“It turns out it’s just not a common crime”. Wednesday, a federal appeals court ruled that a Texas law is discriminatory and violates the act.
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Some of the changes to the Voting Rights Act that have taken place in recent years, the president said, appear neutral on the surface but have the affect of discouraging people from voting.
At the same time, some state legislatures have implemented policies and procedures that may on the surface seem neutral – such as restrictions on early voting and certain requirements for photo identification – but are actually discouraging people from voting, Obama said.
This includes reductions in the number of voting hours and days, restrictive voter ID laws and, perhaps most significantly, the process of gerrymandering, or the drawing of political boundaries to give your party an advantage over an opposing party.
He called on Congress to revise and strengthen the Voting Rights Act in response to a Supreme Court decision that struck down a major provision of the law as outdated.
In a 5-4 decision, the court struck down a formula that determined whether states or other jurisdictions should be required to get federal approval before making changes to their voting laws – based, in part, on their discrimination in the 1960s and ’70s.
Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Congressman John Lewis, D-Ga., as well as other lawmakers and advocates for voters’ rights, will join Obama in a video teleconference broadcast from the White House. “So the only reason to pass this law, despite the reasonableness of how it sounds, is to make it harder for folks to vote”.
One room in the Hank Sanders Technology Center at Wallace Community College in Selma became the center of debate, remembrance and reflections on the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act.
“The promise that all of us are created equal is written into our founding documents – but it’s up to us to make that promise real”, he said. He said he would proclaim September 22 National Voter Registration Day. Now, fast-forward 50 years later, African Americans are still going to the polls, but at a smaller ratio. He says without them, the Voting Rights Act wouldn’t have been signed into law 50 years ago Thursday.
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In practice, violations of the Voting Rights Act only occur when states limit voting opportunities, not when they fail to expand them.
