Hillary Clinton will dive headlong into the voting rights wars with a speech Thursday at historically black Texas Southern University in Houston. In a preview of the speech, the Washington Post is reporting that Clinton will call for new laws guaranteeing at least 20 days of early voting nationwide. The move comes as Team Hillary shows other signs that it intends to make voting rights a priority of her campaign.
“This is, I think, a moment when we should be expanding the franchise,” Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta told the Post. “What we see in state after state is this effort by conservatives to restrict the right to vote.
The choice of a historically black college as the venue for the speech is symbolic, as is Texas, which is the target of the Justice Department’s big Voting Rights Act case since the Roberts’ Supreme Court gutted the landmark civil rights law in 2013. At issue is the state’s 2011 voter ID law which the Justice Department alleges disenfranchises minorities and other Democratic-leaning constituencies.
In recent weeks, the Clinton campaign’s top lawyer Marc Elias has filed challenges to voting laws in Ohio and Wisconsin — both states with Republican governors considered to be White House contenders. Those challenges are in addition to a 2014 lawsuit he was already pursuing against North Carolina’s election laws. The Ohio and Wisconsin complaints are technically separate from Clinton’s campaign, but her spokesman Brian Fallon said in statement to MSNBC, “[W]e are aware of it and strongly support its goal of ensuring the right to vote is not unduly burdened.”
In Thursday’s speech, Clinton is also expected to call on Congress to restore the provisions of the Voting Rights Act that the Supreme Court threw out in 2013, the Post reported.
I never saw anything like that in the Bible so Jeebus wouldn’t be for that and it is un-American to let “those” people vote when it is easy for them
Good start … add to it ‘no cause’ absentee ballots for all!
It is an important position and I hope she keeps hammering away at it. Preventing people from voting makes it closer to impossible to implement any policy changes not desired by those trying to interfere with voting.
Mr. Marshall just declared her candidacy in trouble. Looks like Hillary must have a bit more confidence in herself! I’m happy to see her take the positions she has. She’s on the side of the majority of Americans on a lot of issues (campaign finance reform, gay rights, voting rights to name a few). Plus this gives her to opportunity to troll the R’s a bit.
Instead of all these bandaids, why not just call for a 3-day national voting period? Pick any 3 day period, and mandate that voting stations must remain open the entire 72-hours, no exceptions. This one fix alone would curtail roughly 90% of all the shenanigans we commonly see around voting time. Enough of a fix, in fact, that I surmise many of the remaining shenanigans would fade away as ineffective on their own, without the 1 rushed day of voting to shade them.
The other real problem no one is talking about, is rigged voting machines. They need a paper trail and public software, like yesterday!