As the 2018 and 2020 elections approach, federal and state officials ought to be scrambling for ways to prevent a repeat of Russian interference or other meddling in American democracy. Instead, many are on an obsessive hunt to eradicate phantom problems, such as supposedly massive fraud by non-citizens and people voting in two states. The upshot is that 54 years after Martin Luther King Jr. appealed for voting rights in his “I Have a Dream” speech, those rights remain under a double-barreled assault.
Restrictive laws approved by Republican legislatures have targeted minorities and poor people by, among other things, demanding specific forms of identification that few have. A federal appeals court overturned North Carolina’s law, finding that it targeted African Americans “with almost surgical precision.” Last week in Texas, a federal judge ruled that the state’s voter ID law is discriminatory and illegal.
A Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, created in May, seems focused on the president’s absurd claim that he lost the popular vote only because as many as 5 million illegal votes were cast. Never mind that the president’s own lawyers previously argued against a recount in Michigan, stating in a court filing: “All available evidence suggests that the 2016 general election was not tainted by fraud or mistake.”
Full Article: Voting rights: ‘I Have a Dream’.