For this GOP, 530,000 dead Americans will never be as much of an emergency as 81 million votes for a Democratic presidential candidate.<\/p>\n
Voters will love these election reforms<\/h2>\n
All Americans should be appalled by this coordinated assault on what Ronald Reagan called \u201cthe crown jewel of American liberties.\u201d But Democrats in Congress, especially in the Senate, don\u2019t have time be disgusted. They need to focus on the sad fact that this pathetic plot to steal the elections for the next decade or more could very well work. Easily. Yet it could also be prevented, almost as easily, and with widespread support from voters. We know this because it\u2019s already happened in my home state of Michigan.<\/p>\n
First, here are some numbers that show that we know this plot against majority rule could work:<\/p>\n
Joe Biden got 7 million more votes than Trump. House Democrats won nearly 4.7 million votes more than their Republican opponents.\u00a0The 50 U.S. senators who caucus with the Democrats represent over 41 million more Americans than their 50 Republican colleagues. And despite their massive deficits in the popular vote, Republicans could control every branch of government\u00a0right now if about\u00a090,000 votes had flipped their way.\u00a0<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.gannett-cdn.com\/presto\/2021\/03\/16\/USAT\/8be6dcc5-5ea2-4500-96eb-e77daed19a7c-GTY_1230435525.jpg?width=540&height=&fit=bounds&auto=webp\")
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Voting polls on Jan. 5, 2021, in Atlanta. (Photo: Megan Varner\/Getty Images)<\/span><\/p>\n Out of 155.5 million votes cast, 90,000 votes is a rounding error on a rounding error. Yet if they\u2019d just kept that many Americans from the polls, Republicans would have been rewarded for Trump\u2019s failures with complete control of Washington.<\/p>\n But here are the numbers that show we know we can fix it \u2014\u00a0and voters will love the fix.<\/p>\n Trump won Michigan in 2016 byjust 0.23 percentage points. In 2020, Biden’s winning 2.8-point margin was over 12 times that big. But what happened in my home state two years earlier, in 2018, may be even more important. In the one midterm election of Trump\u2019s presidency, 61% of Michigan’s voters passed\u00a0Proposal\u00a02\u00a0(creating an independent, nonpartisan redistricting committee)\u00a0and 67% passed Proposal 3\u00a0 (amending the state Constitution to include\u00a0automatic voter registration, same-day voter registration, and no-excuse absentee voting.)\u00a0<\/p>\n Voting rights: <\/strong>The Georgia Republican Party wants to set voting rights back decades. Is your state next?<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n Both did better than a victorious proposal legalizing marijuana,\u00a0which has been an issue in my state since December 1971 \u2014 when John Lennon visited Ann Arbor to play a concert to free John Sinclair, who was jailed for selling two joints.\u00a0<\/p>\n Proposals 2 and 3 make up many of the key components of H.R. 1, The For the People Act of 2021\u00a0passed by the House. H.R. 1\u00a0would “thwart virtually every single” attempt state-level Republicans are making to suppress the vote, according to the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice.\u00a0Elizabeth Hira, a Brennan Center\u00a0attorney, calls it\u00a0\u201cthe next great civil rights bill.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n These\u00a0massive upgrades of our federal electoral system are desperately needed. So is the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act,\u00a0which would restore the power of the federal government to review potentially\u00a0discriminatory changes to elections before they go into effect. Passage of the two bills\u00a0would make the GOP\u2019s effort to suppress votes futile gestures from a party that believes\u00a0it can only win by denying its\u00a0fellow citizens their most essential right.<\/p>\n A recent poll found that 67% of voters back H.R. 1, almost the exact percentage that passed Proposal 3 in Michigan. That\u2019s a supermajority of the American public, yet a super minority of Republican senators \u2014 41 out of 100 \u2014\u00a0can make sure the GOP continues to nuke ballot access across the country by filibustering these bills.<\/p>\n But that’s only if Democrats let them.<\/p>\n Racist past and present: <\/strong>End the Senate filibuster so America can move forward<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n Stacey Abrams has suggested\u00a0that Democrats kill the filibuster for voting rights legislation,<\/b>much as Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell killed the filibuster to get Republican nominees onto the Supreme Court.\u00a0Another option is to bring the filibuster back to where it was before the early 1970s, when the senators trying to block a bill had to hold the floor with non-stop \u201cMr. Smith Goes to Washington\u201d talking filibuster. This would force Republicans to defend their attacks on democracy, a highly unpopular position, for days or weeks or months on end.\u00a0Even President Biden is warming to the idea of reforming\u00a0today’s perverse version of the filibuster.<\/p>\n It’s\u00a0the least Democrats can do. H.R. 1 and the John Lewis voting act aren\u2019t just priorities. They are necessities.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n And if Senate Democrats don\u2019t do everything they can to give the entire nation the universal ballot access we now take for granted in Michigan, we won\u2019t be able to say Republicans are stealing elections. We\u2019ll have to say that Senate Democrats handed over our democracy to a party bent on destroying it. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\nDon’t hand our democracy to the GOP<\/h2>\n