Access to the vote becomes a mid-point flash point just a few weeks before election day

In Georgia, a coalition of civil rights groups is suing Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp after a report from the Associated Press reported that 53,000 people – of which nearly 70% were black – had seen their registration suspended due to minor skew issues on documents such as their driver's licenses violate the new requirement of the state "exact match". Kemp's office said voters with pending registrations will still be able to vote on Nov. 6.

Kemp is running for governor against Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams, who is seeking to become the first black female governor of the country. The Abrams campaign called on Kemp to step down from his position as secretary of state.

In North Dakota, Native American tribes, who vote overwhelmingly for Democrats, are facing the implementation of a law that requires voters to provide a piece of identification stating their legal name, their address current and their date of birth. The problem, for some Native Americans, is the street address requirement. American Indians living on reserves or in rural areas devoid of street addresses often use PO boxes.

The two states are the latest examples of a wave of battles against restrictive voting measures passed in states largely dominated by Republicans to prevent electoral fraud. The trend began after the 2010 GOP wave and accelerated after the 2013 Supreme Court decision that overturned the key provisions of the Voting Rights Act. Laws – which typically impose strict voter identification requirements at the ballot box or limit early and mail-in voting – have led to a series of legal and political battles, such as Texas voter identity legislation and voting restrictions. anticipated in North Carolina.

States controlled by democracies, particularly the northeastern states like New York and Massachusetts, have their own obscure electoral laws. But at the national level, Democrats have begun in recent years to advocate for a dramatic expansion of access to the vote, including automatic voter registration. The party has also taken a much more aggressive approach to fighting what it sees as a GOP government policy that disproportionately affects constituencies with democratic tendencies.

It has become a hot spot for the party base, which pays more attention than ever to the technical details of elections and governance, Democratic officials said.

"People react to the idea – they do not like this culture of corruption.They do not like the idea that someone prevents their voice from being heard, "said DNC spokeswoman Sabrina Singh.

The emphasis placed by Democrats on access to the vote has increased after the loss of Hillary Clinton in 2016. Without the White House, the party has lost virtually all of the others. levers of power at the federal and state levels.

In the aftermath of the elections, Priorities USA, the largest super-PAC Democrat, announced a new focus on voter protection. Marc Elias, the Democratic lawyer who will lead most of the party's legal battles against the restrictive vote, will now be a member of the group's board of directors.

Former Attorney General Eric Holder has launched the National Committee for Democratic Redistribution, which aims to help the party win a majority in state chambers and the Senate in anticipation of the 2020 redistricting process. to the party a way to block new restrictive voting laws.

And former Missouri Secretary of State Jason Kander has launched the Let America Vote, a political action committee fighting what the group sees as GOP suppression efforts. Kander, a veteran, recently retired from the group while he was fighting post-traumatic stress disorder.

In the Democratic National Committee, President Tom Perez has expanded the party's voter protection team – by launching a hotline 24/7 and implementing toolkits for specific populations. including African Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders, and LGBTQ people – particularly transgender people – who address the specific barriers they are most likely to encounter at the polls.

Efforts are being made before the mid-term elections, when the Democratic base is eager to reprimand the first two years of President Donald Trump's term. Democrats expect young voters and first-time voters, many of whom are minorities, to have higher participation rates than those registered at the mid-term.

Together, state laws and the actions of GOP officials show that Republicans are attempting to "rig the elections," said the chairman of the board of directors of Let America Vote, Abe Rakov. The Republicans reply that they are trying to get the vote.

Republican authorities were emboldened, said Rakov, "when the president lied about all the illegal voters" in the 2016 presidential election. Trump falsely claimed that millions of illegal votes had been cast, despite the absence of evidence of widespread election fraud.

"This lie laid the political foundation for Republicans to think that they had the political cover to do it," Rakov said.

He pointed to Missouri, where a judge recently blocked the application of part of the law on the identification of state voters, which requires people without coins photo ID to present another piece of identity and to sign a sworn statement.

Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley, the Republican defying Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill, is appealing the ruling on behalf of the state. And GOP Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft told reporters that this decision had created "widespread confusion" because it is the local authorities – not the state, which enforce the decision of the judge – who enforce the law.

Rakov also complained of the slowness of the Secretary of State of Iowa in issuing advance voting data indicating who has already voted, an important piece of information for campaigns that are trying to determine who they should still target.

In Indiana, a judge blocked Republican Secretary of State Connie Lawson's plan to eliminate 450,000 people from state voters before the mid-term.

"They are clearly very frightened by this cycle, more than in the past, and they think the voters are not with them – so they have become anti-voters," Rakov said.