From xxxxxx <[email protected]>
Subject The Right to Vote Should Not Fall Victim to Partisan Battles
Date November 24, 2019 1:05 AM
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[If voters overcome the tricks and traps designed to make voting
difficult and vote in large numbers in 2020, fundamental democratic
reform is teed up to move.] [[link removed]]

THE RIGHT TO VOTE SHOULD NOT FALL VICTIM TO PARTISAN BATTLES  
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Jesse Jackson
November 18, 2019
Chicago Sun Times
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_ If voters overcome the tricks and traps designed to make voting
difficult and vote in large numbers in 2020, fundamental democratic
reform is teed up to move. _

The only way to protect the vote is massive citizen
mobilization—and to elect leaders who will make the right to vote a
priority, Flickr/cc

 

The right to vote is fundamental to any democracy. Protecting that
right — and making it easier to exercise it — ought to be a
priority across partisan lines.

Instead, in states across the country — particularly in the five
years since the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act — it has
become a pitched battle.

The basic reality is clear: Republicans, increasingly a party of
older, white voters, have chosen not to reach out to Hispanics,
African Americans or the young, but instead seek ways to make it
harder for them to vote — or for their votes to count. Backed by
right-wing think tanks, Republican state legislators and governors
push a slew of measures to suppress the vote of targeted populations.
These are increasingly challenged in courts and protested on the
streets.

Alabama, for example, is a state that is over one-fourth African
American. Yet it has had all white appellate court justices for a
quarter-century. This was locked in by requiring at-large statewide
elections for both appellate and Supreme Court judges instead of
district elections where African American candidates would have a good
chance of being elected in some areas. This practice — followed in
Texas against Hispanic voters — is now being challenged in a lawsuit
filed by the Alabama State Conference of the NAACP.

At-large elections are only one of the tactics tried by the Republican
power structure in Alabama.

Since the Supreme Court’s Shelby decision that ended federal
pre-approval of voting rights changes, Alabama has passed measures to
require a photo ID to vote while seeking to close driver’s license
offices disproportionately in black areas. They sought to impose a
“proof of citizenship” mandate to register to vote in state and
local elections. Dozens of polling places were closed,
disproportionately in areas with large African American populations.
Get-out-the-vote efforts were made more difficult with the passage of
a ban on financial transfers from one PAC to another, an act aimed at
the leading organizations working on African American turnout, which
got much of their revenue from other political entities. Alabama has
also begun the process of purging the voting rolls. When the state
legislature passed a measure giving felons who had served their
sentences the right to vote, the state government refused to do
anything to inform people that their rights had been restored. Some of
these measures have been stalled by judicial decisions, but the effort
to constrict the vote continues.

Across the country, instead of making voter registration automatic and
adopting same-day registration, Republican-led states are making
registration harder. Instead of expanding days to vote, they are
limiting them. Instead of encouraging voter registration drives, they
are adopting various measures to criminalize the activities of voter
registration groups. Partisan gerrymandering gets ever more
sophisticated. Hackable voting machines pose a true threat of even
getting an honest count. Closing polling stations forces some —
again, disproportionately those from minority or poor districts —to
travel longer and wait in long lines to vote.

The only way to counter these measures is massive citizen mobilization
— and to elect leaders who will make the right to vote a priority.
In 2018, efforts to restrict the right to vote overwhelmed a voter
turnout that was the highest since 1914. In 2020, with the fundamental
direction of the country at stake, another record turnout is vital.
Upon gaining the majority in the House of Representatives in 2018,
Democrats immediately passed HR 1, the most extensive election and
democracy reform bill since the Voting Rights Act. Among other things,
it would adopt same-day voter registration, limit the role of big
money in elections, curb political gerrymanders and much more. That
bill sits on the desk of Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch
McConnell, who won’t even allow it to come to a vote.

If voters overcome the tricks and traps designed to make voting
difficult and vote in large numbers in 2020, fundamental democratic
reform is teed up to move.

_JESSE JACKSON [[link removed]] is
an African-American civil rights activist and Baptist minister. He was
a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and
1988 and served as shadow senator for the District of Columbia from
1991 to 1997. He was the founder of both entities that merged to form
Rainbow/PUSH._

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