voting rights

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• SOURCE: Prospect Magazine
  9/23/2021
  

  The New Front in the War for Voting Rights

  by Jim Zirin

  The 15th Amendment empowers Congress to enforce the amendment and the right to vote with "appropriate legislation." With Republicans committed to vote suppression, the Democrats must act unilaterally.   

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  8/26/2021
  

  These Restrictions Wouldn't have Passed Muster Before the Roberts Court Destroyed the Voting Rights Act

  Election law experts agree that a host of new state laws would have failed the Justice Department's preclearance requirements under the pre-Shelby Voting Rights Act. 

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• SOURCE: AFRO News
  8/21/2021
  

  What Gloria Richardson Taught Me

  by Joseph R. Fitzgerald

  The late Gloria Richardson's career as an organizer, activist, and thinker in the Black Freedom movement hold lessons for how Congressional Democrats can and must advance new voting rights protections. 

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• SOURCE: Atlanta
  8/10/2021
  

  Latest Installment of Graphic Format Memoir of John Lewis Deals with Ongoing Legacy

  A conversation with Andrew Aydin, John Lewis's former aide and collaborator on "Run," the hit graphic format memoir, discusses the legacy of the activist and congressman. 

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• SOURCE: CNN
  8/1/2021
  

  Are the Democrats About to Repeat Mistakes that Led to Jim Crow?

  If Democrats won't go all out to protect the franchise for their most loyal constituencies, how can they expect to govern? The history of the Jim Crow south suggests they won't, according to historian Richard White. 

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  7/30/2021
  

  Bouie: Manchin and Sinema Have Their History Wrong

  Bipartisan support for 1960s civil rights legislation was an artifact of a fleeting moment of ideological diversity within the two parties. When it comes to voting and civil rights laws, partisan polarization has been the historical norm, and it's nothing to fear now when ballot access is at risk across the nation.

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• SOURCE: Vox
  7/21/2021
  

  How America Lost the Commitment to the Right to Vote

  "The Supreme Court, Justice Elena Kagan lamented in a dissenting opinion earlier this month, 'has treated no statute worse' than the Voting Rights Act. She’s right."

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• 7/18/2021
  

  The 1906 Decision in Hodges v. United States Shows the Error of Leaving Fundamental Rights to the States

  by William H. Pruden III

  The Court ruled that the 13th Amendment did not create a federal right to fairly contracted labor, and called for Black workers to "take their chances with other citizens in the states where they should make their homes," despite the plain determination of those citizens to oppress and expolit them.

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• SOURCE: Southern Spaces
  7/12/2021
  

  Undoing the Voting Rights Act

  by Steve Suitts

  Samuel Alito ventured far from the legislative intent of Congress's 1982 update to the Voting Rights act, making it much more difficult to challenge restrictive state voting laws. 

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• SOURCE: Election Law Blog
  7/1/2021
  

  Breaking and Analysis: Supreme Court on 6-3 Vote Rejects Voting Rights Act Section 2 Case in Brnovich Case— A Significant Weakening of Section 2

  by Rick Hasen

  "The conservative Supreme Court has taken away all the major available tools for going after voting restrictions. This at a time when some Republican states are passing new restrictive voting law."

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• SOURCE: Jacobin
  6/5/2021
  

  There’s Less Than Two Years to Save American Democracy

  Voting Rights scholar Ari Berman discusses the past, present, and future of the ballot, and the parallels between the overthrow of Reconstruction-era voting rights and today's proposals to empower state legislatures and suppress the vote. 

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• SOURCE: Mother Jones
  5/28/2021
  

  Eleanor Holmes Norton’s Long, Lonely Fight to Gain DC Voting Rights

  Eleanor Holmes Norton has always advocated for DC statehood and full representation in Congress, but today places a higher priority on comprehensive voting rights legislation. 

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• SOURCE: The New Republic
  5/17/2021
  

  Our 250-Year Fight for Multiracial Democracy

  The 1829 Virginia Constitutional Convention offers a lens onto the profoundly anti-democratic views held by many of the founding generation. We deal with the same hostility toward majority rule today. 

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• SOURCE: FiveThirtyEight
  5/17/2021
  

  How The Republican Push To Restrict Voting Could Affect Our Elections

  Carol Anderson: “I think Shelby is going to go down in history the way the Plessy v. Ferguson decision has.” 

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  5/9/2021
  

  A Texas Bill Drew Ire for Saying it Would Preserve ‘Purity of the Ballot Box.’ Here’s the Phrase’s History

  Texas legislation invoked the "purity of the ballot box," a phrase critics argued harkened back to the era of Jim Crow and the White Primary. Historians say the phrase itself is obscure but the idea that white Texans are the preferred voting citizens has a long history in the state. 

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• SOURCE: CNN
  5/8/2021
  

  A Short History of the Long Conservative Assault on Black Voting Power

  Eric Foner and Kevin Kruse discuss the historical precedent for the resurgent ideological position that some votes should be more equal than others. 

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• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  4/13/2021
  

  Stacey Abrams’s Fight against Voter Suppression Dates Back to the Revolution

  by Karen Cook Bell

  "The roots of Black women’s activism can be traced back to the Revolutionary Era, when thousands of Black women protested with their feet and ran away from their enslavers." This act would shape the demands of radical Black politics in the ensuing decades.

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• SOURCE: WCNC
  4/11/2021
  

  'The Truth is, Our Elections are Very, Very Secure': Winthrop Professor Debunks Basis for Restrictive Voting Laws

  Political scientist Scott Huffman says that despite claims of fraudulent voting, democracy has historically and recently been threatened more by efforts to restrict the vote. 

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• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  4/12/2021
  

  The Media will be Key to Overcoming a Senate Filibuster on Voting Rights

  by Donald A. Ritchie

  "From the Boston Massacre to Watergate, the power of the media became manifest whenever editors and reporters, convinced of the seriousness of their cause, kept a story alive until they forced people to pay attention." TV journalist Roger Mudd kept the story of the Senate's filibuster of the Civil Rights Act in the public eye. 

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• SOURCE: Democracy Docket
  3/23/2021
  

  It’s Time to Reframe Voting Rights in the Courts

  Since the expansion of voting rights by legislation and the courts in the 1960s, conservative legal activists have narrowed ballot access by shifting legal focus from the interests of the voters toward the purported interest of the state in protecting election integrity, balancing a real problem against a largely imaginary one.