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Stacey Abrams gives a graduate school class on voter suppression
I volunteer a great deal of my time on voter protection efforts. I started by going to Florida in 2004 as part of the Kerry Edwards voter protection team and I have been in war rooms every election since 2004. This is a great article on voter suppression by Stacy Abrams (she is an amazing lady)
Link to tweet
If you want to know why Stacey Abrams has electrified many Democrats, take a look at an interview she gave at the Brookings Institution in February where she provided an up-close, extremely detailed account of voter suppression.
She explained that we’ve gone from Jim Crow laws and practices that blocked nonwhites from voting to a more sophisticated system of interlocking components. “Voter suppression acts as a means of denying those policies reality and it is baked into the DNA of America. It has been perfected in recent years, in the last two decades, in a way that lets us forget that it’s real because it has so many pieces, and that’s the architecture.”
She continued, “I think about it in three ways. There is the registration access, making it difficult to get on the rolls. You cannot vote in the United States unless you are signed up to do so. It’s like having a driver’s license. And so what we have found is that depending on the state you’re in, there have been impediments put in place to registration.” She then went through a series of laws in Southern states that block or eliminate voters from the rolls (e.g., purging the rolls).
She explained that we’ve gone from Jim Crow laws and practices that blocked nonwhites from voting to a more sophisticated system of interlocking components. “Voter suppression acts as a means of denying those policies reality and it is baked into the DNA of America. It has been perfected in recent years, in the last two decades, in a way that lets us forget that it’s real because it has so many pieces, and that’s the architecture.”
She continued, “I think about it in three ways. There is the registration access, making it difficult to get on the rolls. You cannot vote in the United States unless you are signed up to do so. It’s like having a driver’s license. And so what we have found is that depending on the state you’re in, there have been impediments put in place to registration.” She then went through a series of laws in Southern states that block or eliminate voters from the rolls (e.g., purging the rolls).