NNPA NEWSWIRE — Dozens of state legislatures introduced bills to restrict the practice of voting by mail. Other states have begun aggressively removing voters from the rolls and re-drawing Congressional maps blatantly designed to silence the Black vote.
On September 14 a special election will be held to determine whether Governor Gavin Newsom should be recalled. This is only the fourth time in American history – that a state has held a gubernatorial recall election. The last gubernatorial recall election in California took place nearly 20 years ago.
The so-called “conservative” justices on the Supreme Court are rewriting the laws passed by Congress to serve their own partisan purposes. Now the excuse is to limit voter fraud, even though there is no evidence of such fraud other than in the ravings of partisan politicians. This struggle will continue.
August 6 was the 55th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act. If the constitutional amendments passed after the Civil War — the 13, 14 and 15th Amendments — were the “second founding” of democracy in America, the Voting Rights Act, which after nearly a century of segregation gave legal effect to the 15th Amendment that outlawed discrimination in the right to vote, should be considered the “third founding.”
The Democratic-controlled House approved a bill Friday that would restore key sections of the Voting Rights Act that once required officials in all or parts of 15 mostly Southern states to receive federal approval before making changes to the voting process.
The bill would require all states to get federal approval for election changes known to disproportionately affect voters of color.
In the span of thirty days, federal judges have scuttled voter suppression laws in several states, giving voting rights advocates a few, much-needed victories