American Civil Liberties Union

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:

On Saturday, December 10, more than 100 civil, labor, and human rights organizations will take a “Stand for Freedom” in New York City to protest the attack on voting rights.

As a former South Carolina State Election Commissioner, I hope that the U.S. District Court will see the new South Carolina voter ID law for what it is and block its implementation.

The ACLU and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights filed suit today in federal district court in Florida challenging the state’s latest attack on voting rights: purging voters from voter registration rolls.

In May of this year, Secretary of State Ken Detzer distributed nearly 2,700 names for removal from the voter registration rolls, claiming that those voters on the list were not U.S. citizens. The list is fraught with inaccuracies and false positives. In Florida’s most populous county, Miami-Dade, where about 1,600 of the 2,700 ”ineligible” voters are registered, nearly 500 of the targeted voters have already proven to be lawfully registered U.S. citizens. That’s more than a 30 percent error rate.