https://www.democracydocket.com/2021/07/the-fight-for-voting-rights-is-the-fight-for-our-democracy/
The Fight for Voting Rights Is The Fight For Our Democracy
July 7, 2021
By Hillary Rodham Clinton
When Democrats in the Texas Legislature walked out of the capitol in May to stop a suite of anti-democratic voting laws, they cast a spotlight on a crisis that extends far beyond the Lone Star State. Since the 2020 election with its historic turnout, lawmakers across the country have introduced nearly 400 bills making it harder to vote: purging voters from the rolls, making it more difficult to register, cutting back on early and absentee voting, getting rid of ballot drop boxes, even banning giving out food or water to people waiting in line at the polls.
Each of these proposals disproportionately prevents people of color from casting their ballots, and each is egregious in its own right. (They also pose a question: If your best strategy for winning elections is to block huge swaths of the electorate from voting, what does that say about the strength of your candidates and policies?) Combined, they add up to an even bigger problem – one that encompasses redistricting, Trump’s “Big Lie” and the anti-majoritarianism we’re seeing from today’s Republican Party. We are witnessing a concerted attempt to destabilize the democratic process and delegitimize our multi-racial democracy, carried out in full view of the American people. As Democrats, it’s not enough to push back one law, one court case or even one election at a time. We need to fundamentally change the way we think about and fight back against this blatant, sweeping effort.
The fight to ensure that every citizen can vote and have their vote counted has long been the defining struggle of our country. This historical thread runs from the Civil War to the Thirteenth and 19th Amendments to the Civil Rights Movement. The Voting Rights Act, and the laws interpreting it, have been at the core of much of the progress we’ve made since its passage – a view that, until recently, was shared by Democrats and Republicans. I was in the U.S. Senate when we voted 98-0 to extend this landmark piece of legislation. We sifted through thousands of pages of evidence and heard hundreds of hours of testimony that showed just how desperately the Voting Rights Act was still needed. After our unanimous vote, the law was signed by a Republican president, George W. Bush.
It’s heartbreaking and unacceptable that we once again find ourselves fighting the battles of the last two centuries. Today’s voting restrictions are no different from the Jim Crow past, replacing literacy tests and poll taxes with laws that, as one North Carolina judge put it in 2016, “target African Americans with almost surgical precision.” Much of the blame for this backsliding rests with the Supreme Court, which, thanks to the election of President Trump, is even more hostile to voting rights today than it was when it gutted a crucial provision of the Voting Rights Act in 2013. But the problem is more insidious.
Thirty years ago, Republican operative Thomas Hofeller said, “I define redistricting as the only legalized form of vote-stealing left in the United States today.” He became the primary architect of Republicans’ gerrymandering strategy, collecting data on race and voting behavior, then drawing statehouse maps tailor-made to dilute the influence of Black voters. Groups like the Federalist Society have worked for years to pack the courts with judges more committed to appeasing powerful special interests than to championing the fundamental rights of the American people. The emboldening of white supremacists and conspiracy theorists during Trump’s campaign and time in the White House along with the international movement against liberal democracy have exacerbated this perfect storm.