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Shirley –
The 2020 presidential primaries are underway. There's no better time to exercise our right to vote – and defend it.
Across the country, too many states are making it harder to cast a ballot. But voters are supposed to choose their elected officials, not the other way around.
Learn about some of the most rampant methods of voter suppression – and the advocacy and litigation efforts aimed at protecting our fundamental right to vote.
Suppression efforts range from the seemingly unobstructive to systemic disenfranchisement. And if you blink, you might miss what's happening in your state. Here are some ways to block the vote that could be happening in your area:
- Strict voter ID laws impose an unnecessary burden on poor communities, the elderly, and people with disabilities, who may not have the means or ability to access IDs.
- Voter registration restrictions include requiring additional documents to prove eligibility, onerous penalties for registration drives, or limiting the window of time in which voters can register.
- Voter purges are the practice of mass removal of names from voter rolls, under the guise of so-called roll maintenance. Tens of thousands of eligible voters can be deleted in a single purge – often without their knowledge, and often when they were perfectly eligible to vote.
- Felony disenfranchisement has stripped the right to vote from millions of people – disproportionately Black – who have served their time. It's a relic of the Jim Crow era that must stop.
- And long before elections begin, politicians dilute the strength of your vote through gerrymandering – drawing district lines to manipulate a political outcome.
Check out this resource breaking down the different forms of voter suppression threatening the power of our vote across the country.
Shirley, our democracy works best when all eligible voters can participate and have their voices heard. And we need activists like you to keep protecting this fundamental right.
Thanks for reading,
Dale Ho
Director of the ACLU Voting Rights Project
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