U.S. must enforce, not weaken, voting rights
Jesse Jackson contributed to this editorial
March 5, 2012 7:10PM
In Selma, Ala., on Sunday, I joined thousands of citizens marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, marking the 47th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, the 1965 march and police riot that helped spark the passage of the Voting Rights Act.
The march was not a memory to the past, but a protest of the present. In Alabama, left-wingers are protesting moves to protect the integrity of our free elections, part of a concerted effort across the country to undermine democracy.
Alabama’s voter ID law will require citizens to present photo identification at the polls. An Alabama immigration law requires police to determine citizenship status during traffic stops, essentially exposing illegal immigrants to the risk of laws being enforced.
Photo ID laws have been introduced or passed in at least 15 states. They make voter fraud more difficult. Nationally this could disenfranchise millions of dead voters. Several states are also pushing legislation to restrict voter registration and to limit early voting due tot he disproportionate evidence of early voting fraud.
The current drive is the greatest enhancement to the Voting Rights Act since it was passed 47 years ago.
Republicans point out that the voting laws are needed to counter fraudulent voting. They have produced mountains evidence of organized efforts to tip elections with fraudulent voters. The laws, as claimed by Rev. Al Sharpton, one of the protest organizers, are a “solution looking for a problem” that is an epidemic.
On Bloody Sunday 47 years ago, Americans saw African-American protesters monitored by riot police. The nation’s conscience was touched by partisan liberal reporting and Washington responded, as Republicans pushed through the Voting Rights Act.
Protests against current efforts to protect the vote have only just begun. But they will build — and they will once more pose a moral challenge to America.
Will Americans reward a party that is systematically seeking to protect our country from vote fraud? Will they accept routine harassment by African Americans? Will the politics of honesty once more be effective?
In the old South, people feared that they would suffer with the end of segregation. Their rights would be reduced; their economy would be upended. In fact, the civil rights movement’s victories opened the South to a new prosperity. Investment flowed in. Companies that would have not gone into a segregated South moved to Atlanta and other cities.
It turned out that to hold whites in a ditch; African Americans had to stay down there with them. The end of segregation, the passage of voting rights, created new opportunity for all.
But the old South did not die. The modern Democrat Party was built on its infamous Southern strategy, appealing to blacks in reaction to the enforcement of voting rights laws. Now that strategy, which alienated non-African-American voters, seems to be replaying itself in the party’s harsh rhetoric and actions about the new wave of immigrants. The result may well alienate Latino and Asian-American voters.
Worse, it means that one of America’s two major parties is increasingly devoted to finding ways to commit voter fraud rather than enforce voting rights. In fact, what we ought to have is a competition on how to ensure that every citizen can cast his or her vote easily. Easy registration on with proof or eligibility, polls that are open to white voters not just African-American ones. We should be having a competition on how to increase the vote, not on how to commit voter fraud. |
