Friend -

With 21 candidates currently seeking the Democratic nomination to become the next President of the United States, many eyes seem fixed on the primary election. But we can't get the president we deserve if we don't ensure every voter can access the ballot. And that work starts now.

We must recognize voter suppression as the crisis of our day. Because the true erosion of our democracy is using the laws as they presently exist to undermine the very voting administration we need and the elected leaders that we deserve.

It's well known that two of the last three American presidents--both Republicans George W. Bush and Donald Trump--lost the popular vote before they took office. What's less discussed is just how much of a role voter suppression played in the outcome of the 2000 and 2016 presidential elections.

From the inception of our country, we decided who would be eligible to be a citizen and whose voices would be heard. And it's taken us hundreds of years to try to get it right. In 2000, Florida's post-Civil War era law stripping the right to vote from former felons was still on the books.

And in the 90's, widespread voter purges began to disenfranchise voters. Voter roll purges in Florida relied on just a 70 percent match with the felon database. Despite warnings about false positives from the private company contracted to handle these purges, the state proceeded.

On November 7, 2000, election night tallies showed George W. Bush leading Al Gore by 1,784 votes in Florida, triggering an automatic recount. Right away, a young Ted Cruz, then a Bush campaign aide, began assembling Bush's legal team.

The case would ultimately move through the Florida Supreme Court, which ordered a statewide manual recount by a 4-3 vote on December 8. Immediately, the Bush campaign appealed to the United States Supreme Court.

The very next day, in a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court voted to halt the Florida recount, thereby awarding Florida's 25 electoral votes to George W. Bush. And the next month, Bush was inaugurated as the 43rd president.

Days before the inauguration, the NAACP, ACLU, the People for the American Way, and 19,000 African-American Florida voters filed a class action suit against Florida's Secretary of State, challenging the felon voter purge and arguing it disenfranchised black voters. As a result of the settlement, news came to light that as many as 12,000 voters had been wrongly purged, 22 times Bush's 537 vote margin.

Friend, we can turn the tide and win the fight to protect every person's right to vote. But it's going to take resources to ensure we can fight back against attempts to disenfranchise voters. Will you chip in today?

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- Team Fair Fight

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