DISENFRANCHISEMENT

In the shameful days of open segregation, "literacy" laws were used to suppress minority voting. Today, through other laws and actions -- such as requiring voters to show photo ID, discriminatory drawing of Congressional districts, not allowing early registration or voting, and purging voter rolls -- states are taking steps which have a similar effect.

The patterns are unmistakable. An MIT paper found that African Americans waited twice as long to vote as whites. Wait times of as long as six or seven hours have been reported in some minority precincts, especially in "swing" states like Ohio and Florida. Thirteen percent of African-American men have lost the right to vote due to felony convictions.

This should offend the conscience of every American.

The fight for minority voting rights is a fight for justice. It is inseparable from the struggle for democracy itself.

We must work vigilantly to ensure that every American, regardless of skin color or national origin, is able to vote freely and easily.

ADDRESSING POLITICAL VIOLENCE

• We need to re-enfranchise the more than two million African Americans who have had their right to vote taken away by a felony conviction.
  
  
• Congress must restore the Voting Rights Act's "pre-clearance" provision, which extended protections to minority voters in states where they were clearly needed.
  
  
• We must expand the Act's scope so that every American, regardless of skin color or national origin, is able to vote freely.
  
  
• We need to make Election Day a federal holiday to increase voters' ability to participate.
  
  
• We must make early voting an option for voters who work or study and need the flexibility to vote on evenings or weekends.
  
  
• We must make no-fault absentee ballots an option for all Americans.
  
  
• Every American over 18 must be registered to vote automatically, so that students and working people can make their voices heard at the ballot box.
  
  
• We must put an end to discriminatory laws and the purging of minority-community names from voting rolls.
  
  
• We need to make sure that there are sufficient polling places and poll workers to prevent long lines from forming at the polls anywhere.

LEGAL VIOLENCE

Millions of lives have been destroyed because people are in jail for nonviolent crimes. For decades, we have been engaged in a failed "War on Drugs" with racially-biased mandatory minimums that punish people of color unfairly.

It is an obscenity that we stigmatize so many young Americans with a criminal record for smoking marijuana, but not one major Wall Street executive has been prosecuted for causing the near collapse of our entire economy. This must change.

If current trends continue, one in four black males born today can expect to spend time in prison during their lifetime. Blacks are imprisoned at six times the rate of whites and a report by the Department of Justice found that blacks were three times more likely to be searched during a traffic stop, compared to white motorists. African-Americans are twice as likely to be arrested and almost four times as likely to experience the use of force during encounters with the police. This is an unspeakable tragedy.

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