Yesterday, Attorney General Eric Holder addressed the partisan assault on voting rights, the likes of which we have not seen since before the civil rights movement and the enactment of the cornerstone Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Holder spoke of the VRA at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library and Museum in Austin, Texas—a space dedicated to the very president who enacted the vanguard law because, as he said then, it is “deadly wrong to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country.”
The much-anticipated speech addressed the Justice Department’s role in protecting voters’ access to the ballot and the barriers that Americans face today, primarily due to an “antiquated” election system.
“We need election systems that are free from fraud, discrimination and partisan influence — and that are more, not less, accessible to the citizens of this country,” said Holder, who also claimed that our “biggest barrier to vote in this country is our antiquated voting system.”
“All citizens should be automatically registered to vote,” said Holder, suggesting that “states should modernize out-of-date paper registration systems,” writes Gary Scharrer at the San Antonio Express-Times.
The specter of voter fraud and partisan politics, Holder said, play a role in the passage of laws that turn the clock back on the Voting Rights Act and the hinderance of advancements in the election system.
Ari Berman writes at Rolling Stone: “Holder also addressed the conservative bogeyman of ‘voter fraud,’ which Republicans constantly invoke to justify restrictive voting laws, saying that ‘voter fraud is not acceptable – and will not be tolerated by this Justice Department,’ while also noting that ‘those on all sides of this debate have acknowledged that in-person voting fraud is uncommon.’”
Despite the mutual acknowledgement that voter fraud is rare, Holder’s speech garnered a group of picketers who carried signs “supporting voter identification laws or urging him to resign,” Charlie Savage at the New York Times writes.
“Currently, the Justice Department is reviewing new requirements in Texas and South Carolina requiring voters to produce a photo ID before casting ballots,” the Associated Press notes. “The department also is examining changes that Florida has made to its electoral process — imposing financial penalties on third-party voter registration organizations like the League of Women Voters when they miss deadlines and shortening the number of days in the early voting period before elections.”
Earlier this year, Project Vote, the ACLU and Florida ACLU, urged Holder and the Justice Department to block the restrictive Florida law, which is now under federal court review. At this time when voting rights are threatened–not just in Florida, but across the country–we applaud Attorney General Holder for acknowledging the need to protect the voting rights of all Americans.
“Although I cannot go into detail about the ongoing review of these and other state-law changes, I can assure you that it will be thorough — and it will be fair,” he said.