voting rights

California following Oregon’s lead on universal (automatic) voter registration

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Maybe Arizona’s queen of voter suppression, Secretary of State Michele Reagan, should pick up the phone and call her counterparts in Oregon and California to learn more about what a secretary of state who actually wants to increase voter participation in elections does to make it happen.

Think Progress reports, One Simple Change Could Drastically Improve Voter Turnout In California:

Voting-RightsAs soon as this week, the California Senate could pass a bill to address its dismally low voter turnout by making registration automatic for the millions of residents with drivers licenses.

Copying a landmark law passed by Oregon earlier this year, the policy would connect DMV records with voter registration rolls, putting the burden on the voter to opt-out rather than opt-in. According to California Secretary of State Alex Padilla, this could help bring the 6.6 million California citizens who are eligible but not registered to vote into the democratic process.

“We have a lot of work to do on the strength of our democracy,” Padilla told ThinkProgress. “We need to focus on the whole pipeline: both getting more currently registered people to cast ballots, and getting more eligible Californians on the voter rolls.”

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Keeping The Promise, A Community Panel on the Voting Rights Act – Today

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Late political calendar announcement:

Congressman Grijalva will host Keeping The Promise, A Community Panel on the Voting Rights Act on Wednesday, August 12 from 9:00-11:00 AM at the Tucson YWCA on the Voting Rights Act, the promise it continues to hold for countless Americans, and the ongoing efforts to undermine that promise 50 years after it became law.

WHO
Congressman Raúl M. Grijalva
Community advocates

WHAT
Keeping The Promise
A Community Panel on the Voting Rights Act

WHERE
Tucson YWCA
525 N. Bonita Avenue
Tucson, AZ 85745

WHEN
Wednesday, August 12
9:00 -11:00 AM

For more information, contact Cassandra Becerra at (520) 622-6788 or cassandra.becerra@mail.house.gov

Press Release (below the fold)

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President Barack Obama calls on Congress to restore the Voting Rights Act

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President Barack Obama reflects on the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act and calls for its restoration in 50 Years After the Voting Rights Act, We Still Have Work to Do:

The right to vote is one of the most fundamental rights of any democracy.

ObamaFifty years ago today, because of the sacrifice of countless men and women, that right was secured for more Americans.

On August 6, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law — breaking down legal barriers at the state and local level that had prevented African Americans and others from exercising their constitutional right to vote.

Because of that law — one of our nation’s most influential pieces of legislation — Americans who were previously disenfranchised and left out of the democratic process were finally able to cast a ballot. The law was designed to ensure that all American citizens, regardless of the color of their skin, had an equal opportunity to make their voices heard.

But that law didn’t come to pass because folks suddenly decided it was the right thing to do.

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President Bill Clinton on the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act

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President Bill Clinton writes this essay on the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act for the Yale Law and Policy Review. (William Jefferson Clinton, The Voting Rights Umbrella, Yale L. & Pol’y Rev. Inter Alia (August 6th, 2015), http://ylpr.yale.edu/inter_alia/voting-rights-umbrella). The Voting Rights Umbrella:

BillClintonThe right to vote is both fundamental to individual liberty and to the proper functioning of representative democracy. When voting rights are denied, diluted, or restricted, the ability of government to respond to our challenges and increase our opportunities is impaired, and its legitimacy in doing so is diminished.

A major theme of American history is the steady expansion of the right to vote. Once restricted to white male property owners, the franchise has been extended to include all citizens from their eighteenth birthday on. Fifty years ago, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 sought to end practices like literacy tests that made it more difficult for African Americans to vote.

The Voting Rights Act was the result of years of struggle, paid for with the blood, sweat, and tears of Americans black and white, young and old. It was made possible by people like John Lewis, who absorbed blow after blow on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge, and by the elected officials led by President Johnson willing to enact laws allowing us to live up to our founding principles.

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50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act – still necessary today

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Since our sad small town newspaper the Arizona Daily Star did nothing to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, here is the editorial from the New York Times and an op-ed by Ari Berman of The Nation.

The Times editorializes, The Voting Rights Act at 50:

voting-rights-act-signed-16x91For the first 48 years of its existence, the Voting Rights Act — signed by President Lyndon Johnson 50 years ago this week — was one of the most popular and effective civil rights laws in American history. Centuries of slavery, segregation and officially sanctioned discrimination had kept African-Americans from having any real voice in the nation’s politics. Under the aggressive new law, black voter registration and turnout soared, as did the number of black elected officials.

Recognizing its success, Congress repeatedly reaffirmed the act and expanded its protections. The last time, in 2006, overwhelming majorities in both houses extended the law for another 25 years. But only seven years later, in 2013, five Supreme Court justices elbowed in and concluded, on scant evidence, that there was no longer a need for the law’s most powerful tool; the Voting Rights Act, they claimed, had done its job.

In truth, the battle for voting rights has had to be unrelenting, and the act itself has been under constant assault from the start. As Ari Berman writes in his new history of the law, “Give Us the Ballot,” the act’s revolutionary success “spawned an equally committed group of counterrevolutionaries” who have aimed to dismantle the central achievements of the civil rights movement.

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