Unabashed efforts to suppress voting rights

Citing false and exaggerated allegations of election fraud, many states have recently imposed new restrictions on voting that threaten to roll back the hard-won right of American citizens to participate in our Nation’s democratic processes.  Such restrictions could discourage or preventthousands or even millions of eligible citizens from registering and voting, including minorities, low-income persons, senior citizens, voters with disabilities, and students.  The Lawyers’ Committee has joined with other civil rights leaders and groups to speak out against these unabashed efforts to suppress voting rights.  To combat these efforts, we have developed anInteractive Map of Shame that illustrates the extent to which states have recently enacted voting restrictions and have widely disseminated the Map to decision-makers, community activists, and the media.   Stand with us and speak out now against voter suppression efforts! Now, North Carolina has joined the movement to disenfranchise eligible voters by proposing a purge of the state’s voter registration records.  North Carolina must obtain preclearance for this new procedure under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, and now is your chance to take a stand and tell the Justice Department to use its authority to deny preclearance.  The new procedure most directly impacts recently naturalized citizens who are seeking to participate in the democratic process by registering to vote and casting their ballots.  Rather than celebrating their determination and effort, North Carolina is implementing a faulty system that presumes that these individuals in fact were not citizens when they registered to vote.  This presumption is contrary to the data North Carolina itself has developed, and ignores the fact that thousands of North Carolina residents each year become naturalized citizens. Please join the Lawyers’ Committee in this fight against voter suppression and tell the Justice Department to disapprove North Carolina’s effort to restrict the right to vote!  Specifically, North Carolina is using flawed computer matching techniques to target newly registered voters who had previously obtained a driver’s license in the state but were not yet citizens.  The obvious problem is that there is a gap between North Carolina’s outdated DMV records and the voter registration rolls with up-to-date information on citizenship.  The state proposes that these new citizens targeted by the faulty system must show proof of citizenship, a requirement not asked of any other citizens in the state.  If the individuals do not respond, even if notice was not received because the state used an outdated address or made another mistake, the state will unjustly purge them from the registration rolls. The Voting Rights Act requires that North Carolina demonstrate that its new procedure does not have a discriminatory purpose and will not have a discriminatory effect.  The overwhelming majority of persons who will be subjected to the new purge procedure are African Americans, Hispanics, and Asian Americans.  Because the new purge procedure will disproportionately impact minority voters protected by the Voting Rights Act, and the state has no justification for its presumption of non-citizenship, the Justice Department should deny preclearance because of the procedure’s discriminatory effect. Our right to vote is too important for us to allow these assaults to continue!  Legislators and election officials need to fix our election system and expand access to the ballot box, not enact unnecessary and unfair restrictions on the right to vote. Click here to submit a letter to the Justice Department urging them to deny preclearance to North Carolina, and to carefully scrutinize other voter suppression efforts as well. We greatly appreciate your assistance in the fight to preserve our voting rights. Sincerely, The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law