This is one of the most fascinating things I’ve ever seen. Where a National Political party the Republicans have set out to disenfranchise minority voters. Isn’t the right to vote guarneteed by the U.S. Constitution?
Amendment XV (the Fifteenth Amendment) of the United States Constitution provides that governments in the United States may not prevent a citizen from voting because of his race, color, or previous condition of servitude (slavery). It was ratified on February 3, 1870.
Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
Even with the enactment of this Amendment further action was required and taken with The National Voting Rights Act of 1965. Yet with all these actions taken the voting rights of Americas minority and poor citizens continues to be attacked by the Republican party and its supporters.
Yes there had been previous cases of attempted voter suppression but nothing like that which took place in Florida before, during and after the 2000 presidential election with voters being denied the right to vote because their name was similar to that of a convicted felon. Letters sent to voters informing them of their removal and the possibility of reinstatement which where sent either to the wrong address or after the time for appeal had expired. The 2004 Presidential election was no better: Here are examples of alleged voter caging and how they where handled by the Justice Department.
Contrast, for example, the Department of Justice’s efforts in 1990 in North Carolina under President Bush’s father to the Department’s actions in the 2004 election cycle in Ohio. In 1990, the North Carolina Republican Party and the Jesse Helms for Senate campaign engaged in vote caging by sending 44,000 postcards to black voters, giving them incorrect information about voting and threatening them with criminal prosecution. The plan was to use the mailing to compile a caging list. In response, the Bush I Justice Department, where I served at the time as a federal prosecutor of voting discrimination cases, filed a federal lawsuit against the GOP and Helms’ campaign and obtained declaratory and injunctive relief. In 2004, when the Ohio Republican Party was sued by voters prior to the election to stop what appeared to be a similar vote caging scheme in progress, the Bush II Justice Department did not file its own lawsuit to stop the vote caging but instead intervened in a highly unusual manner on the opposite side: by writing a letter to the federal judge overseeing the case and coming to the defense of the Ohio’s GOP efforts! The judge appears to have ignored the letter, which was totally unsolicited and contrary to the Department’s tradition of avoiding intervention in pre-election litigation.
One might believe that given the high profile of this issue that attempts at continuing the practice voter suppression might fall by the wayside you would be wrong. Republicans continue to work towards if not completely disenfranchising poor and minority voters then ensuring that large majorities within these two groups will have their votes suppressed. Two laws passed by the by the Ohio and Florida state legislatures are a prime example of this:
In Ohio, which swung the 2004 election to Bush, new Democratic Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner said in a phone interview that an election law passed last year and signed by former Republican Gov. Bob Taft effectively “institutionalized” vote caging.The law requires that the state’s 88 county election boards send non-forwardable, pre-election notices to all 7.8 million registered Ohio voters at least 60 days before the election. Undelivered letters are public record, she said, meaning that effectively, “now the counties are paying for” the data needed to compile challenge lists.
A 2005 Florida law, approved by the Justice Department under the Voting Rights Act, stripped the state’s 10.5 million registered voters of the right to contest challenges at the polls. Now a challenger need only swear to a “good faith belief” that a voter is ineligible to force the voter to file a provisional ballot.
At the same time, the law reduces from three days to 48 hours the deadline for challenged voters to produce evidence that they’re eligible to vote in their precincts.
Why does the Republican party work so hard to suppress and or disenfranchise poor and minority voters? Maybe its because they seen them as a threat to their power.
Is because they are blatantly racist and despise those who whose economic fortunes are well below theirs? My guess is that it is all of those things along many other underlying fears, biases and prejudices.
No matter your political or ideological bent No One who has the legal right to vote should have their Constitutional Right to Vote interfered with just because they are poor or a minority.