DSCC Helping Lead “Massive Legal Campaign on Voting Ahead of 2020”

POLITICO: “The DSCC has focused its court challenges on tackling barriers to registration and voting, as well as ballot-order rules, in states with high-profile Senate races”

A new report spotlights how Democratic organizations including the DSCC are investing millions to protect voting rights across battleground states in 2020. The DSCC and DCCC have made an eight-figure investment this cycle in a legal strategy that will take on Republicans’ voter suppression tactics in key states and increase access to the ballot. Alongside partner organizations and local stakeholders, the DSCC is “tackling barriers to registration and voting, as well as ballot-order rules, in states with high-profile Senate races, including Arizona, Texas and Georgia.”

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

POLITICO: Democrats launch massive legal campaign on voting ahead of 2020

By Nolan D. McCaskill

February 6, 2020

Key Points:

• As Democrats select their 2020 presidential nominee, a constellation of left-leaning groups is looking ahead, laying groundwork for huge voter turnout in November by filing an avalanche of voting-rights lawsuits against state laws they say suppress participation in elections.

• The groups, including state and national party committees as well as outside nonprofits, are spending millions of dollars to fight voter-registration purges, ID requirements and rules regarding signature-matching and ballot order, and they are also hiring voter protection staffers and recruiting and training volunteers in key states.

• Democratic donors are flooding the wide-reaching legal effort with millions of dollars not only to help defeat President Donald Trump in 2020 but to affect elections all the way down the ballot — from the Senate and the House to the governorships and state legislative races that will shape redistricting and the next 10 years of state political maps.

• A Brennan Center report on voting law changes in 2012 found that state governments across the country made it harder to register or vote in states that accounted for 171 electoral votes, particularly for “young, minority, and low-income voters, as well as on voters with disabilities.”

• “We can’t govern if we can’t win, and having free and fair access to the ballot box determines if we win or not,” said Antjuan Seawright, a Democratic strategist in South Carolina, where Democratic groups recently successfully challenged a policy that required voter registration applicants to submit their full Social Security number.

• The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee are making a combined eight-figure investment on voting rights-focused legal challenges.

• The DSCC has focused its court challenges on tackling barriers to registration and voting, as well as ballot-order rules, in states with high-profile Senate races, including Arizona, Texas and Georgia.

• The DSCC and DCCC are involved in many of the same cases, which could benefit House and Senate incumbents and candidates.

Read the full story here.

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