According to Politico, citing a sweeping survey by the Knight Foundation, “voter suppression” is a myth.  While Politico does not put it exactly that way, here is a key paragraph that makes that point:

Democratic campaign committees and activist groups have been spending millions of dollars to fight against a range of legal obstacles on voting, believing that making voter registration easier and keeping polls open longer would inspire more Americans to turn out.

But to nonvoters themselves, those issues don’t seem to be at the forefront of their minds . . .

Structural issues such as voter ID laws and difficulty accessing polling places didn’t come up enough to even be marked in the Knight survey results. 

Recently, Congress has been focusing on the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) and election cybersecurity by holding hearings.  Lawyers Democracy Fund (LDF) has been covering these hearings on its blog and Twitter feed.

This morning, the Supreme Court heard oral argument for the second time in a racial gerrymandering challenge to Virginia's 2011 House of Delegates district map in Virginia House of Delegates v. Bethune-Hill.  Back in 2017, the Supreme Court upheld one of the challenged 12 districts and sent the remaining 11 back to the district court for further review after determining that the district court had applied the incorrect standard.  On remand, the district court found that race had been the predominant factor in drawing the 11 districts and threw them out, and the House of Delegates appealed.

Lawyers Democracy Fund's board member Joanne Young published an op-ed today cataloguing the many problems with California's automatic, or mandatory, voter registration system, which is especially relevant as the House debates and votes on H.R. 1 this week.  H.R. 1 would require all states to adopt automatic voter registration (AVR) according to the bill's requirements, regardless of each state's existing laws.  It would also require a massive data dump from various government databases in the states' voter registration systems, which would introduce errors in the voter registration databases that would only be exacerbated by the new required AVR systems.

As we wrote last week, Lawyers Democracy Fund (LDF) has a full analysis of the election administration portions of HR 1 and how they would centralize control of elections and harm election integrity.  LDF has also released a shorter document highlighting the top ten problems with HR 1:

Lawyers Democracy Fund (LDF) has just released a summary and comprehensive analysis of House Democrats' attempt to commandeer America's elections. In short, the massive compilation of major election chances is being pushed through the House of Representatives, likely without any substantive hearings, expert testimony from election officials, or meaningful markup and on a blatantly partisan basis. As LDF describes: