More than 159 million people voted in the 2020 federal election and 2021 Senate runoffs, giving Democrats “trifecta” leadership of the White House, Senate, and House. Since then, Republican-controlled state legislatures around the country have teed up hundreds of bills aimed at making it harder to vote. Proponents of these bills assert that new restrictions on voting will restore public confidence in “election integrity.” But this claim is unsupported by any evidence of election-security breaches anywhere in the country sufficient to change the outcome of the 2020-21 elections in any State or the nation as a whole. “Souls to the Polls” One target of this current wave of voter-suppression bills is voting on Sundays before Election Day. For example, in Georgia, proposed legislation would have reduced or eliminated in-person Sunday voting. As voting-rights experts and others have noted ( here and here , for example), the probable target of Sunday voting prohibitions is “Souls to the Polls” – the custom of Black churches to organize congregants to go collectively to the polls on Sundays, after services. (As noted here , get-out-the-vote activities have been practiced by churches in Black communities for at least 60 years. And attacks on Sunday […]
