Editorials: Hillary Clinton's voter rights crusade | theguardian.com

increasingly likely that Hillary Clinton will be taking another shot at the presidency in 2016. She hasn’t announced her candidacy yet and may not do so for at least two more years, but preparations appear to be underway – and pretty much everyone seems to be assuming that getting the Democratic nomination is a done deal for her. Which, of course, would mean that we might soon have our first woman president. Time will tell how this will all play out, but at least we can take comfort in the knowledge that if Mrs Clinton actually does become the 45th “POTUS”, it will not be because she or any other power players in the Democratic party spent years devising ingenious schemes to disenfranchise blocs of voters who tend to support the opposition. On Monday, in the first of a series of policy speeches, Hillary Clinton spoke about the worrying implications of the US supreme court’s recent decision to strike down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act (VRA). The provision required states with a history of discrimination to get pre-clearance from the Department of Justice (DOJ) before they passed any laws that changed voting procedures. Clinton pointed out that in the past 15 years, the VRA has been used to block nearly 90 attempts to pass discriminatory voting laws. Since the provision was struck down just over a month ago, Republican law makers in several states have wasted no time ramming through highly restrictive voting laws that will make it more difficult, if not impossible, for millions of Americans to exercise their right to vote.
In Texas, Republican lawmakers didn’t wait for the ink to dry on the supreme court ruling before enforcing a voter ID law that a federal court had already invalidated. In a move likely to bring back memories of the dreaded 2000 election, Florida is restarting a purge of its voter rolls. The Republican governor of North Carolina just signed a bill into law that Clinton described as reading like the “greatest hits of voter suppression”. Some of its highlights include strict photo ID requirements, no more same-day registration, restricted early voting (if any) and no extended voting hours to accommodate the resulting long lines.
All of these measures are almost certain to disproportionately impact African-American, Latino and young voters. Yet, the Republican lawmakers who rushed to enact them would like us all to believe that it’s just a coincidence that these are the very same groups of voters who tend not to vote for Republicans.
The strict and often impossible-to-meet ID requirements are all about stamping out voter fraud, we’re told. This would sound somewhat plausible if it were not for the rather inconvenient fact that no lawmaker, Republican or otherwise, has been able to produce any evidence whatsoever that voter fraud exists in any meaningful way. (And it’s not like they haven’t looked.)
Full Article: Hillary Clinton’s voter rights crusade | Sadhbh Walshe | Comment is free | theguardian.com.