A/HRC/49/46/Add.1 Texas for election workers to send absentee ballot applications to voters who have not requested them. The electoral system in Texas, and unfortunately in a growing number of other States, thus appears to be increasingly loaded against the voting rights of minorities. Despite the fact that, according to the 2020 census, minorities represent about 95 per cent of population growth in Texas, of which more than half is Hispanic and Latinx, according to court documents filed in a lawsuit before the visit of the Special Rapporteur, the two congressional seats added because of the increased population are located in areas with a majority white population. Such examples of gerrymandering 15 are on the upswing in the United States and many submissions made to the Special Rapporteur emphasized that the voting power of minorities is being diluted. In States such as California, with an independent redistricting commission, no such undermining of the right to vote of minorities appears to be occurring. 29. Examples of measures being adopted to make or having the effect of making voting more difficult are legion. Minorities, particularly African Americans, Asian Americans and Hispanic and Latinx populations, have been disproportionally and negatively impacted in their exercise of the right to vote, even if none of the measures identified directly refer to ethnicity, language or religion. The linkages are surprisingly evident, however: poorer minority voters may have limited free time to vote on workdays since they may have more than one part-time job, may not work during standard office hours or may not have time to line up for hours to exercise their right to vote because their polling stations may be crowded. Moreover, they may have little or no transportation to get to a polling station. Limiting the number of drop-off boxes, restricting voting by mail, restricting voting to a limited number of hours, locating polling stations far from public transportation or from areas where minorities live or creating electoral districts that dilute the concentration of minority voters all contribute to restricting the voting rights of poorer minority groups. 30. It must be emphasized that the impact of all of the above measures, and the submissions and testimonies received by the Special Rapporteur, all reflect recent legislation adopted in 19 States in 2021 making voting disproportionally harder for minorities. The Special Rapporteur has not been presented with clear evidence of any significant amount of fraud in the electoral process or illegal voting affecting the integrity of the electoral system that would warrant measures likely to exclude many Americans from the right to vote. 16 It appears that most restrictive measures are adopted only because of a perception that encouraging and making the exercise of the right to vote too accessible could facilitate fraud, and hence must be discouraged – again despite the absence of any evidence of such issues being at play in connection with the 2020 national elections. 31. The conclusion of the Special Rapporteur is that many of the obstacles minorities face in the exercise of the right and opportunity to vote by universal and equal suffrage are unreasonable and therefore discriminatory and clear violations of one of the pillars of international human rights law, and that the phenomenon, and the undermining of democracy, is increasing. Human rights, and especially the equal right to vote, are moving backwards for minorities in the United States. 32. On the positive side, the Special Rapporteur was heartened by the commitment of the current administration to improve protections of the right to vote of all Americans with the introduction of two federal voting bills, the Freedom to Vote Act and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, as well as with other legislation such as the For the People Act, which contain voting-rights protections. The latter would facilitate the universal and equal right to vote of all citizens by setting national voting standards and strengthening legal protections against discriminatory voting laws and policies. More specifically, it would set 15 16 8 Gerrymandering is achieved through manipulating the boundaries of electoral districts to gain an unfair political advantage, so that the votes of one particular group are more concentrated and are more likely to win a seat, or the votes of an opposing group are thinly distributed in a number of districts to dilute its odds of winning a seat. In the 2016 national elections, out of 135 million votes cast, there were four documented cases of voter fraud, one of which was a woman who cast a ballot on behalf of her dead husband; see, “There have been just four documented cases of voter fraud in the 2016 election”, The Washington Post, 1 December 2016.