Federal Reforms, Grassroots Organizing Can Stop Voter Suppression Tactics

September 17, 2024

Federal Reforms, Grassroots Organizing Can Stop Voter Suppression Tactics

On National Voter Registration Day, Congress Must Pass Key Voting Rights Bills

WASHINGTON, DC - Today, on National Voter Registration Day, democracy advocates, community leaders and working families across the country aim to get out the vote ahead of the 2024 general elections. Meanwhile, voter suppression tactics plague the United States, infringing upon citizens' right to vote.

Several states including Florida, Tennessee, Alabama,and most recently New Hampshire have passed laws that place barriers to voter registration based on false claims of voter fraud. Georgia, Texas, Montana and Iowa have added new voter-restriction policiessuch as shortening early voting windows, requiring new voter registration if voters don't participate in the previous election, forbidding automatic mailing absentee ballot applications and requiring IDs at the polls; states have also purged voter roles and even sued to try to prevent voter registration efforts.

On this National Voter Registration Day, Public Citizen Democracy Campaign co-director Jonah Minkoff-Zern says voting rights and the fabric of our democracy hang in the balance this election cycle, but grassroots organizing and federally proposed reforms would provide safeguards to voters against anti-democratic efforts.

"Our country's current patchwork of voter protections simply doesn't suffice," said Minkoff-Zern. "The best ways to stand against attacks to our freedom to vote is registering ourselves and others to vote and passing federal reforms including the John Lewis Voting Act, the Freedom to Vote Act, the Native American Voting Rights Act and the proposal for DC Statehood. We need these sweeping reforms that benefit all of us, no matter our race, class, gender or belief systems. The late John Lewis poetically proclaimed voting as a sacred right. But the system to uphold that right is tattered and stained, because of racist, greedy actors and interests. Now we must act on the ground and in the U.S. Capitol to make our system whole."