Voting Rights Act

Amid all the paeans to the memory of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. that will be published today, it’s vital to note that at this moment perhaps his most important legacy — his struggle to ensure the full realization of voting rights for all Americans — is under greater threat than at any time since his death. King, who would have turned 90 this year, was a tireless advocate for freedom, equality and democracy. He urged the nation to revitalize the amendments added to the Constitution after the Civil War — what he called the “full pledge of freedom” — to ensure equal citizenship for all. Even as a teenager, he spoke eloquently for the “13 million black sons and daughters of our forefathers” who “continue the fight for the translation of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments from writing on the printed page to an actuality.” At the center of King’s campaign for freedom was ending racial discrimination in voting. Over the course of his life, he demanded, time and again, “give us the ballot.” The right to vote was a core fundamental right: “To deny a person the right to exercise his political freedom at the polls is no less a dastardly act as to deny a Christian the right to petition God in prayer.”

If judging only by the 99 new laws proposed in 2017 to restrict registration and voting access, one might assume that voter fraud is a widespread issue. Yet according to a study in May by the Brennan Center for Justice, of the 23.5 million votes cast in the 2016 general election, only an estimated 30 incidents across 42 jurisdictions were referred to by election officials as suspected noncitizen voting. In a one-year period, America has had more proposed laws prohibiting voting than cases of actual voter fraud incidents. So what makes a statistically nonexistent issue warrant the current level of scrutiny or legislative action? If the proposed cures appear worse than the problem they’re designed to solve, that’s because the problem isn’t voter fraud, but the growing number of women, people of color, young, and low-income voters filling out ballots.

Fifty-two years ago this week, John Lewis of Georgia was a young activist, not the Democratic congressman he is today. Yet he got a warmer welcome from the then-president of the United States, Lyndon B. Johnson, than from today’s occupant of the White House. On the Twitter feed of the longtime member of the U.S. House of Representatives, you can see a picture celebrating that time a few decades ago, when, with Democratic and Republican support, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed and then signed. Lewis was one of those who suffered arrests and shed blood to make it so. You might think that at 77 years of age, he has earned the right to relax just a little. But instead of celebrating progress made, he has to ignore occasional insults from President Donald Trump and some of his congressional colleagues, while refighting a version of that same fight for voting rights.