Voting Rights

It is troubling President Trump appears more comfortable talking to President Vladimir Putin behind closed doors than to the American people about the well-documented intrusion by Russia into US elections in 2016. The attack on our democracy by the Russian government appears to have been given short shrift during the meeting.

There’s unsettling news from the Lone Star State today; after fighting for years to overturn Texas’ vote suppressing voter identification law, the Justice Department has filed a legal brief supporting and urging a judge to uphold the state’s revised ID requirements.

In the past week, as the Trump administration has sought an array of personal information about voters from state government databases, a bipartisan and nationwide assortment of state officials has undertaken a welcome and very constitutional defense of states’ rights to resist federal overreach.

The Pence-Kobach Commission’s and Department of Justice’s letters seeking information from election administrators are telling signs of a coordinated, partisan effort to remove eligible voters from registration rolls.

Advancing voting rights, once a bipartisan objective, has fallen victim to intense partisan gridlock following the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, a ruling that effectively gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA).

The fundamental right of every American to vote has been under attack since the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in its Shelby County decision. It is more than symbolic that today’s reintroduction of the Voting Rights Advancement Act comes just days before the fourth anniversary of that decision; it is desperately needed to stem the rising tide of voter intimidation and suppression efforts enacted across the country.