President Lyndon Johnson signs the 1965 Voting Rights Act, with Martin Luther King, Jr., in attendance.
After decades of struggle against the tyranny of institutional racism, the civil rights movement led by luminaries such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. finally achieved its most critical victory. Ironically, a personally racist, formerly conservative Southern Democrat, who had opposed every civil rights bill during his first 20 years in Congress, was instrumental in passing the single-most progressive piece of legislation in the history of the United States. His name was Lyndon Baines Johnson and on this day 50 years ago the Voting Rights Act became law. Legitimate, untarnished American democracy was finally born.
Along with freedom of expression and the right to due process, the right to vote makes up the foundation of any truly democratic society, because these rights protect our ability to enjoy nearly all others. The history of the United States has been one of a never-ending battle between the forces of elitism and privilege, and those of equality. The long march of progress toward ever-greater equality has been made possible by an expanding conception of democracy, the right to vote, and what it truly means for all persons to be created equal.
That march culminated on August 6, 1965, when after 189 years America finally granted the franchise to all adult citizens regardless of class, previous servitude, sex, and now race. At last, our country had achieved truly universal suffrage, or so we thought. Never content to see its power wane, a privileged elite has plotted to roll back all the gains many brave Americans risked their lives to win over so many decades. As a comprehensive, must-read account from the New York Times recently illustrated, these efforts have been met with varying degrees of success.
In the half century after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the racially motivated partisan realignment it helped produce, this has been an offensive effort waged by conservatives who in recent decades are entirely affiliated with the Republican Party. Late in the year 2000, they finally achieved their long sought-after goal. That fall, a malevolently reckless voter purge of felons in Florida wrongfully prevented roughly 12,000 disproportionately black voters from exercising their rights. This disenfranchisement was critical in subsequently enabling a reactionary Supreme Court to hand down the worst decision since the 19th century, when their flagrantly partisan ruling installed George W. Bush as president, despite clear irregularities in election returns showing Bush ahead by 537 votes.
Bush's presidency saw political ideologues installed in the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division and a key, long-time anti-VRA crusader was made Supreme Court Chief Justice. That set the stage for 2013, when the Supreme Court gutted the VRA's main enforcement mechanism, which had required DoJ approval for any change to voting laws in the mostly Southern states with a pernicious history of racial discrimination. This decision and others related to it have thus far validated the onslaught of anti-voting laws passed by Republican legislators since they took power in a slew of states following the 2010 elections. These changes to voting laws have ushered in the second era of electoral Jim Crow.
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It is against the backdrop of this increasingly successful Republican assault on self-government that activists and legislators have protested, filed litigation, and urged reform, with good reason. Voter participation, ease of voting, and the ability to have one's vote matter are more threatened today than at any point in nearly half a century. When voting burdens minorities and the poor with long lines, administrative systems are underfunded rife with inefficiency, and millions of predominantly nonwhite Americans are disenfranchised by law or economics, something is seriously amiss.
It doesn't just end there for many voters as several of our electoral rules are designed to reduce mass participation. The choices presented to them are meaningless and some votes count more than others, with race playing a significant role. The wealthy have been allowed to buy access to officeholders at the expense of voters. Politicians have a free hand to rig the rules whenever their power is threatened while candidates and parties can win despite losing the popular vote. Millions of American citizens even lack the ability to vote for those who govern them, while the rampant use of elections for offices which should be merit-based needlessly politicizes our government.
It is alarmingly clear that action is needed to protect American citizens' right to vote and defend the concept of one person, one vote. However, we don't just need to update the VRA to the modern era, we need drastic changes both to secure the right to vote and to alter our political system so that all citizens matter equally to ensure that government is representative of the people. Here are 13 reforms which need to take place to reclaim our democratic system from a blossoming oligarchy:
1. Add a Voting Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution
2. National, uniform election administration
3. Automatic and same-day voter registration
4. A national holiday, weekend election day; Expanded early voting and vote-by-mail
5. End felony disenfranchisement and other racially biased discrimination like Voter ID
6. Require non-voters to opt out, rather than voters to opt in with negligible cost to them
7. Publicly fund campaigns and ban private campaign contributions
8. End gerrymandering and reform the rules concerning majority-minority districts
9. Consolidate state and local elections with presidential and congressional races
10. Abolish the Electoral College
11. D.C. and Puerto Rico statehood
12. Proportional representation and ranked-choice voting
13. End elections of judges and prosecutors
Over the coming weeks, I will elaborate on each of these reforms, why they are necessary, and what the likely outcome would be. Given the importance of democracy for progressive policy, a new Voting Rights Act should be the very first law passed when Democrats finally retake Congress. Nothing should be acceptable short of what our greatest president, Abraham Lincoln, called "government of the people, by the people, for the people."