How are we going to hold Republicans accountable for trying to put an accused sexual predator on the Supreme Court? By voting in support of progressive values.
How are Republicans going to protect themselves? By supercharging their efforts to suppress the vote.
Suppression efforts reportedly kept 200,000 people from voting in Wisconsin, a state Trump won by less than 23,000 votes.1 Similar suppression in North Carolina, Florida and Ohio helped hand those states to Trump as well.2
Now Ohio Republican Rep. Bob Gibbs is doubling down. His new federal legislation, the Ensuring American Voters Act, would mandate proof of citizenship in order to vote.3 That’s voter ID on steroids – and we cannot let it become law.
Trump and extremist right-wing Republicans relentlessly perpetuate the myth of voter fraud to cast doubt on the electoral process, reinforce racism, undermine the voting power of communities of color and justify laws that suppress the vote. Despite courts putting a stop to some of the worst voter suppression laws, Republicans across the country are trying to steal elections by enacting discriminatory photo ID laws, cutting back early voting, eliminating polling locations and doing anything else they can think of to make it harder for people to vote.4,5
There is absolutely no need for Gibbs’ legislation, because non-citizen voting just doesn’t happen. The Brennan Center for Justice found that non-citizens cast only 0.0001 percent of ballots and the small handful who try end up indicted under existing law.6
Gibbs’ bill is nothing more than a sham to shift attention away from the foreign governments like Russia and deep-pocketed corporations who are deliberately manipulating elections, perpetuate the voter fraud myth and give red meat to the Republican Party’s anti-immigrant base. You can bet that if it passes, election officials will be asking mostly Black and Brown folks to show their papers.
Republicans are not going to give up trying to rig the system for their Party’s benefit. We have to do everything we can to block Trump’s extreme agenda and stop Republicans from passing laws that keep people from voting. Right now, that means speaking out against the Ensuring American Voters Act. Can you tell Congress there should not be a racist citizenship test to vote?
Thank you for standing up for voting rights.
References:
- Ari Berman, “Wisconsin’s voter-ID law suppressed 200,000 votes in 2016 (Trump won by 22,748),” The Nation, May 9, 2017.
- Steven Thrasher, “Trump’s voter fraud commission is a shameless white power grab,” The Guardian, May 12, 2017.
- Sabrina Eaton, “Rep. Bob Gibbs introduces bill to require citizenship proof for voter registration,” Cleveland.com, Sept. 6, 2018.
- Greg Palast, “The GOP’s stealth war against voters,” Rolling Stone, Aug. 24, 2017.
- Mark Joseph Stern, “Voting Rights on the March,” Slate, Aug. 1, 2016.
- Eaton, “Rep. Bob Gibbs introduces bill to require citizenship proof for voter registration.