Dear MoveOn member,
The Supreme Court, led by the extremist right-wing justices appointed by Donald Trump, just dealt a major blow to voting rights and opened the door to even more direct attempts by Republican lawmakers to stop people of color from voting.
The court ruled that two laws in Arizona that lower courts had previously ruled unconstitutional—and explicitly racist—will be allowed to stand, even further weakening long-standing protections in the Voting Rights Act and opening the door for the court to turn a blind eye to more Republican attempts to suppress votes and manipulate elections in their favor.1
The most egregious part of the decision is to uphold a law in Arizona that banned voters from getting help returning mail-in ballots, which lower courts rightly saw as a direct attempt to curb voting by Native Americans living in rural areas and on reservations in the state, who do not receive postal service at their homes.2
Republicans in states across the country will surely take today's ruling as a blank check to continue passing laws to stop Democrats and people of color from voting, and we need to do everything we can to fight back RIGHT NOW.
That's why MoveOn is expanding our work to pass legislation in Congress to protect the vote and building a massive grassroots effort to defeat Republicans up and down the ballot in 2022. Will you chip in $5 a month to expand this work in response to today's ruling and build the resources we need to win in 2022?
No, I'm sorry, I can't make a monthly donation.
This isn't the first time that the Supreme Court has attacked the right to vote. Back in 2013, Chief Justice John Roberts ludicrously claimed that "our country has changed" since the Voting Rights Act was implemented in 1965, gutting provisions of the law that stopped racist voter suppression laws.3 And what happened after that? Republicans in states across the country passed racist laws aimed at stopping people of color from voting.
Fueled by Donald Trump's Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen, Republicans have been sneaking more and more racist voter suppression laws onto the books in an effort to manipulate elections in their favor or simply overturn results they don't like—and today's decision means the courts are unlikely to block those laws and state legislatures will pass even more of them.
But we can do something about it.
We are fighting like hell to get rid of the filibuster in the Senate by mobilizing tens of thousands of MoveOn members in states like West Virginia and Arizona to push Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to wake up and protect our democracy from the GOP attempts to demolish it. We're also laying the groundwork to pass a new Voting Rights Act, named for the heroic civil rights leader and congressman, John Lewis.
And we are building the infrastructure for a massive midterm elections push—from testing new and innovative voter engagement tactics to identifying and supporting inspiring progressive candidates and training MoveOn members to organize and volunteer in their communities to get out the vote.
But we can't do it without you, John. We don't have the billionaires and dark-money groups that back Republicans and pay to write their voter suppression laws. We have something better: you.
Will you join the fight to protect the right to vote and stop the Republican attempts to dismantle our democracy by chipping in $5 a month?
No, I'm sorry, I can't make a monthly donation.
Thanks for all you do.
–Emma, Jensine, Nadia, Sandra, and the rest of the team
Sources:
1. "Supreme Court Allows Arizona To Keep Voting Restrictions," HuffPost, July 1, 2021
https://act.moveon.org/go/154450?t=6&akid=300938%2E40999114%2ExYdP75
2. "Supreme Court ruling in Arizona case will be another front in the voting rights wars," CNN, June 2, 2021
https://act.moveon.org/go/154448?t=8&akid=300938%2E40999114%2ExYdP75
3. "Supreme Court Invalidates Key Part of Voting Rights Act," The New York Times, June 25, 2013
https://act.moveon.org/go/154449?t=10&akid=300938%2E40999114%2ExYdP75
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