists move the Democrats to the right?

Our Staff
02 May

Podcast: The future of depolarization

Our Staff
11 February

Podcast: Sore losers are bad for democracy

Our Staff
20 January

Deconstructed Podcast from IVN

Our Staff
08 November 2021
Recommended
Video: Will Trump run in 2024?

Video: Will Trump run in 2024?

Elections
State of voting - election law changes

The state of voting: May 23, 2022

Voting
Mo Brooks and Donald Trump

Trump looms large over Tuesday’s primaries

Voting
Podcast: Abortion politics take center stage

Podcast: Abortion politics take center stage

Leadership
Theodore Roosevelt

The U.S. has been seeking the center since the days of Teddy Roosevelt

Leveraging big ideas
Your Take: Inspiring sports memories

Your Take: Inspiring sports memories

Your Take