Illustration by João Fazenda

The crisis of democracy that has attended Donald Trump’s Presidency has visibly manifested itself in challenges to the free press, the judiciary, and the intelligence agencies, but among its more corrosive effects has been the corruption of basic mathematics. Since the 2016 election, Trump has periodically rage-tweeted about an alleged three million non-citizens whose ballots delivered the popular-vote majority to Hillary Clinton. His fulminations were a fanciful extension of the Republican Party’s concern, despite all evidence to the contrary, that American elections are riddled with voter fraud. The math does, however, support a different number—one that truthfully points to how American democracy is being undermined.

Nearly two million fewer African-Americans voted in the 2016 election than did in 2012. That decline can be attributed, in part, to the fact that it was the first election since 2008 in which Barack Obama was not on the ballot and, in part, to an ambivalence toward Clinton among certain black communities. Civil-rights groups and members of the Congressional Black Caucus point to another factor as well: 2016 was the first Presidential election since the Shelby County v. Holder Supreme Court decision, which eviscerated sections of the Voting Rights Act. Suppressive tactics, some old, some new, ensued—among them, voter-roll purges; discriminatory voter-I.D. rules; fewer polling places and voting machines; and reductions in early-voting periods. After an election in which some two million Americans went missing, the Administration concluded that three million too many had shown up at the polls. (The equation here is: reality minus delusion equals three million.)

Last week, with these events in mind, a hearing on H.R. 1, the For the People Act, took place in the House of Representatives. Elijah Cummings, Democrat of Maryland, the new chair of the Committee on Oversight and Reform, referred to the bill, in his opening remarks, as “one of the boldest reform packages to be considered in the history of this body.” He added, “This sweeping legislation will clean up corruption in government, fight secret money in politics, and make it easier for American citizens across this great country to vote.” That statement was not partisan hyperbole. The bill is a broad, imaginative, and ambitious set of responses to the most pressing challenges facing American democracy, many of which preceded the 2016 election, but almost all of which were brought into sharper focus by it.

Implicit in the choice to take up an electoral-reform bill as the first act of the new Democratic majority in the House was the decision to confront not only these injustices but, more fundamentally, the forces that have allowed them to come into existence. The bill contains provisions to insure access to paper ballots, in order to verify the accuracy of voting results; to establish early voting in all states for federal elections; and to launch independent redistricting commissions, to address the problem of partisan gerrymandering.

A federal matching system for small-dollar political contributions would serve as a counterbalance to the sums that wealthy individuals and corporations pour into spending for political elections. Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidates would be required to release their tax returns. The bill also includes provisions for mandating transparency in digital-ad spending, strengthening disclosure policies regarding foreign gifts to officeholders, and strictly enforcing the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

A section focussing on voting rights is of particular interest. The Supreme Court’s ruling in Shelby essentially held that the Voting Rights Act was outmoded, relying on presumptions about racism, especially in Southern states, which didn’t reflect the progress that had been made since 1965, when the bill was signed. The Court, however, left open the possibility that Congress might bring it in line with more recent circumstances, if warranted. H.R. 1 could spur the creation of new formulas for determining which states should be subject to federal oversight. It might, for example, be possible to take into account recent voter-suppression efforts in Ohio, Wisconsin, North Dakota, and other states, thereby expanding the reach of the Act.

For those progressives who were wary of what the Democrats would do with their new majority in the House, H.R. 1 is as reassuring a start as anyone could have hoped for. But the civic fervor behind it has not been entirely welcomed on Capitol Hill. Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, denounced H.R. 1 as “a power grab that’s smelling more and more like exactly what it is.” Setting aside the question of what a power grab smells like, McConnell’s outrage was striking, even in a period as cynical as this one. Taking aim at a provision that would make Election Day a day off for federal employees (with the idea that private companies would follow suit for their employees), McConnell said, “Just what America needs—another paid holiday,” then predicted that federal employees would use the time to volunteer for Democratic campaigns.

It’s not uncommon for a single bill to encompass such a wide range of concerns. But the concerns presented in H.R. 1 point to another unanswered question. For the past twenty months, public attention has been focussed on the special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible Russian interference in the 2016 election. Intelligence agencies, media outlets, and independent researchers have consistently pointed to Russian intentions to sway the electorate in Trump’s favor. Possible motivations for these efforts—from belated score-settling for the Cold War to alleviating sanctions—aren’t hard to discern. But we’ve seldom asked about American motivations in creating the conditions that facilitated such meddling. Russian attempts to influence American voters—including ad purchases on social media intended to foment racial division—coexisted with and benefitted from domestic attempts to discourage people from casting a vote.

American democracy is threatened by a hydra of vulnerabilities, most of them of our own making, but none of them beyond the notice of our adversaries. H.R. 1 is the most cogent corrective to these matters which we have yet seen. The calculations around it will most certainly be partisan, but it is the best hope for ending the corrosive practices that subtract citizens from the electorate. ♦