Empire State Today

New York state voters shot down proposed constitutional amendments Tuesday that would have allowed for same-day voter registration and universal absentee voting in elections, initiatives championed by congressional Democrats.

“New York voters rejected key plans of the progressive voting agenda the night before the left’s latest attempt to impose their agenda on the nation,” Jason Snead, executive director of the Honest Elections Project, wrote on Twitter.

Prior to working for Honest Elections Project, Snead spent 10 years at the Heritage Foundation.

The “latest attempt” Snead referred to was the most-recent version of the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, or Senate Bill 4. The House passed its version, House Resolution 4, in August.

On Wednesday, a procedural move to bring S4 to the floor failed. Democrats, needing 60 votes to break a filibuster, received 50, with one Republican -  Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski - voting with the Democrats. 

Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) voted yes then switched to no, allowing him to call for another vote on the bill at a later time.

“…the main focus of S4 is putting states under federal control through a process called preclearance,” Snead wrote. “S4 tallies ‘voting rights violations’ dating back to 1996. Once a state has too many violations, it’s forced into preclearance.”

Preclearance under the 1965 Voting Rights Act was rejected in 2013 when the U.S. Supreme Court agreed with Shelby County, in Shelby County v. Holder, that the coverage formula, Section 4(b) of the law, that determined which states had to preclear their laws, was outdated. 

More recently, the high court ruled in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee that two rules in the Arizona voting procedures did not violate the 1965 Voting Rights Act. One restricted third party collection of mail ballots (ballot harvesting) and another invalidated a vote cast in the wrong precinct on Election Day.

"Once again they are trying to gut the Brnovich case in the Supreme Court," Snead wrote. "SCOTUS laid out guideposts for justices to consider when deciding if a law violates the Voting Rights Act. The factors include when a law has been in force for a long time or a state aims to stop fraud."