Ocean State Today

Progressives are quick to criticize the voting laws in Texas and in other Southern states as suppressing the minority vote, but the voting laws in Rhode Island and most of the rest of the blue states in the Northeast are far more restrictive, one elections analyst said.

“The left likes to point one way when it comes to voter restrictions,” Ken Cuccinelli, national chairman of the Election Transparency Initiative and the former Republican attorney general of Virginia, told Ocean State Today. “Truth is voting in Texas and other Southern states a lot more accessible than it is in the Northeast.”

He added that imminent changes in Texas law, to ban 24-hour curbside voting and other reforms, won’t change that dynamic.

Texas and Rhode Island, for example, are among 36 states that require voter ID for in-person voting. But the Rhode Island law was passed 10 years ago amid tension between black and white Democrats and a rising Latino population, wrote Russell Berman in The Atlantic.

“Backers of the bill included the first black speaker of the General Assembly,” Berman wrote. “They shared stories of voter fraud they had witnessed, but opponents of the law saw it as an effort to suppress Latino turnout in Providence."

Berman wrote, ''‘It was bizarro,' said John Marion, the executive director of Common Cause Rhode Island, the state affiliate of the national government-watchdog group. ‘Ten years later, I still don’t know how it happened.’”

Overall, Berman wrote, voting restrictions in the Northeast “are relics of the urban Democratic machines, which preferred to mobilize their voters precinct by precinct on Election Day rather than give reformers a lengthier window to rally opposition. Democrats who have won election after election in states such as New York, Delaware, Connecticut and Rhode Island have had little incentive to change the rules that helped them win.”

A recent Wall Street Journal breakdown of the census numbers shows that overall turnout was 5.4 percentage points higher in 2020 than in 2016. The share of Hispanics (53.7%) and Asians (59.7%) of voting age who cast ballots hit new heights, the Journal said, and the number of black voters (62.6%) surpassed any presidential year except for 2008 and 2012 when Barack Obama was on the ballot for president.

Moreover, the Journal noted that “Black turnout was highest in Maryland (75.3%) followed by Mississippi (72.8%) and lowest in Massachusetts (36.4%). Liberals have lambasted Georgia for ‘purging’ voters and restricting ballot access. But Georgia had a smaller black-white voting gap than Illinois, New Jersey, Virginia and California—all states controlled by Democrats.”

Democrats and progressives argue that suppressed voter turnout was not a major problem in the 2020 elections but could develop into one during the 2022 and 2024 election cycles.

This past weekend Cuccinelli was the headline speaker at the Virginia Election Integrity Summit II, held in Richmond.

“I told them the rhetoric about voter suppression by the left isn’t working,” he said. “Joe Biden and Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C) came against a voter ID and now they are flip-flopping on. They can see that the needle of public opinion hasn’t moved an inch despite all their rhetoric. Voters want secure elections so they can have confidence that their vote counts.”

Cuccinelli describes himself as fighting for more than 20 years "on the front lines of the conservative movement."