The Voting Rights Act is in jeopardy.
The Voting Rights Act passed 54 years ago today. Now, it’s in jeopardy. Help us protect it.
Today, on the anniversary of the signing of the most significant piece of civil rights legislation of its era, we have to admit: Protecting the legacy of the Voting Rights Act has not been easy.
Fifty-four years ago on this day, President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law. Yet, step by step, the courts have torn holes in that law. In 2013, the Supreme Court swept away a key provision of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder that weakened the law significantly. The result has been rampant voter suppression.
In just the past year, American voters have faced massive voter roll purges and a Supreme Court ruling that allows politicians to choose their own voters through gerrymandering. These fly in the face of the intention behind the Voting Rights Act, which was meant to end racial discrimination in voting.
We saw many mechanisms of voter suppression in 2018 in states like Georgia — you can read true stories of voters who never had their vote counted at Fair Fight Georgia. Under the stripped-down Voting Rights Act, we’ll see those same mechanisms again in 2020.
Here are just a few of the methods we’ve seen to suppress voters:
- Adding new roadblocks to voter registration,
- Aggressively purging citizens from the voting rolls,
- Closing hundreds of polling places in areas where voters of color reside
- Imposing new, stricter voter identification laws.
All of these methods disenfranchise minority and other voters underrepresented in our elected offices. They create a government by the few, for the few.
Here at Vote.org, we believe in a government by the people, for the people.
Every day, Vote.org works to ensure that American citizens have the information and support they need to exercise their constitutionally protected right to vote. But we can’t do it alone.
