Voter Suppression Is Happening Everywhere. This Institute Is Trying To Stop It.

[applegrove]

Voter Suppression Is Happening Everywhere. This Institute Is Trying To Stop It.

by Samantha Lachman at the Huffington Post

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/voting-rights-institute_us_56eb145ae4b03a640a69fe56?utm_hp_ref=politics

"SNIP............


A Texas county with an infamous history of racial discrimination decided in December to reduce its number of early voting sites from eight locations to two.

Waller County is where Sandra Bland died after a violent arrest at a traffic stop last July. It has one precinct with an African-American majority — Prairie View, home of the historically black Prairie View A&M University. Students successfully advocated for an on-campus early voting site in 2014. The town of Prairie View had its own site, as well. But the county’s plan for its primary in 2016 did not include early voting sites in either location.

Chad Dunn, an attorney and voting rights expert in Texas, was alerted to this significant reduction in early voting sites by a Democratic candidate in the area. He in turn notified attorneys at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit in Washington, D.C., focused on election reform. Three days before Christmas, CLC attorneys wrote a letter to the county’s election administrators arguing that its early voting plan would “have an adverse impact on black voters,” “burden their right to vote” and “hamper minority turnout,” since one of the two planned early voting locations was 25 miles away from Prairie View, and the other, closer location was inaccessible by public transit.

The attorneys who wrote the letter — Gerald Hebert, CLC’s executive director, and Danielle Lang, a legal fellow — urged Waller County commissioners to reconsider their decision not to place an early voting site in Prairie View. They cited Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits election practices that result “in a denial or abridgment of the right of any citizen... to vote on account of race or color.” They also pointed out that Waller County has resisted making it easy for A&M students to vote, and that the Department of Justice has intervened multiple times to prevent the county from disenfranchising students.



...............SNIP"

[Politicalboi]

1. And visiting polls and holding people up for hours

Or making them turn away is voter suppression, but some here seem to think it's okay.

[Rebkeh]

2. Yep.