The dust has barely settled in South Carolina since the Department of Justice refused to approve the state’s voter ID law, a discriminatory measure which would disenfranchise thousands of eligible voters, many of them African-American, elderly and young people. And yet, undeterred and brazenly determined, the state legislature is already taking another bite at the voter suppression apple.
A Florida high school teacher talks about how Florida's new law restricting third parties from registering voters suppresses registration among young people.
Terrifying is not a word I’d use to describe myself. I don’t even think it’s a word most other people would use to describe me. But I guess it all depends on your perspective.
I was in East Tampa, Florida a few weeks before the primary, to assess the state’s new election laws, which add prohibitively onerous requirements to anyone who wants to register voters there. I was looking for people who register voters, and the people they sign up, to try to understand how the legislation will affect things on the ground.
With Florida’s primary just days away, all eyes are on the Sunshine State. And in an effort to shine a light on the state’s new regressive voting laws, the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights, chaired by Sen. Dick Durbin, is holding a federal field hearing today in Tampa, Florida.
Criminal disfranchisement proved to be a hot issue in the Republican presidential debates recently, leading to a CNN poll asking, “Should felons be allowed to vote after serving their sentences?”
The results showed that the majority feel that those with past convictions should have that right. The Washington Post also editorialized on the issue Friday, making the point that it is unjust to prevent “individuals from having a full stake and a full voice in the community and its leadership” after they have already paid their debts to society and earned their right to freedom.
By Dennis Parker, Director, ACLU Racial Justice Program at 8:49am
Today voters are going to the polls in South Carolina to exercise their most fundamental democratic right: the right to vote. This week we celebrated the life and work of Martin Luther King, and in doing so we recall his championing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Recognizing the pitifully low number of blacks who were eligible to vote at that time, Dr. King believed that until all African Americans were able to participate in the electoral process, there could be no real justice in this country.
During the summer of 1964, a coalition of civil rights groups and almost a thousand student volunteers converged in Mississippi to register African-American voters. The “Mississippi Summer Project” was met with unrelenting violence: 1,000 arrests, 35 shootings, 30 bombed buildings, 35 burned churches, 80 beatings, and at least six murders. The following year, to sustain the focus on the plight of African-American voters in the South, civil rights leaders marched from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. On March 25, 1965, the final day of the march, Martin Luther King Jr. vowed to continue fighting for the right to vote, earn, and learn—all without racial barriers:
There were eight states this year that passed some version of a law requiring photo identification for all voters. South Carolina was one of them, but hopefully not for long.
The Department of Justice on Friday blocked South Carolina’s law, which it said would have disproportionately affected thousands of minority voters.
In Sunday’s issue of the Chicago Tribune, famed civil rights activist Julian Bond reminded us that expanding access to the ballot for all Americans has been a critical part of our country’s history.
No one knows this better than Bond, who has spent much of his life advocating for the right to vote. In the 1960s, he was a founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which led sit-ins and freedom rides, marched on Washington and organized voter registration drives in states such as Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi.
Jessica Chiappone was convicted of a nonviolent drug offense. Since serving her prison sentence, she has turned her life around, completed law school and hopes to become a public defender. But because of her felony conviction, Jessica is unable to vote, hold public office or sit on a jury – all requirements for admission to the Florida Bar.
