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Hello, and welcome to another episode of The Weeds. I'm Dylan Matthews, and I'm joined today by Weeds co-host Jerusalem Dumsys.

Hello.

I'm Emily Wrongzang. Hi.

Emily is a former scatten fellow at the ACLU Voting Rights Project, and she's currently a PhD candidate in political science at Stanford, and she's a bona fide expert on the empirical social science and the law of voting rights.

So we thought she was a perfect person to bring on to talk about what's been happening with voting rights in America.

So this past week, the Senate rejected rules changes that would have allowed it to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, as well as the Freedom to Vote Act, which were two of the biggest pieces of voting legislation that the Senate has considered in many years, and we've done a wide variety of things from combating gerrymandering to reducing barriers to voting in various states, and was a real central push for the Democratic leadership that came up short.

Before we dive into the details here and the complexities of law and political science of voting, Jerusalem, can you break down what these bills that were up for votes would actually do?

Totally. So I think I'm like many people who were following this debate. I completely lost the plot on how many different bills there actually were.

So HR1 has been around since like 2019, and that's the big one that a lot of people kind of know about. It's called the For the People Act.

And there were a bunch of different pieces in that. It included things like voting accessibility, it included ethics in the federal government, big money in elections, election security, and gerrymandering of the House of Representatives.

So it was a big bill, and it was around before January 6th, but obviously it was really picked up in the aftermath of that last year, as people were obviously, you know, rightfully horrified by the events that took place that day.

That did not pass. And there were basically two different kinds of bills that end up coming out over the last year. There's the Freedom to Vote Act, and then there's the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.

The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act does a bunch of things as well, but one of the big things that it did was trying to restore the pre-clearance requirement, which was part of the Voting Rights Act that had been kind of really decimated after the Shelby decision from the Supreme Court.

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