voting rights
The party in Trump’s thrall is going after the very notion of fair elections. Yet Congress has failed to act.
We can’t let the filibuster keep us from doing something about it.
Unlike today’s Republican party, Delta and Coca-Cola are responsive to public opinion.
“The vote is precious,” said Lewis. Fifty-five years after Bloody Sunday and the Voting Rights Act, many Americans remain disenfranchised.
Those in power have been working for years to prevent votes from counting.
The voting rights provisions of the “For the People Act” should be uncontroversial.
I was invited to an interfaith solidarity service. Instead I spent the day reading Congressman John Lewis's graphic novel trilogy about the civil rights movement.
In North Carolina, civil rights leaders are focused on the one political issue that undergirds all others: the right to vote.
I spent last week on a rural island in Wisconsin, where the Century was cosponsoring the Wisconsin Council of Churches' annual summer forum. It was a great event. It was also a pretty momentous news week, and there I was away from the office and mostly offline. Since returning I've been taken aback by just how much more ink the Supreme Court's Defense of Marriage Act decision has gotten than its Voting Rights Act decision.
In November, I had to vote by provisional ballot. Happens to a lot of people, often for no good reason. But if I had stayed closer to home instead of moving across the state line, along with making my parents happy I likely would have avoided this frustrating experience at the polls. Wisconsin doesn't need to use provisional ballots on anything like the level that Illinois does, because Wisconsin has same-day voter registration.
Lots of great moments from the Inauguration. Some of them serious, like Obama's full-throated support for LGBT rights. (Though contrary to some reports, it wasn't the first time he used the Seneca Falls/Selma/Stonewall line.) Some of them fun, like watching the First Family behave like a regular, happy, un-self-conscious family. (It's not likely you missed this, but just in case: Malia Obama's amazing photobomb.) My personal favorite: the president's decision to start using DC's "Taxation Without Representation" license plates on his limo.
In case you missed these when they made the rounds right after the election, the University of Northern Iowa's collection of women's suffrage postcards has some great examples (via Gwen Sharp) of postcards used as anti-suffrage propaganda. A number of them rely on the specter of men left to care for a household while their wives are off voting in luxury.
I got up before dawn today. (My farmer wife does this every day; I try, with mixed results, to keep her hours.) We got to the polls just as they were opening. For the first time in the eight or nine times I’ve voted in Chicago, my name wasn’t on the list. I had my voter registration card with me, so nobody challenged my eligibility. But I did have to cast a provisional ballot, which might or might not eventually be counted.