Civil & Human Rights

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Ilyse Hogue, co-director of Friends of Democracy, a super PAC aimed at electing candidates who champion campaign finance reform, and the former director of political advocacy and communications for MoveOn.org, has written this opinion piece for CNN. GOP's push to suppress vote threatens democracy (excerpts):

This election year is the
culmination of years of Republican efforts to foment confusion and fear
to keep certain Americans from voting. That is a subplot of this
election, but one that will have massive consequences. In close and
bitterly fought elections, there's far more at stake than who occupies
the White House: Americans' belief in the integrity of our democracy
hangs in the balance.

These efforts are
pernicious, pervasive and professionalized. In a recent New Yorker
article, Jane Mayer profiled Hans von Spakowsky, a legal fellow at the
conservative Heritage Foundation who has been hyping the myth of voter impersonation fraud since 1998, despite mountains of evidence refuting his claim.
(The Brennan Center for Justice has concluded that many more people are
struck by lightning than commit in-person voter fraud.) Rep. John Lewis
— a civil rights hero who bled to get all Americans the right to vote
— describes von Spakowsky as waking up every morning thinking "What can I do today to make it more difficult for people to vote?"

Spakowsky is a close adviser to True the Vote,
a Houston-based organization funded by wealthy conservative donors that
has led challenges against the registration of minority voters across
the country.

Because of these
challenges, thousands of Americans who have voted reliably in the same
place every year have had to attend formal hearings to defend their
registrations or be disqualified from voting. The group has been so
aggressive and so inaccurate in its work that Rep. Elijah Cummings has said it could "amount to a criminal conspiracy to deny legitimate voters their constitutional rights."

The backbone of the voter
suppression movement has been the national push to institute a
labyrinth of voter identification laws. Thirty-three states have passed such laws since 2009.

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Dan Harris of ABC News does an investigative report for Nightline on True The Vote voter intimidation and voter suppression. The founder of True The Vote, Catherine Engelbrect, lies her ass off in this interview, and Mr. Moran does a fairly weak job of pointing it out, tripping her up once on a county attorney's finding of race-based voter challenges in Houston in a prior election. Moran accurately points out that "Study after study has shown that voter fraud is virtually non-existent."

Video below the fold.