Message from National NOW President Christian F. Nunes
May 3, 2024
Greetings Feminists,
How can we ensure intersectional voting access and voter rights for all? More than a century after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, the ability of women to effectively exercise the right to vote is under renewed attack.
We are facing the most significant and dangerous anti-democracy movement our country has ever seen, with strict voter identification laws put on the books to promote voter suppression and harm groups like racial minorities and people experiencing poverty.
The Transformative Justice Coalition has identified 72 Forms of Voter Suppression, from strict voter photo ID laws, no early voting and cuts to early voting hours and drop-off boxes to running out of ballots, failure to accept Native American tribal IDs, lack of available public transportation and a host of other barriers that can no longer be ignored. We need to secure constitutional voting rights for everyone.
Voting is the building block of our democracy. It’s a tool everyone has in equal measure—at least, that’s how it’s supposed to be. But today, voting rights are being taken away faster than they’re being strengthened, and our democracy is in peril.
The Founders of our country gave the vote only to other educated white men who owned property. It took more than a century for the vote to meaningfully reach people of color, women, Native Americans, people with disabilities, and low-income people who were historically kept from easy access to the voting booth.
That’s why passing the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act is necessary.
The Supreme Court took a sledgehammer to the Voting Rights Act in the Shelby County v. Holder decision of 2013 that struck down the preclearance provision that required jurisdictions with a history of voting discrimination to get approval from the Department of Justice or a federal court in Washington, D.C. before changing voter laws or practices.
In his majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts argued that a vigorously enforced Voting Rights Act was no longer “grounded in current conditions” because the “country has changed.” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in her dissent, wrote that the country would not have changed without the preclearance structure. Trashing preclearance, she said, was “like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”
NOW members know who was right in that Court decision and the dreadful consequences it’s caused to the voting rights of millions. We won’t stop fighting until we have complete Constitutional protection of voting rights for everyone—and always.
In solidarity,
Christian
