Promised increase in vaccine supply comes as Republican Governors drop Covid restrictions

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1.09pm GMT

Moustafa Bayoumi writes for us this morning on what he says is a new low – using utility bills to hunt undocumented immigrants:

The startling truth is that signing up for even basic utilities in this country has turned into a gamble for many people, particularly undocumented immigrants. Last week, the Washington Post revealed that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) has paid tens of millions of dollars since 2017 for access to a private database that contains more than “400m names, addresses and service records from more than 80 utility companies covering all the staples of modern life, including water, gas and electricity, and phone, internet and cable TV”. The information has been mined by Ice, the Post reported, for immigration surveillance and enforcement operations.

Related: Ice reached a new low: using utility bills to hunt undocumented immigrants | Moustafa Bayoumi

1.01pm GMT

Overnight, Giovanni Russonello’s On Politics newsletter for the New York Times had a focus on voting rights restrictions that Republicans are attempting to impose across the US in the wake of their November election defeat.

There are over 250 bills pending in 43 states that would restrict access to voting. He spoke to Wendy Weiser, director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU’s law school, and she had this to say about the efforts:

[There are] seven times the number of restrictive voting bills we saw at the same time last year. So it is a dramatic spike in the push to restrict access to voting. It’s not brand-new this year, it wasn’t invented by Donald Trump, but it was certainly supercharged by his regressive attack on our voting systems.

Many of these bills are fueled by the same rhetoric and grievances that were driving the challenges to the 2020 election. In addition to expressly referencing the big lie about widespread voter fraud and that Trump actually won the election, they’re targeting the methods of voting that the Trump campaign was complaining about. So, for example, the single biggest subject of regressive voter legislation in this session — roughly half the bills — is mail voting.

It would create a baseline level of voter access rules that every American could rely on for federal elections. So, for example, in many states we’re seeing attempts to eliminate no-excuse absentee voting. This would require all states to offer no-excuse absentee voting. Every state would then offer that best practice of voting access, and it would no longer be manipulated, election by election, by state legislators to target voters they don’t like.