(Above): Protesting recent anti-voter legislation across the country, demonstrators at the Freedom to Vote rally, Oct. 23, in Washington, D.C., call to pressure Congress to pass three voting rights acts. (Bob Korn/Shutterstock) (Inset: l-r): Wade Henderson, Interim President and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the oldest civil rights coalition in the U.S.; John C. Yang, Executive Director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice (AAJC); Jacqueline De Leon, Staff Attorney, Native American Rights Fund; and Sean Morales-Doyle, Acting Director for the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. (Siliconeer/EMS)

 

At an Ethnic Media Services briefing, co-hosted with The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, Nov. 5, speakers – Wade Henderson, Interim President and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the oldest civil rights coalition in the U.S.; John C. Yang, Executive Director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice (AAJC); Jacqueline De Leon, Staff Attorney, Native American Rights Fund; and Sean Morales-Doyle, Acting Director for the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice – discussed struggle to safeguard voting rights, perhaps the most pressing civil rights issue of the moment. On Nov. 3, Republicans used the filibuster to block debate over the John L. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act even as 19 Republican-led states have passed restrictive new voting laws. Speakers updated us on the stakes, particularly for ethnic voters, and where the struggle goes from here, focusing still on the senate looking to the courts reforming the filibuster.

“This is a very important discussion. More so than our usual convenience ‘democracy is in peril.’ There are too many in this country who fail to recognize the urgency of the moment. That’s why having a conversation about the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act is so critically important,” said Henderson.

Acknowledging deep disappointment in the senate’s failure, Nov. 3, to advance debate on the John Lewis bill, the legislation to restore and strengthen the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Henderson said, “It has now been eight years, four months, and 11 days, since the Supreme Court gutted the part of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County vs Holder decision. It was a blow to our democracy and the decision unleashed a tidal wave of measures to restrict the vote that resemble the Jim Crow era, both in intent and intensity.

“That anti-voter assault has fully grown in momentum since the 2020 election. The January 6th (attack) left us no doubt of the fragility of our democracy and state legislatures are now hell-bent on perpetuating Donald Trump’s big lie.”

The Brennan Center pointed out that between January and September of this year, 19 states have enacted 33 new laws that restrict our freedom to vote. “The Leadership Conference has published 13 state reports that document chapter and verse, the pervasive and pernicious racial discrimination in voting. The evidence could not be clear that the senate action is necessary to restore the Voting Rights Act. Before now, voting rights has always had bipartisan support. We must never forget that Republicans voted in support of the 2006 reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act at a 98-to-nothing vote. 13 current Republican senators voted for the reauthorization. As Members of Congress, their unwillingness to support the legislation today demonstrates how hyper-partisanship has overtaken long-standing bipartisan support for voting rights,” said Henderson.

“This fight is about what’s at stake for American values and American votes. Failure to recognize that is to deny the fundamental promise of our Constitution, that every voice and every vote must count. The window is closing, but there is still time to act,” said Henderson.

“Congress should even cancel the recess next week and lawmakers shouldn’t go home as these voting rights bills languish, time and again, voters have shown up for democracy, now senators must show up for voters before it’s too late,” pointed Henderson.

“We’re at a critical moment right now for our democracy. We are facing unprecedented attacks on our democracy. We all saw that come to fruition in a way that was frightening on January 6th of this year, we saw real attacks, an attempted insurrection, we saw the threat that our democracy faces manifest in a way that I don’t know that any of us thought we would. That attempted insurrection was motivated by the big lie by this idea that our elections were rigged. That there was rampant misconduct, that same lie has fueled this wave of restrictive laws. That same light is what is being used to justify these restrictive laws. It’s not the same ‘in your face’ visceral kind of attack that we all witnessed on January 6th, but it is an attack on our democracy and an attack on voting rights,” said Doyle.

The Brennan Center for Justice keeps track of every piece of legislation affecting voting rights introduced in every state legislation across the country. This year they have already seen 19 states enact 33 laws that restrict access to voting that includes a number of laws in places like Florida, Georgia, Texas and Iowa, that the center refers to as ‘monster voter suppression bills.’ These bills contain a whole array of restrictions on the right to vote.

“We are now also seeing in this redistricting cycle. We’re seeing states introduce maps that will dilute and weaken the power of communities of color at the ballot box and we are seeing the gap in turnout between voters of color and white voters expand. It is expanding rapidly. In some states it is at its highest level in a quarter century and the impacts of all these things are very real,” said Doyle.

“There are many court decisions that have made clear that in many ways the federal courts are not going to be a good place for us to wage this battle,” said Doyle.

“All eyes are on Congress and all eyes are on the Senate because we actually do have two pieces of legislation that would help us get past this moment that would take us in the right direction, that would give us the tools necessary to fight back against these restrictive laws and the attacks on voting rights – those are the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.

“The Freedom to Vote Act would set a floor for federal elections across the country. It would take so many of the things, the tactics, that are used in states, to make it harder for folks to vote off the table by saying you have to have a certain amount of early voting; you have to have same day registration; you have to restore voting rights to people immediately upon their release from prison; you have to have automatic voter registration; you have to do all these things that should just be the bare minimum in a 21st century democracy. And that would get us a long way towards pushing back against all of these restrictions, but it wouldn’t get us all the way, and that is because the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965 with these pre-clearance provisions in place because Congress and the President recognized in 1965, the ingenuity of discrimination in this country that when you cut off one option for discriminating against voters of color, states and other jurisdictions find another way to do it. We’re witnessing that ingenuity in these laws right now, the states are finding new and different ways of accomplishing the objective of making it harder for some folks to vote and without restoring the Voting Rights Act to its full strength, by passing the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, we won’t be unable to respond to that ingenuity,” said Doyle.

De Leon mentioned the ‘under-reported’ stories about the abysmal state of voting rights in Indian country. “It is unreasonably difficult to vote across reservations in the United States. Often, there are no on reservation polling places to cast a ballot in person. At times, natives have to travel over a hundred miles over dirt roads. Natives are impoverished and lack access to working vehicles, and in Montana, following a Section 2 lawsuit to force on reservation voting, that was resolved. Not long ago, in 2014, turnout increased from an appalling 30 percent to 70 percent. Natives vote if they’re provided a fair opportunity but they are too often not given that fair chance,” said De Leon.

“The homes on Native American reservations are unaddressed. They do not receive residential mail delivery and post offices are also distant with poorer quality service than in urban areas. This makes registering to vote, being placed in the correct precinct, and voting by mail, difficult and at times, impossible,” said De Leon.

“If you go back to the 1960 Census, we (Asians) were only 0.5 percent of the American population. Now after the 2020 Census, we are seven percent of the population. We are the fastest growing community in the United States, growing by over 38 percent since the 2010 Census, and that shows up in the polls, and shows up in voter registration, and on election day. In 2020, we had an increase of over 20 percent, which was the largest increase of any group with respect to voters showing up when compared to 2016,” said Yang.

“We firmly believe that everyone’s voice matters and making sure that they have that ability to have their voice heard matters, and that’s why any attempt to suppress those votes makes a difference to our community,” said Yang.

A Texas legislator’s comment on the voter-id law that was proposed in Texas was “we think that Asian Americans should get more American-sounding names so that it would be more easy to identify them.”

“What you are looking at is again as an immigrant community. Our community is over two-thirds immigrant, in other words, born in a different country. We know what our ids look like. They often times look like a mess, unless you have a Western surname. All of us as immigrants know that getting our names translated correctly onto a Social Security Number, a Passport, a Driver’s License, are going to be inconsistent, and I’m not faulting those hard-working administrators at all of those offices. The reality is that, yes, because these names sound foreign to them, they will sometimes have difficulty translating them in a consistent manner. And then, when that comes to polling places and people checking ids, that results in people thinking that there is not an exact match and certainly for those that choose to exclude voices of immigrant communities, they will use this as a basis and prohibit that person from voting,” pointed Yang.

“A second example would apply to the Freedom to Vote Act. In the run-up surveys to the 2020 election done by our community, the surveys show that 64 of our community preferred voting by mail and some of that might be understandable because, again, if there are limited English proficiencies involved, you might want a little bit of extra time; not want to feel the pressure of being at that ballot box and having a line waiting behind you to vote; so that having it at home, having the ability to translate materials and making sure you understand it in the comfort of your own home makes some sense, and this played out also in real life in Georgia. 40 percent of the Asian American population voted by mail compared to only about 24 or 26 percent of the general population. Overall in the runoff election in Georgia, 34 percent of the Asian American population voted by mail compared to 24 percent of the population overall. So, for us voting by mail matters. Voting by mail is a means for which we can ensure that our voice matters and is counted so these are not just simply theoretical questions to our community, these are not simply possibilities of discrimination, we can show with data that this does indeed have a direct effect on our own community,” said Yang.

“Having communities being able to exercise their voice is about communities not feeling that they are less of a citizen because of their immigrant status, or because they have limited English proficiency, or because they have different socio-economic means that don’t allow them to vote at during a 9-5 period, so for all of these reasons the Freedom to Vote Act as well as the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act really matters to our communities,” pointed Yang.

What are our next steps; your views on the filibuster; how do we educate people this is a nonpartisan issue; the midst of this Senate opposition by Republicans, what is the Plan B?

“The responsible parties in this matter are Republicans. They have voted for the bill in the past. 13 of them are in Congress today, but turn their backs on the voting rights bill, and we need to take the heat. This is not a partisan conversation. You need to confront the individuals who refuse to even debate the issue. As voters, we possess the political power. The issue is, are we organized sufficiently well to use it in precise ways that help to move the system forward and being strategic and how we target our votes accordingly is really necessary. We’re not helpless supplicants and we shouldn’t come to the table as if we’re begging for a privilege this is a right. We should demand it and we should generate the political heat necessary to obtain it,” said Henderson.

What is your sense of the way forward; How do we draw a line in the sand so we don’t wind up not with 19 states, but 25 states; and if Congress isn’t the way to draw the line in the sand, what is Brennan’s perspective on ‘how to move this forward’ strategically?

“Failure is not an option. The way forward is Congress, and Congress needs to be told that over and over, and over again. They need to hear that and understand it and act. That said, we haven’t stopped fighting these laws while we’re waiting for Congress and we won’t. We need to keep up the work to change the public narrative. Most people do want an expansive democracy that welcomes everybody to the table, and most people these days, more than I think in my lifetime at least, care about voting rights and make it one of their top political priorities than ever before. This is the thing that voters care about that’s why Congress has prioritized these issues as the first bills that they introduced. They’re responding to their constituents and they can see that their constituents care about this because they’re also seeing the action in the states. We’ve seen more states pass more expansive laws this year and there are these divergent trends so there are many states in this country that are making voting more accessible, that are expanding our democracy, because they are responding to what voters care about. It is equally important that we keep voters and the general public dismissing the big lie and focusing on an expansive democracy, while we’re waiting for Congress to act,” said Doyle.