Hillary Hits Hard on Voting Rights - Says Discrimination Deniers 'Must Not Be Paying Attention'

[bigtree]

from CNN:


____ In her remarks in San Francisco Monday (American Bar Assn.), Mrs. Clinton took aim at policies she said were unfairly limiting access to polls for minority voters, and said June's Supreme Court decision gutting the federal Voting Rights Act was a grave mistake. That ruling effectively invalidated a key provision of the 1965 law that gives the federal government oversight of states and localities with a history of voter discrimination.

Clinton said the part of the law which was struck down had played a "such an important role" in the decades since it became law, and argued it was still needed to prevent undue restrictions from being placed on minority voters.

"Not every obstacle is related to race, but anyone who says that racial discrimination is no longer a problem in American elections must not be paying attention," Clinton said. "And despite the best efforts of many well-intentioned election officials, discrepancies and resources across precincts and polling stations still disproportionately affect African-American, Latino, and young voters."

She singled out efforts in Florida to remove noncitizens from its voter rolls – an effort that began, and later stalled, during later year's presidential election, but that the state's Republican governor revived following the Supreme Court's ruling.

Clinton said the effort was likely to "disproportionately affect minority voters and bring back memories of the 2000 election, and the scores of wrongly disenfranchised voters."


read: http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2013/08/12/hillary-clinton-jumps-back-into-political-fray-with-speech-on-voting-rights/

[JustAnotherGen]

1. Thanks for posting this

Unfortunately - it's already too late for 2016.

[Thinkingabout]

2. If the GOP is putting in laws to prevent Democrats from voting maybe Democrats needs

To enact laws to prevent the voters who voted for crazy TP members from voting again since they don't seem capable of making sensible decisions.

If the GOP had a reasonable opportunity of proving voter fraud we might need to make adjustments but this is not the case. If we used the Florida case in 2000 then we could cry voter fraud. We will need to run a grassroots campaign to get our Democrat voters with the type of id which will suffice.

[Little Star]

3. k&r

[reformist2]

4. If the court was concerned by the VRA's uneven application, make federal review universal!

Quite frankly, I think there are a lot of states not subject to "preclearance" by federal authorities that need it (e.g., Ohio). We should revise the Voting Rights Act to say that state voting laws are of such importance that ALL changes in EVERY state need to be reviewed at the federal level. The Supreme Court may still find fault with that, but it'll be a much harder thing to do when the law applies equally to all jurisdictions.

[bigtree]

5. 'harder thing to do when the law applies equally to all jurisdictions'

. . . that's good reasoning, reformist2.

Make all significant changes to voting laws subject to federal review before enactment. That still amounts to pre-clearance, or pre-approval, so it will meet strong resistance from these red states determined to restrict Democratic and minority voters.