Commentary: For the People Act would protect voters

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By Dr. Greg Williams and Ken Abraham

Whatever your political persuasion, every American should be appalled by the brazen efforts of conservatives to curb, restrict or block your right to vote!

Since the presidential election debacle in Florida in 2000, the proposed 2019 For the People Act (House Resolution 1) is the most robust collection of voter protections in a generation. The bill will be on the House floor next week.

According to a Feb. 8, 2021, report by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University: Just since the violent Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, state legislatures have already proposed a colossal 165 bills to make voting more burdensome. As of Feb. 23, the updated-in-real-time Voting Rights Lab’s State Voting Rights Tracker reveals that the number now exceeds 240 bills.  Each one intends to make voting trickier and more difficult, either by reducing vote-by-mail (VBM) or voter registration, imposing stricter voter-ID laws or allowing voter roll purging.

They’re direct responses to the baseless, weaponized lies claiming that widespread voter fraud is real. Not one scrap of credible, empirical evidence shows that such fraud exists. Unsupported bits of isolated anecdotes are pointless.

We need to make voting easier and redistricting (i.e., gerrymandering) harder, and enacting federal safeguards is the only practical path.

Especially in communities of color and other historically disenfranchised populations, the For the People Act would reinforce voting rights. Other examples of those communities include college students, urbanites, people with disabilities, convicted felons and older Americans.

One strategy for hoarding national power is to suppress the voting numbers, specifically those disenfranchised groups. A supportive point came from former President Donald Trump himself. He told “Fox & Friends” that the increased VBM would cause “levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

The good news is that other state lawmakers are taking advantage of an invigorated electorate and the patriotic fervor for democracy reform. As of Feb. 23, more than 880 state legislators across the U.S. had introduced, prefiled or carried over bills to expand voting access.

The For the People Act would create strong “ethics” measures for elections and our government. It also would weaken political corruption, such as the influence of “Big Money” in politics.

All of us should voice our concerns about the pernicious forces trying to disenfranchise millions of Americans. Here’s how you can get these voter protections passed: Call (202) 224-3121 for the U.S. House switchboard operator and ask to be connected to your representative (by name). Then, urge them to, at once, pass the For the People Act!

Sixty-seven percent of voters support bold democracy reforms!

Greg Williams, Ph.D., is a Fielding research fellow and nonprofit research policy analyst specializing in democracy, voter-fraud disinformation and voter suppression. He lives in Washington, D.C.

 

Ken Abraham is former deputy attorney general and founder of Citizens for Criminal JUSTICE. He lives in Dover.

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