On May 14, Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte (R) signed three new bills into law. Two of the bills established new restrictions on voting, including a provision that could make it a crime to collect and submit ballots on behalf of another voter. The third bill made it illegal to protest near oil and gas pipelines, with a potential punishment of up to 18 months in prison and thousands of dollars in fines.

The new laws appear to have a clear target: the members of Montanas various Native American tribes, who rely heavily on mass ballot collection drives in order to vote, and who in recent years have led protests against major oil and gas pipeline projects that posed a threat to their lands.

The GOP has sought for years to limit the right to protest and curb access to the vote. But both efforts have intensified across the country in 2021. So far this year, eight states, including Montana, have passed laws that create new criminal penalties related to protesting, according to the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, which tracks such legislation . At the same time, Republicans have enacted new laws that create or strengthen criminal penalties related to voting or election practices in at least half a dozen states. Many of these laws, like Montanas, have explicitly criminalized or strengthened criminal penalties on the practice of returning ballots on behalf of voters.

And as is the apparent case in Montana, the wave of anti-voting and anti-protest laws a wave that civil rights groups say is unprecedented since the civil rights movement of the 1960s is not just broadly anti-democratic. It is also a specific assault on the rights of Black, brown and Native Americans.

They are responding to people who are trying to use fundamental rights in American society, whether its the right to vote or the right to protest, not by enabling people to tell legislators what they want and what they care about, but by seeking to cast them as criminals and silence them, both at the ballot and on the streets, said Vera Eidelman, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union.